When I was 19 I got caught selling a bunch of MDMA at a night club. Undercover police caught me, and by God's grace they chose to let me go.
MDMA had just begun to carry a minimum 10 yr prison sentence throughout the state.
I had no idea what I was doing in my life, like I was asleep and not awake, until I got caught that night.
About 15 minutes into the interrogation at the scene, Officer Garcia - I still remember him - knowing my mental state of panic and realization of reality, said to me "You know, when I was your age I did the same thing, and I was forgiven and let go. So what I'm going to do is forgive you and let you go this time. Go home, and don't ever do this again."
I drove home at about half the speed limit that night, trying to process what had happened. First time I had experienced such forgiveness and mercy.
The aim of my life now is to maximize the amount of good I can do for others. I'll never forget. I could still be in prison. Maybe as an open source computer programmer, but prison nonetheless.
It's a big risk to let someone go like that; will they actually repent, or continue causing harm?
The power of stories like this never fails to humble me. There are countless (less dramatic) incidents like this in every life. Your experience brings them back into focus.
Offtopic, but minimum sentences are nuts. What's the point of judges and juries etc if we make the law so aggressive that they hardly have a say anymore?
The minimum sentence had been recently enforced at that time because things were getting really out of hand with MDMA flooding the markets. Probably tons of deaths, adulterated compounds, and ruining people's brains.
I say ruining people's brains because, in the world of raves I was involved in, most customers were teens, and I knew quite a bit who kept taking it excessively for self-medication, eventually just to get through the day, and I would see the decline in their cognitive functions over time. It was really sad. I denied selling to those people because they scared me. But...I was selling nonetheless. So unaware of the consequences of my actions...
Juries ultimately have the final say in conviction. Its well within their right to go not guilty for any reason.
Judges and lawyers absolutely hate it, but juries aren't there just as a logical check on laws as written and facts as presented. Juries are a check on the legal system and laws themselves.
Kudos to officer Garcia. I don’t know many people who still bring that kind of responsibility to their job. So much easier to just follow the rules. Even among judges I know only very few who have the guts to make an actual judgement, which, after all, requires to say “I” - which seems almost an audacity today.
It's legal or decriminalized in Portugal, The Czech Republic, The Netherlands, and Switzerland, by the way. Surprise: Those are now the countries with the lowest number of drug deaths and drug related crimes in Europe.
Haha I understand your point.
But it is a dangerous substance when used without medical supervision.
And more importantly, what I was selling was presumably MDMA. I didn't have kits to check the batches for adulteration. What if people died? I was not ready for that responsibility.
Although I agree with you, imho the point the parent was making was that:
a) when you are 16-18-20-22 you don't know sh*t about life - you are still a newbie. It doesn't mean that drug-trafficking is excused but when I look back at my 18yo self, I could have died 100 times between 18 and 22. And I could have 'taken some people with me' while doing so.
b) it's in the person. When given a second chance you can either turn your life around (and a Mr. Garcia will never see you again) or you can go back the very next day and maybe a Mr. Garcia will be finding your corpse in a back alley because a trade went sour.
As for Preston Thrope - hang in there. It's a long path to salvation - almost endless. As long as you keep your head up high and give the good fight, good things will (probably?) come. I've watched enough of John Oliver's Last Week Tonight shows to know that you got myriad of forces that want to see you fail so keep walking and dreaming!
I don't think MDMA is "legal or decriminalized" in the Czech Republic...? Sure, consumption of _anything_ is decriminalized here (you are allowed to possess only a tiny amount for your own consumption) but other than that, owning, offering, selling, importing, etc. MDMA is very much criminalized here!
In Switzerland the sentencing isn't very tough for possession in small quantities, but you certainly cannot _sell_ MDMA and hope for lenient treatment.
Whatever people are incarcerated for, the fact of the matter is that 95% of the people currently incarcerated in the US will one day live next door to one or more of us. Isn't it better to prepare them to live there, self-sufficent and contributing to society? (Disclosure: I am the Cofounder of Unlocked Labs, Preston's current employer and formerly incarcerated myself). I can say without hesitation, Preston is an incredible employee whom I am happy we provided this opportunity for.
There are a lot of historical examples arguing for and against you. But murder and rape is far different than getting popped for heroin or selling weed and our laws already reflect that
In contrast, the American system aims for penance, which is why we call it penetentiary. You have to "pay for your actions" - which has absolutely nothing to do with rehabilitation and preventing recidivism. Paying for your actions is deeply ingrained is the American zeitgeist - making the concept of favoring rehabilitation appear immoral.
Regardless, it could be argued that rehabilitating a perpetrator of more severe crimes is a harsher form of punitive justice. Living with your (newly acquired) guilt and regret about your actions is more difficult than hanging out with, and learning from, your peers in crime university - prison.
What are the recidivism rates on those crimes like? Our laws often reflect misguided morals, not hard data. Justice is supposed to be blind. That's an ideal to reach for, not reject out of hand.
It's a little late, so this will get buried, but I had a similar experience.
I caught two felonies (both from the same incident)
Luckily, I had a good job at the time and it was my first offense, so I was able to get house arrest.
After seeing what could have been my life, I completed my BS in CS, online part-time and convinced the state of California to let me move there.
I received five years of probation, so even though I was off house arrest, I had to convince the state of California to take me as a probationer.
I don't think this is usually offered, even though I had gainful employment waiting for me. I feel very fortunate.
Since then, I've worked for various startups and Fortune 50 companies as a software engineer. I was lucky enough that the tech industry valued me more for my skills than punished me for my past.
I will be forever grateful to the state of California and the tech industry for this.
I've looked into, and tried to volunteer for various programs that try to teach inmates or felons technical/engineering skills. All have fallen through.
I'd love to hear what you're working on OP, and if you want to brainstorm a way we can try and help more inmates turn their life around through software development.
Thank you for sharing your story. It's wonderful that you want to pay your fortunes forward.
I don't think they work directly in prisons and jails, but https://www.underdogdevs.org/ is a group that works to train formerly incarcerated people in software and tech. They built mentee/mentor relationships between professional development and those wanting to learn.
As a former software engineer for over a decade and current corrections officer in a max level state facility, this is a very interesting topic. My facility has a large college presence within it. While there are problems with it, I think overall it is probably a net positive for the staff and inmates. At the same time, I don't believe that we have more than maybe a small handful of nonviolent/drug offenders; anybody on the outside advocating for murderers, rapists, and those in for armed robbery to have access to more of the normal comforts of the outside world is going to have a hard time and not much support. Even the medium level prisons have those types of people in them. So what facilities would wider access to remote learning and work become available? There would need to be honor facilities inmates must work towards proving they're responsible enough to be transferred to. Right now budgets are being slashed, we're at 60% staffing as it is, and the whole state is in the shit. And this is a "progressive liberal" state. It would probably take the federal government to start throwing money around for pilot programs, no state is going to increase their prison budget to accommodate this.
I think for all the criminals that are going to be released back into society at some point, recidivism should be at the top of our mind, not punishment.
If you can stop them from doing it again by locking them up in comfort for 10 years instead of discomfort for 20, then that is what we should do (assuming that doesn’t cause more people to do it in the first place).
> If you can stop them from doing it again by locking them up in comfort for 10 years instead of discomfort for 20, then that is what we should do.
You're never going to stop many of them from reoffending. Even the "best" rehabilitation programs have crime rates far above the general population.
The additional 10 years is 10 more years where they can't hurt innocent people. The justice system exists for the benefit of society and innocent citizens, not criminals.
> assuming that doesn’t cause more people to do it in the first place
Why would you ever assume that? Punishments absolutely have a deterrent effect.
My life circumstances were such that I needed a job in a new area where that's all I was qualified to do (meaning I can breathe) while earning enough to live on. Software engineering is not an option within 90 minutes of here. Even if I could get a job in software here and it paid the same, software is significantly more stressful than my current job, the future is unsure as tech is always changing, the people I work with are closer and more friendly/outgoing, and the time off is amazing. When I leave work I'm done, there's no reading up on/practicing the latest stack without any guarantees it's going to increase my employability. When I walk out of the prison, my own personal life is all need to think about. I'd probably not take the job for less than a 50% increase in what I make now. And wages here are so low it just wouldn't happen. I do still enjoy coding but I like it as a hobby. And honestly, I was probably never very good at it.
One of the article's key points is that violent crime does not mean "caused physical harm" and that entire categories of crime are considered violent by law, whether or not any violence was perpetrated during the commission.
"The fourth myth: By definition, “violent crime” involves physical harm
The distinction between “violent” and “nonviolent” crime means less than you might think; in fact, these terms are so widely misused that they are generally unhelpful in a policy context. In the public discourse about crime, people typically use “violent” and “nonviolent” as substitutes for serious versus nonserious criminal acts. That alone is a fallacy, but worse, these terms are also used as coded (often racialized) language to label individuals as inherently dangerous versus non-dangerous."
As someone actively working in this space, I can tell you they are. Maine is following the so-called Scandinavian Model. It essentially comes down to giving incarcerated people a chance to practice normal daily activities and social interactions. The facilities feel more like highly secure dorms than jails. The way a head of a different DoC said still sticks with me:
We send people away for years, tell them exactly what to do every day and they get to make exacrly one choice every day: do you obey or not? That's the only choice you get to make. Then, after 3, 5, 10 years, we send them out into society and tell them, "Make better choices." But we haven't prepared them for that at all. We have given them almost no chances to make decisions and learn how to make good ones. We just tell them the decision to make and they do it. There's no space for practicing good decisions in traditional prison settings.
Multiple other states are pointing to Maine as proof that the Scandinavian model can work in the US and are incorporating their learnings into their plans and trainings.
We send people away for years, tell them exactly what to do every day and they get to make exacrly one choice every day: do you obey or not? That's the only choice you get to make. Then, after 3, 5, 10 years, we send them out into society and tell them, "Make better choices." But we haven't prepared them for that at all. We have given them almost no chances to make decisions and learn how to make good ones. We just tell them the decision to make and they do it. There's no space for practicing good decisions in traditional prison settings.
This really puts things in perspective. Thank you for sharing!
None of the places I was housed at had any opportunities, really.
One place had computers to learn typing. You weren't allowed computer books in that facility in case you used them to figure out how to hack out of the jail. So, bless the elderly nuns, they smuggled in "C# in a Weekend" for me, with the CD-ROM, so I could teach programming classes when the guards weren't paying attention.
Seems like a good idea, but from the article it sounds like a lot of the difference between Maine and his earlier prisons was the culture that existed amongst the prisoners themselves. Obviously prison officials can try to influence this (indeed, it sounds like the authors transfer to Maine was an attempt to do that), but it seems like the kind of thing that's hard to do with just, like, correspondence college degree programs and the like.
This is an incredible post, and I encourage everyone to read it.
I wish I knew better how to help incarcerated people. Based on the Norway(?) model, I feel like help would reduce return rates, but I don't know how to go about it.
I just got out after 10 years. I work with a lot of people just coming out (just been helping a guy locked up for 40 years, he's doing great).
The biggest issue is that 95% of them will be returned within a few months. Drugs is the main cause. You get out, you have no ID, no job, no family, no friends. You're stuck in a halfway house that is just like being in prison (lots of rules, line up for meal service etc). All the other guys there have a ton of drugs and you swear you won't touch them, but then you do because you're bored and sad. And then you're addicted again. And now you need money to buy more drugs. So you go do something goofy to get money and you get caught and locked up for another 10 piece. Or your parole officer drug tests you and violates your parole and you go do another 3 piece. Or the halfway house owner gets sick of you coming in after 7pm smelling of alcohol so he calls your parole officer and you go do another 3 piece.
The no ID thing is interesting. The article mentions that as a major issue as well. Seems like it'd be a pretty cheap intervention to just issue all out-going prisoners a gov't photo ID on their release.
Recidivism rates are astonishingly high in all countries. Norway has the lowest at 20% within 2 years. The real rate is higher because most crimes aren’t solved. So in the best case, rehabilitation makes someone 300x more likely to commit crime than the average Norwegian.
It's unfair to say it "makes" them that way. They were incarcerated because they already proved willing to commit a crime. It failed to change them back into an average citizen, sure. Understandably a very difficult problem. It's quite possible that it makes them worse instead of better but we'd need different evidence to show that.
By that logic, the worst possible recidivism rate (surely 100%) would make someone 1500x more likely to commit crime than a non-offender.
That’s still a pretty good case for having effective rehabilitation (unless you insist on the death sentence for all prisonable offences)
I'm always amazed at this country in which incarcerating someone for 10 years (!!) for non violent drug dealing is economical, but public healthcare and education aren't.
It starts to make more sense when you look at the 13th amendment:
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Private prisons are in the business of cheap labor, not rehabilitation. It would be extremely expensive to effectively change the lifestyles of millions of people and treat their addiction, not to mention those around them who become traumatized due to their mistakes and follow in their footprints.
We simply lack the necessary amount of political will to do an end run around this by decriminalizing harmful drugs and providing safer pathways of use that can lead to treatment for addiction. Partially because, again, cheap labor! But no doubt also due to moral puritanism.
I’m happy to see there is some movement in state constitutions to do away with this kind of punishment, and even house/senate resolutions proposed to amend the federal constitution, although I don’t know what’s become of that effort.
Nobody will take your call the second you step inside a jail. Best man at your wedding? He's not picking up, I promise you. Literally nobody will call you or write to you. You will get nothing except maybe from your mother. If you are married, forget it.
Humans only like to associate with success. Once you seem to be failing literally nobody will want to even speak to you.
I wanted to contact him to tell him that he was wrong (he got to the front page without using any of his proposed techniques [1]) but I couldn’t find the e-mail. I have no LinkedIn either; right now I almost feel like submitting an issue to one of his github repos just to get his attention. Can you point me to his e-mail address?
> kicked out of my parents house for being a stupid 17yr old
That's child abuse in my book. If you are a parent, you are responsible for your children. That's it. No age limit. Nothing. They need a place? You are responsible for providing them a place to live. This isn't to say you have to be responsible for their crimes, but you should never be allowed to force your child out of your house. YOU brought them into this world. They are your responsibility. Forcing a child out? You are a terrible parent. Yes, some children thrive, but others don't. I'm sorry, but it's on you.
If you aren't ready to take care of your children or make sure they are taken care of for the remainder of their life, you shouldn't have children. 18 and you force them out? You are in the wrong.
Author here again:
I told myself I was done chiming in, but this is just something I have to clarify.
My parents are absolutely amazing people, and they are the only reason my life has any hope at this point.
They were still figuring things out, and didn't understand why I was such a rebellious asshole. Having 4 kids and two of them teenagers isn't easy, and they have been incredibly supportive to my younger siblings when one went through some troubles, and have been supportive to me the entire time. I know this is something my mother feels terrible for, but I feel like I was going to do what I was going to do, and I put no blame on her for anything.
This was the only thing that was going to get me to comment, because i know it breaks my moms heart.
Doesn't change what they did. Things might be better now, but they still failed. Being a failure doesn't mean you are always a failure, and you can improve. That you have a good relationship with them now is proof of that. But it doesn't change the fact that they were wrong for what they did.
That's pretty harsh. Children turn into adults, and not all of them turn out great. As a parent my responsibility is to get them to adulthood with as much chance of success as it is possible for me to provide. At some point they do absolutely become responsible for their own decisions. Do I ever want to find out what it would take to throw my own child out of the house? Of course not. Am I going to toss them out when they turn 18? No plans to. But this idea that you should be responsible for another adult for the rest of their life just because you created them...? That's silly.
No, it's not. It's reality. And you only think it's harsh because you are ignorant. And that ignorance will not prepare you for reality.
> But this idea that you should be responsible for another adult for the rest of their life just because you created them...? That's silly.
No, it's reality. And if you think otherwise, you are not ready to be a parent. Or you'll have a rude awakening when it turns out you are wrong.
Maybe you get lucky and they are able to support themselves, but if you think you raising them to 18 means you are done, it just means you are ignorant.
> Children turn into adults,
No, they don't and that's your ignorance.
Not all children grow up to be adults mentally. Not all children grow up. There are numerous conditions that mean you are responsible for them for the rest of their life, ensuring they get the care they need.
And trying to wave that off as the exception, it just means that you are ignorant. You should go into being a parent understanding that this might happen.
I see way too many parents throwing their kids into the water and letting them sink or swim. Sorry, but if they drown, it's on you as the parent. You failed them. You are the failure.
And that's child abuse, and people that think like that are worthless.
The apparent lack of opportunities for anyone is easy to solve with Dorm Room Welfare:
Open free dorms next to the campuses of community colleges. Anyone who is physically able to live on their own, but who can not afford to live on their own can move in and live there as long as they are working towards being economically self sufficient.
Working towards being economically self sufficient can mean passing academic classes, passing career and technical education classes, taking remedial classes, completing a high school equivalency degree, passing K-12 classes online, earning certifications, working in internships, working jobs at a training wage, or other things
I suggest we replace all other welfare programs with drom room welfare.
This does not solve the problem that many of us do not want to hire convicted criminals.
> This does not solve the problem that many of us do not want to hire convicted criminals.
The issue that keeps people from hiring ex-offenders isn't hard to solve:
One part is social. This one requires a little leadership and a little bit of re-defining what is an acceptable attitude.
The other part is a financial issue and is EASY to solve politically: most business insurers will raise rates or not insure companies that hire ex-offenders.
In my home state we were able to get a law passed that shifted liability for a hired ex-offender who committed a crime on the job to the state so insurers could not make hiring ex-offenders ridiculously expensive.
We were able to sell the idea to our legislators and local city councilors with a simple trade: the Democrat-controlled city council wanted to pass laws making it illegal not to hire ex-offenders. The Republican-controlled legislature wanted to give tax credits to businesses that hire ex-offenders. I suggested instead of passing unconstitutional laws or handing out corporate welfare we could solve the problem by making it illegal to charge more to insure a business that hires an ex-offender, and at the same time, absolving the insurer of having to pay claims because of the hire. The city and state decided to try it out, and it's helped a lot of people over the past eight years.
You could just make criminal background checks unlawful, which is the case in Ireland. There is police vetting for people who work with the vulnerable and certain key jobs, but the average person will never face vetting for a job.
> This does not solve the problem that many of us do not want to hire convicted criminals.
Thank you for at least acknowledging this.
I'd wager that if people with convictions on their record, had even a 10-20% chance of being hired at a decent establishment, we'd see recidivism go down by a statistically significant amount.
I know the justice system. The grand majority of folks coming in and out of prison genuinely do not want better for themselves, it's a lifestyle choice that they've accepted (or resigned themselves to, depending on how you look at it).
But for the fractional percentage of incarcerated individuals that DO decide "Okay, I've had enough, I'm done with this and I want better for myself" and mean it, they aren't afforded such a luxurious opportunity for a bland life in suburbia.
I don't at all care for the way in which he mentions his crimes were nonviolent and tells us about being arrested for dealing ecstasy (a drug with little taboo associated with it) while skipping over the fact he's currently in prison for dealing choke-on-your-own-vomit synthetic opiods, not cute party drugs.
That stuff killed a coworker's son a few years ago. Died right in his own recliner.
Indeed. He had an ounce of U-47700, a synthetic opioid equivalent to about half a pound of morphine. With intent to distribute. And this is not his first prison sentence for distribution. I think opioid dealers are a different and worse class of dealers compared to, say, MDMA. That's a personal opinion. At any rate, he's paying for that crime, and when he's done he'll return to a normal life, hopefully, and I'll wish him well. Until then, he should be honest about who he is—or was—before his supposed epiphany.
People do things they're not proud of in desperate situations. Also, everyone was 18-21 once.
Speaking as someone who (barely) survived an unintentional acetyl-fentanyl overdose that hospitalized me with rhabdo and almost killed my then-fiance -- him dealing this stuff is not the end of the world.
I think a lot of people on HN don't know what it's like to be someone below the poverty line who is also entangled with the law. If you're looking for hell in a first-world country, that's about as close as you can get in the USA.
People do things they're not proud of in desperate situations
See that's the thing. Did you read one word in the post about him being remorseful or apologetic to the people he might've killed by selling them U-47700, a drug that's essentially unstudied in humans? I didn't.
Yeah this guy belongs in jail and clearly doesn’t think what he did was a problem at all. In the midst of an epidemic that kills tens of thousands of Americans a year the dealers of these drugs make the front page and are cheered on as “victims.”
The victims here are the families and children of the people whose abuse he profited greatly off of.
As a severe opioid addict myself for over 10 years, I am absolutely ashamed of having any part in that life. It is a burden that I will have to continue dealing with every day for the rest of my life.
In no way am I trying to say that I did not deserve to go to prison. The focus of this post, was about the facilities made available to those people who do end up in prison, so that they do not return.
As to the references... yes I am a non-violent drug offender. That isn't a label I gave myself, that is a fact: there to let readers know that I am not here for murder or rape or something of that sort.
Involvement in opioids and that lifestyle/culture is something that I did not have any contact with UNTIL I was sent to prison. Perhaps we should consider whether
1. Prison is making people worse (that is just an objective fact)
2. We want to be institutionalizing people that clearly are capable of much more, who turn to things like dealing out of their drug habits, or lack of resources/options.
Before anyone wants to go google'ing and coming up with immediate judgements, why don't you look into that there was absolutely zero prosecution of the case being referred to.. They said they found "residue" in my apartment, put out a nationwide manhunt for me, then immediately dropped the case as soon as I was judged by the media and the judge. They couldn't just destroy my apartment and all my stuff and say "we found nothing". Leaving them to prosecute me for 1oz of a synthetic opioid 8x stronger than morphine, that itself, had a potency of roughly 1%. It was almost completely inert. absolutely useless. and this was a completely unrelated case.
To the person who said I sold drugs to kids.. Where exactly do you get off making such horrible claims about me? Do you live in such a bubble that you think that every drug dealer sits around behind dumpsters at high-schools and asks kids if they want to try some 'pot', thats really laced with angel dust? Oh and they all put rainbow fentanyl in your kids halloween candy too right?
The opioid epidemic has killed a good chunk of my friends over the years. It was rampant in the form of "cheese" when I was a teen; one of my closest friends was left to die when he began vomiting from an overdose. When I was in the Marines I saw Marine after Marine prescribed opioids for pain and injuries after deployments, many of them separated out and continued using. As an adult I've lived in the Bay Area and Portland; I've gotten to observe first hand what culture these drugs cultivate on our streets. I've gotten to see opioids make their way, sometimes by mistake, into the rave scene and the constant fear it creates among people who want nothing to do with those drugs. We have Narcan at our house because people consistently use the church parking lot next door to shoot up in their car. I've personally ran down the street and through the fence to go bang on doors because I saw someone passed out for too long - not because I want them gone, but because I don't want to see someone else die.
To put the entire mantle on dealers would be a mistake, imo. Their choice to sell can come from a variety of incentives: sometimes from clout, sometimes their upbringing, sometimes lack of opportunity, sometimes lack of education, many times a mixture of the above. Often enough these people are users themselves; the pain the people they sell to endure they also typically endure.
I don't view this post as victim-seeking and I don't really view him as a victim. Instead, I view this as a critique of prison culture that reinforces its outcomes. I view him as someone that wants to change and has the capacity to change, but there is little if any pipeline or incentive to do so. If there is one, it seems frail. When people want to change we should have a stepped pipeline for reintroducing them to normality and finally society.
Like you, I'd like to see less opioid related deaths in the future but I think there's more than one way to get to that goal. If there's a way that can make productive citizens out of people rather than shutting them away forever then I'm all for it because, frankly, the threat of a felony or life imprisonment didn't stop people before. In fact, that's when the prison population and recidivism bloomed.
The guy is in jail and is serving his sentence. I could understand given recent scandals with opioids that people view perhaps justice in this area as "patchy", though.
I recently read a book about experiences in the UK prison system: 'A Bit of a Stretch: The Diaries of a Prisoner' by Chris Atkins (there is an associated podcast, which is also excellent). It is a fascinating, but rather depressing read about his experiences being incarcerated for tax fraud and how broken the UK prison system is. It is no wonder the re-offending rates are so high.
I'm guessing much of the US system (where I understand a lot more for-profit private companies are involved) is at least as broken.
I'd like to make a couple of points to think about:
I'd been addicted to opioids for a couple of years. And I was very happy that I was able to get original non-counterfeit pills on the dark net, from vendors that had thousands of positives reviews. Being a nerd, and successful when it comes to business, risk-free supply had never been an issue. Luckily I bought Bitcoin when they did cost $0.20...
Fighting the dark net has always been a stupid idea. It's the cleanest way for people to get the substances they need, with the lowest amount of risk in every single regard. Lowest risk to get your substance cut with something unhealthy, lowest risk of getting ripped off, lowest risk of getting into criminal circles.
Fighting the dark net means pushing people to street dealers, increasing suffering, violent crime and deaths.
So, why did I get addicted? Depressions, anxiousness, and finally: Being on the autistic spectrum, which now seems absolutely obvious from earliest childhood memories, but my parents never took me to a neurologist to get that diagnosed. I just lived with being "different". Until I could not take it anymore, and tried to help myself with substances.
How did I get off the addiction? Did a search for the best-rated neurologist in the region, made an appointment, got treatment. It took a while, but in the end a combination of substances was found that worked out better than opiates.
But that being said: Those substances are the same that I can get as prescription medication, or as "drugs" on the street. It's just that now I no longer have to spend Bitcoin on it, but get them for free from the health care system. Yay!
Please remind yourself: Nearly everything that is taken and sold as "drugs" on the streets is used to treat some problem, just in a very dangerous way, without proper education, without proper risk management.
Whatever that scary drug that your parents and your school are warning you about to be evil: It's just medication. The poor people die on the street trying to get their supply, the rich guys get a subscription to get it for free.
If your country has a problem with drugs on the street, and with crime due to people trying to get those substances, your country SIMPLY HAS A PROBLEM PROVIDING HEALTH CARE to its citizens!
So please stop demonizing substances, demonizing substance "abuse", demonizing people providing those substances in a clean and safe way via the dark net, and demonizing people who sadly did not have the luck of their health care system helping them.
I resonate with this comment strongly. I have never been diagnosed, but I strongly suspect I am neurodivergent. My extreme social isolation/anxiety in my college years and twenties led me to dependency on alcohol and cannabis. I never tried hard drugs, but my life back then was just one tiny twist of fate away from me becoming an opioid addict.
I did manage to become sober, and a lot of social challenges have become more manageable now that I have a better framework for understanding my mind.
You might want to try Ketamine. In some countries it's now available legally from neurologists as nose spray. If not, get it from the dark net or a friend in the rave community. Or ask as friend who is a veterinarian. You get mix your own nose spray with that.
Before Ketamine, I never in my life had been able to get into a group of people with them being closer than about 50cm to me. Which means: I could never join a dancefloor.
With Ketamine, that poof went away, and I could.
The same happened for a couple of my neurodiverse friends. One girl her hole life could not be in the same room as others while eating. Now she can.
A single dose also has anti-depressant effects for five days.
Interestingly, it's now in some countries allowed to be used as treatment for social anxiety after positives studies on that. On the other hand, there is now a clinical study that say it's not better than a placebo. Weird.
However, for me (and my nerd friends) the before/after effect is so drastic, I can rule out a placebo effect. My neurologist agrees. I trust clinical studies and always consult them, but something must have gone wrong there.
And yes, this is a good example of a substance that in many countries can get you into jail, while in other countries it can make a most DRAMATIC positive change in your life.
What blew my mind is that ~667/100000 or ~.67% of Americans are incarcerated according to the numbers in this post and the population according to the German Wiki page for the US.
Wikipedia says it's .531% on the English language website, .629% on the German site. (Don't know which year for either or if juvenile detention is counted on German site.)
That is A LOT! A LOT!
The last time this topic came up on HN (not that long ago, a matter of weeks), I dove into the rabbit hole a bit. Turns out that the lion's share of the difference in incarceration rates between the US and other countries comes down to sentencing. Crime-for-crime, the US doles out a lot more time than e.g. Western European nations.
A lot of people think it's drug crimes. Not really. Just the same old crimes as everywhere else, punished with 2-3x the amount of time.
This is basically what US voters have asked for up until recently. Being tough on crime is a feature for a politician. Three-strikes laws, etc.
> It was October 2018 and I had just completed a 3-month rehab program at a state addiction clinic in Sweden. I was unemployed, staying with family, and had basically nothing going on.
> With no drugs or other vices to pass the time, the days seemed impossibly long. I struggled to find activities to fill them. I enrolled in school for a while, but it wasn’t for me this time either. Eventually I turned to programming, since it’s always been my big interest in life.
It isn't the worst deal because you don't have to worry about paying rent, so you can just focus 100% on getting good at whatever skillset you choose to pursue.
TFA is interesting but I've got a problem with this:
> I was left with the difficult choice of either living there and walking to a temp agency with hopes of making $10.50/hour doing manual labor (without an ID or social security card at this point), or getting on a bus to NYC to see some associates, and coming back in a week or so with $15-25k in my pocket and living in comfy luxury hotels until I could rent an apartment I chose the latter, obviously, and was back in prison after 14mo.
That is not obvious. My father was left with nothing at some point in his life, living like a hobo in an abandoned, broken, leaking RV next to gypsies (heck, he'd even, for free, help the gypsies' kids with "homework").
And he was still proud --and still is-- of never having done anything illegal.
People choose to engage in crime, and there's nothing obvious about it.
Nobody needs the latest iPhone or the latest sneakers. They believe they "flex" with the latest iPhone and sneakers (I've got a whole different idea of flexing btw but that'd be another topic). They choose the easy path.
And that is not obvious at all. Most poor people and by very, very, very far, even most hobos, are not thieves and are not drug dealers. When you deal drugs you have on your conscience how miserable you make the lives of so many others: it's not even about legality here.
I had a friend and roommate at one point (and still friend to this day), we'd split rent and he'd barely make any money. Serving pitas at a tiny kebab/pita place three nights a week for hardly any money. And he was okay with that. He didn't care about clothes or cars or phones or fancy hotel rooms or whatever. He'd just be honest and survive.
What I'd like to know is why people believe it's "obvious" they choose a criminal life for $25 K a week instead of an honest life flipping burgers.
It's not obvious and that mindset of "fancy luxury hotel rooms" and "latest iPhone" should just die. Nobody is impressing anyone with these utterly pointless bullshit.
Asking newly-release prisoners to have the absolute strongest constitution and pain endurance is also not obvious to me. The average person would struggle in this situation, and we expect formerly-incarcerate individuals to be even stronger than them?
It doesn't offend me at all to see it highlighted as "obvious" to the author. For some high proportion of these individuals, it is obvious (and indeed seems like the only choice).
Crime will always pay better than legitimate alternatives. You can either choose to sacrifice the extra income or risk going to prison– that's kind of just how society functions.
> For some high proportion of these individuals, it is obvious (and indeed seems like the only choice).
Then they can go back to prison. Society need not be blackmailed into giving ex-cons excessively lucrative jobs in hopes of luring them away from crime.
you don't need to have the 'absolute strongest constitution' to work a boring min-wage job in the United States of America. Ask any refugee who migrated to the country what a hard life looks like.
Smart people like this guy, who choose to go into the drug trade do it because they think a crappy 9-5 job to get back on their feet is beneath them.
This entire post is based on misunderstanding why the author used the word "obviously" here: You're reading about an incarcerated developer, so you obviously know he chose to commit a crime again at that point in the story. He wasn't saying it was the obvious choice to make.
But OP claims to be committing nonviolent drug crimes. Depending on your philosophy you may feel you’re not doing anything morally wrong by selling drugs. Upholding the law for the laws’ sake isn’t obviously good.
It’s admirable that you’re father did what he did without resorting to becoming a negative influence on society, but I bet most people on HN have broken the law in some small way many times in their life. Breaking the law and hurting others are not always the same.
MDMA either puts me to sleep or makes me talk faster than freaking Busta Rhymes raps, without effort. I recorded it once and it's crystal clear. Fun stuff.
Haven't tried Meth yet. Jessa Reed almost inspired it couple o' years back when I was at my weakest but when her teeth fell out in the middle of an interview I decided to wait into my late 50s.
I’m really happy that you found a way out of the trafficking life.
That was a really nice thing to read and I think a lot of people will resonate with it. (Computer nerds that had tough times in life). I’m wishing you all the best in your fight against addiction and I’m definitely adding Unlocked Labs to my list of donations. Thanks for sharing your story.
It is incredible story. I wish you all all the good luck you can get and happy life after you get out of prison. I also wish that prison systems in the US and Canada will adopt this "Scandinavian" model. So much better to put people back on right track instead of being vengeful fucks who would chase person the end of their days,
> particularly those affected by the war on drugs, like myself, who has spent 1/3 of his life imprisoned for non-violent drug crimes
Still not quite ready to take responsibility for his actions... You weren't magically "affected" by the war on drugs. You went into crime for the easy money, but found out you weren't very good at avoiding getting caught.
Meanwhile working class people have lesser and lesser purchasing power to the point were renting and homeownership are out of their reach; subemployment / "gig" employment ("innovating" by removing without workers rights) is rampant.
Nothing like a system that produces a high amount of marginalized / vulnerable people and then blames them for going for "easy" money like drugs or prostitution.
I would expect the tech crowd here to be more inclined towards blameless postmortems / systemic safety.
It's not like they've scammed others with crypto or tried to overtake markets with price dumping tactics or bribed the governments to use their software or spied on billions for profit.
They've just lorried stuff other poor people wanted. That should not be illegal. The above should.
I guess I read this blog post very differently from many other commenters. I don't see this as being entitled or avoiding responsibility for his actions. He's just telling his story. He knows he fucked up. But he also knows the system is fucked.
If you can't possibly understand how growing up without positive influences can lead someone to a life of crime, you're probably too privileged to be the target audience of this article. Just move on.
> He's just telling his story. He knows he fucked up. But he also knows the system is fucked.
Here in the UK we have something called Joint Enterprise [1] which is controversial for a numnber of reasons, I've read this chaps blog, I can relate to his circumstances in a number of ways having grown up with the rave culture in the 90's, I've seen many people turn a blind eye and escape prosecution, mainly because its too hard to prosecute, demonstrating the laziness of the police as evidence gathers and the judicary.
What annoys me is how these so called law abiding people manage to remain in their job. People claim to live in a democracy, none more so that many in the US, and yet AFAIK noone gets taught law as a mandatory subject when growing up. If you are not taught something how can the public even debate it? Is this the legal system applying a form of Darwinism on the population in a dictatorial fashion? Is this a form of intellectual torture being applied on some who want to enjoy themselves in non-alcoholic ways?
If I had the money I'd get a Judicial Review to find the reasons why judges dont want people to be taught the law as a mandatory subject for a number of reasons, and for adults to be kept up to date with legal changes in a TLDR fashion, that doesnt rely on the opinion of the state broadcaster and other news outlets.
Some people are too busy to watch/read the news, which is the only en-masse way to keep up to date currently, and there is also the issue of why is legal conformity pushed on people if they are doing no harm? Just what exactly is a democracy and do you really have a say?
If Roe v. Wade (1973) can mandate a change across a country like the US, are these judges who shy away from making a countrywide decision to keep people abreast of legal changes, not only undermining the idea of democracy, but also just keeping themselves in a stealth sado masochistic schadenfruede-like position of authority with accompanying lucrative income?
Has any scientific study measured the dopamine receptors of judges or serotonin receptors or testostorone levels when they pass a judgement? Has the scientific community shown they derive pleasure from controlling other peoples lives in non scientific ways, because I see the reoffending rate is quite high, and the system is clearly not fit for purpose.
To the original poster, just remember there are some people who agree with your actions, enjoy the mental mind games of programming, it can keep you occupied even when not in front of the computer. :)
Sure I'm not in jail and on the surface I have my act together, but my entire life has been fucked up by what are now called "ACEs" and it's a miracle I'm as stable as I am.
I'm not going to let people off the hook, but I am able to sympathize...especially knowing the wrong person or event at the wrong time would have quickly sent me down the same path.
>Many more people then you might think have had a unsatisfactory childhood. However, most of them get their act together at some point during growing up
Dιδ they have the same exact family circumstances, growing up experiences, psychological capacity, and so on? Or at least very close ones?
Or are you comparing different cases and expect them to have handled things the same?
>Pointing at your past as an excuse for criminal acts is pretty fucked up, IMO
It's not an excuse, it's an explanation, and a description of the forces and circumstances which led you there.
People's family and early life circumstances are hard to overcome, and just because some percentage of people manage it, doesn't mean it's easy for the rest, or that the people that did do it wouldn't also have slipped if they didn't have some lucky breaks (from psychological perspective all the way to the people they met, the connections they had, some rare good mentor or a good friend influence, etc.).
I hate to quote so much of the post—it's well worth a read—but I think it's bookended by two very different experiences that convey so much about the U.S. prison system.
> A few years later, I left prison with $0 in my pocket (lawyers and commissary are expensive, and nobody pays you what they owe you when you come in), to a rooming house with hallways that smelled like crack-smoke and were filled with parole officers and junkies. I was left with the difficult choice of either living there and walking to a temp agency with hopes of making $10.50/hour doing manual labor (without an ID or social security card at this point), or getting on a bus to NYC to see some associates, and coming back in a week or so with $15-25k in my pocket and living in comfy luxury hotels until I could rent an apartment… I chose the latter, obviously, and was back in prison after 14mo.
...and later:
> I am very grateful for the opportunity, but I recognize that this is very much the exception and not the rule, and the success of the Maine model of corrections should highlight the absolutely embarrassing lack of opportunities in the rest of the system, to do anything but become a bitter, broke criminal; deprived of not just your freedom, family, financial security and reputation, but also of your self-identity as someone worth investing in changing. We need to do better as a society, and understand that, yes, there are people in the system that deserve this kind of punishment, but a large majority of our prison population are just regular people… non-violent drug offenders like myself. There are plenty more, like me, that are capable of being responsible, productive, tax paying members of society if given the opportunity, but you cannot expect anyone to change when you just lock them up in a cage with a bunch of other criminals where there is a subculture of endless negativity.
Prisons in the USA are for-profit enterprises that rely on a consistent population. They have no incentive to rehabilitate, in fact it's the opposite. What I don't understand is how a country with so many advantages like the USA could come up with arguably the worst prison system in the world. As a citizen, it's embarrassing that this is accepted by those in power as a good solution.
> how a country ... like the USA could come up with arguably the worst prison system in the world
I will leave you with this quote by John Erlichman:
"We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities, (...) We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
And, because everything is complicated, the family denies it all:
The 1994 alleged ‘quote’ we saw repeated in social media for the first time today does not square with what we know of our father. And collectively, that spans over 185 years of time with him,” the Ehrlichman family wrote. “We do not subscribe to the alleged racist point of view that this writer now implies 22 years following the so-called interview of John and 16 years following our father’s death, when dad can no longer respond. None of us have raised our kids that way, and that’s because we were not raised that way.”
Private prisons are problematic in their own right, but they only make up 8% of the total prison population at the state and federal level. imo, we (the citizens) are to blame for constantly championing a system of accountability that believes accountability is putting a man in a box and taking every future opportunity he doesn't know yet away from him. You can certainly blame those in power, and they share some blame, but we also elect to these sentences.
Serious question: does this come from real first hand experience of knowledge of the issue or are you simply repeating the NYT/the Atlantic/Vox etc.?
My understanding is that about 8% of US prisons are privately owned. Perhaps that's not a good thing, but I don't think it is at all correct to say that "prisons in the USA are for-profit enterprise" when the actual number is so low.
I have also heard this narrative for a long time that the prisons were filled mostly with non-violent drug offenders, only to learn that this description only applies to about 3.5% of the prison population. Maybe that's not a good thing either, but again I feel like I have been intentionally deceived after reading supposedly high-minded journalism into believing a fundamentally false understanding of what is going on.
About 7-8% of US jail and prisoners inmates are in for-profit correctional institutions, most are in public institutions which are not operated for profit.
Private, for profit prisons are an issue, but they are very much not the norm in the US.
A very small number of prisons are for profit and advocates of being soft on criminals love to push the idea that they make up a majority, just as you implied.
I, as a lawful citizen of the United States of America, am not embarrassed by the prison system.
I am embarrassed, however, by folks who use hyperbole without merit to try and appease the masses without having the courage to go against the grain for fear of getting "downvoted" and losing faked internet points.
The fact that you believe the USA has the worst prison system in the world, compared to somewhere like, I dunno, Venezuela, supports my prior point.
He was convicted of possessing 30 grams of carfentanil while on parole for his previous conviction. A lethal dose of carfentanil is 2mg, so it was at least 15,000 doses.
Fuck me, carfentanil is one of those things I read about years ago, that seemed like it would never get anywhere near the recreational drug market, because it’s just too potent and too dangerous to handle safely…
Ah, I see from your link it was u-47700 he was arrested with. Certainly a potent and potentially lethal substance, but not exactly on the same scale as carfentanil. U-47700 is quoted as 7.5x the potency of morphine, fentanyl at 50-100x and carfentanil around 4000
> There are plenty more, like me, that are capable of being responsible, productive, tax paying members of society if given the opportunity, but you cannot expect anyone to change when you just lock them up in a cage with a bunch of other criminals where there is a subculture of endless negativity.
Of course they expect inmates to change, but towards even more criminality, not towards rehabilitation. This will justify them for being inmates in the first place (and thus the existence of the model) and justify them to come back later. It's a very profitable business model.
So he chose to go back to a life of crime and we’re supposed to feel bad for him? There’s a reason he was able to make 20k in a weekend, it’s a high risk high reward business and I have no sympathy for someone who skirts societal norms and makes a shit ton of money in the process while plenty of people suck it up and earn the 10.50 until they can get back out in their own. This guy and his entire post reeks of entitlement, beginning with “non-violent drug offenses” in the first paragraph.
That’s an opinion, he wasn’t arrested for possession in reality he made a ton of money selling dangerous drugs to kids. Maybe they should be legal, some of that I agree with (I spent a lot of my late teens and early twenties in jail or on probation for simple possession and have a felony to this day for it) but that doesn’t mean you should be able to peddle chemicals you don’t understand in large quantities. Your upbringing being bad doesn’t make that okay either.
I don't think it really matters if you feel bad for him or not, and focusing on that aspect does more harm than good. I think, given a choice between living in a fucked-up halfway house with your only prospect for the future being a shitty minimum-wage job, or falling back into your old crimes where you can make pretty solid bank doing illegal things (yes, with high risk)... most people would probably pick the latter.
I absolutely agree that "non-violent drug offenses" is a cop-out when describing high-volume drug dealing. Maybe he wasn't directly violent, but dealers like him directly contribute to dragging many more people into addiction, violence, and even death. I don't think people should be jailed (or even punished) for simple possession, but dealing -- especially on a large scale -- well, that's a different matter.
But ultimately what I really care about is outcomes. The bottom line is that it doesn't matter what we want someone to choose when they get out of prison. If we don't provide a compelling path for an ex-con to go straight, that's just us shooting ourselves in our feet. If that means spending more time and money housing someone in actually good conditions, and providing them direct access to higher education and better job opportunities, so be it. Ultimately that ends up being a lot cheaper for taxpayers than what we're doing now. And we get a much healthier society in the bargain.
Acting punitive toward convicts and ex-cons doesn't help anyone. It doesn't help the person involved, and it especially doesn't help ourselves.
He's not asking for sympathy. The entire article is about how he ended up where he is now, how the prison he's at now has saved him from a life of crime by giving him a meaningful chance at a career, that this is an anomaly, and that it shouldn't be.
I agree with you that just on the basis of this piece, he does not sound accountable and can appreciate given what you've shared about your own history why it might be particularly frustrating. At the same time, there are factual elements of the story that deeply bother me about the way we treat those who have previously transgressed. I believe that we do need systems of accountability, but I also believe that our current system is broken beyond repair and is not ultimately effective. Or rather it can only be effective if we collectively agree to condemn a certain class of people as criminals and therefore deserving of treatment we would never accept of non criminals. We would all do well to remember our own incredible good fortune in life.
Of course there are people in prison who are a menace to public safety and must be dealt with. And there must be consequences for harmful behavior even when it is "nonviolent" (which is a word that diminishes non-physical harm). But I truly struggle to understand how it is a good idea to segregate all the people who have previously transgressed, deny them opportunities for betterment and fully initiate them into criminal life.
Guilty once, guilty forever right? You're defined by your lowest moment and surely can never come back from it ; and surely serving your sentence is never enough to be allowed a second chance.
There's not a mention asking for sympathy in there. It's mostly factual, and explanatory of his experience. And the fact that giving opportunities to convicts to educate themselves and find their way seems a much better solution than just educating them to gang life.
> Who else has an opportunity to spend 12+ hours a day learning something for years? With no other obligations or responsibilities?
Totally tangential, but this prison article reminded me of a short story by Cory Doctorow about a monastery for programmers. I imagined living in a room about the size of my home office, a bed, a desk, a decent MacBook Pro and a high-speed connection and just hanging out on the Internet all day reading articles and programming. Food and shelter taken care of, no obligations or responsibilities. Like the pictures of Norwegian prison cells.
That reminded me of a weird Internet streamer collective started by a Twitch streamer named Athene. He started a group called The Singularity Group [1] which allowed people to move into a house to volunteer work on philanthropic projects. They are responsible for the AI Jesus [2] channel on Twitch. There is some controversy since some see the streamer as having tried to start a cult [3]. They also created a few mobile games that run on their own crypto-currency.
At any rate, it is all quite interesting to me. It was very common in the past in almost all cultures for a certain number of men to just reject society and go off into hermitage. Sometimes those hermits would band together into brotherhoods. Often they would make beer, or honey or some other collective task to earn enough money for the members to spend the rest of their time in quiet contemplation. I can imagine such a life might be attractive to a lot of programmers who tend to be introverted and feel alien to normal society.
There was a thread or submission recently
on setting up a low cost room & board for aspiring people, that I loved, but haven't been able to re-find the thread.
> Sometimes those hermits would band together into brotherhoods. Often they would make beer, or honey or some other collective task to earn enough money for the members to spend the rest of their time in quiet contemplation. I can imagine such a life might be attractive to a lot of programmers who tend to be introverted and feel alien to normal society.
Lovely imagery & idea, thank you.
Rather than focus on the negative motivations (be introverted and feel alien), i think often there's hope optimism & drive; more modernly especially, some are marked out from others by being inspired people, seeking to be active forces. Caring deeply about enormous possibilities trying to spring forth. Finding capacity for the cause, finding support or even just peers for those folks is hard.
Programmers have such amazing leverage, but most day jobs are just work. The idea of sustainable no frills living among other Burton Klein type-1/Happy Warrior types, able to pursue the thing & tangle with it & ideally also have others enmeshed in their questing too: that has huge appeal. It'd be such a worthy investment to support, imo.
It is a good point that the final sentence could be taken negatively.
I wasn't trying to determine why any individual might choose such a path. I was thinking about the population of programmers and considering that the stereotypical traits associated with that population do seem to align with a set of traits that are conducive to hermit-like or even brotherhood-like lifestyles. I did choose negative-sounding stereotypical traits to highlight that fact (although introversion isn't necessarily negative).
I would even argue that my own experience is that the population of programmers on average tend towards self-reliance type mindsets (e.g. Henry David Thoreau) a little bit more than socially active mindsets. However, I personally know a few individuals who are social activist types and also programmers.
Even when you consider "brotherhoods" you can think of multiple reasons why someone might want to join up. Perhaps the person desires a community of like-minded activists. In fact, that is how many brotherhoods would grow after their establishment. Combating the "incursion" of these community building types in some traditions appears to be a feature (e.g. vows of silence). I remember watching a documentary on splits in these communities for this very reason. Some hermits felt that structured communities with explicit charters went against everything they were trying to do (usually some kind of mystic communion with God or similar). So you can imagine a bifurcation of such a community into those who wanted to be socially active communities and those who wanted just enough collaboration with others to allow them as much individual freedom as possible.
I don't believe that one of those groups was "positive" and the other "negative". But I do think it is worthwhile recognizing the difference in mindsets. You said "ideally also have others enmeshed in their questing too" - however, that is not a universal ideal. Be careful you aren't forcing yourself into spaces where that isn't the goal.
I once was talking to someone who wanted to financially support independent scientific research. He had started a successful business (you may have heard of it, though I won't name it) and he wanted to put his money to good use.
He wanted to find people he could write a check to, basically. I suggested that if he wanted to advance science as much as possible, it would be far more efficient to run a dormitory for scientists with free room and board, as long as they do scientific research. I'm sure he could find many people who would accept a minimalist lifestyle for the opportunity to do research the system wouldn't otherwise support. (I'd be interested.)
He declined, stating that one major factor was the tax write-off he got from the donation, and I guess giving people a place to live doesn't have that benefit.
It is interesting to think that your definition of a "a dormitory for scientists with free room and board, as long as they do scientific research." is kinda-sorta what I think of when I consider the Institute for Advanced Study. If you squint hard enough, it is kinda-sorta what tenure in universities aims to provide.
Athene was indeed trying to start a cult (it had all the basic elements). And from watching him speak in the past, he did seem to me like a huge narcissist.
Haven't been following his latest projects much, and I can't speak to how the Singularity group has changed since back then. Though I have seen his AI channel sometimes. It's moderately entertaining.
I cant't comment directly on whether or not he was or wasn't actually trying to start a cult, but I am interested in cults in general (and any kind of esoteric/occult stuff) so I devoured a lot of content related to this. I mean, a 21st century digital cult!? That is some juicy stuff!
What I found was a young idealistic kid who was playing a character online. He was optimizing for views and we all know what kind of behavior gets attention online. The character was overblown and narcissistic. There is zero argument from me that if you take selected clips of him from when he was at the height of his streaming fame he was a dumb-ass edge-lord playing the role of a prophet or spiritual leader. He even leaned into it when he was accused because he thought it was funny. But when you watch recent videos of him (he does a pretty good react to Asmongold's react of him), I think I saw a different side.
All that being said, he isn't a kind of character I trust. He seems to me to be very much the kind of person where the ends justify the means. He has some pretty high ideals, some of which I agree with and others which I am sympathetic towards. It's like Greenpeace or animal rights activists ... even if I agree with their overall goals I often disagree with their methods.
I'm currently recovering from a grief, depression, intimate partner violence, State abuse, and whatever-the-hell-is-in-nationwide-legal-psuedo-cannabis-vapes based psychosis. Long story short: I sacrificed my physical, mental, emotional, and future well-being as a human shield so my non-biological daughter who I won't see again could have part of a childhood and not develop a cluster-b personality disorder like her mother. To those that don't understand what these people are like behind closed doors, you simply have no frame of reference. There are no words that will allow you to understand; many social workers and psychiatrists are often even fooled into serving as these people's unwitting thralls. Their nature is predatory. They smash mirrors within and without (even posting something public about it like here will summon a small herd of them to cover the tracks with doubt). They have no ideology other than predation, so they follow the ideology of the hour that gains them the most; they wear personalities like hats. It was after being attacked, yet again, that I was DARVOed (because I was actually escaping for good this time, and the cherry on top of these relationships is always, without fail, a DARVO kick-in-the-ass on the way out the door). Then, despite having over two hours of her attacking me over years of time recorded, including her pouncing atop me and snatching my phone on the very day in question, the brilliant detective at Atlanta PD warranted me, and I stayed in the Rice Street gulag where the schizophrenic kid was murdered by police via bedbug consumption (the police there use subterfugal torture methods to "keep people in line" by throwing them in freezing-in-winter, low-to-no ventilation, hot-in-summer, or bug-ridden cells, keeping lights on at all hours, refusing medical care, 30 people bricked in cells meant for 8, kept standing for days, COVID outbreaks in entire cell blocks, standard US prison system fare, torture by any sane definition of the word). It's when I looked down at the homeless man in that cell, the one laying flat directly in the piss and the shit on the floor so he can lay down in the real estate that no one wants, that I said to myself, "yeah, that's where I'm at."
It's after that, I underwent a psychosis so vast that every word, every symbol, every story, every axiom, every fear, every thought, and all of human history amassed into a unified and perfect whole; only after would I come to recognize that what I saw was identical to the ascent in Merkabah literature, Thelema's visit to the City of the Pyramids, Samadhi, and several other analogies for such experiences. Myself had disappeared, and in its place was a sacrifice burning through time like a star. There were only really two forces in the universe, entropy and creation, and the two were yet an illusion still of a singular. Dark matter became simply matter not yet light, returned to the path of least resistance towards supermassive black holes in the center of galaxies, dark energy became simply the remnant left by matter past the edge of observability to continue the pulling, decimation, and return, breaking the laws of thermodynamics that were merely local phenomenon, and creating novel matter in the process, the early stages of which would expand in an accelerated manner that would appear as a bang, but be more akin to a snake eating its own tail and growing.
I wandered in a daze, searching for what I called my fellow "wizards" or fellow autists or fellow disciples, not fully knowing what I was doing or why. I researched Benedictine and Bhuddist monestaries to try to escape the world. So yes, US hermits are very real, we are very noble, and we are fucking livid regarding the state of adequate hermitages. I'm currently in a low-rent studio, searching for minimum wage jobs, so I can pay less taxes to the undemocratic State. "Fully-employed" I'd make 1/4 million a year.
Whether you feel sympathy for Preston or not, the fact of the matter is that 95% of the incarcerated individuals in the US will one day love next to you and me. Wouldn't you rather they be prepared to live there, to have a job and resources? To be self-sufficient (Preston will not need welfare resources when he returns because of this opportunity)? (Disclosure, I am Preston's employer and formerly incarcerated myself)
Wait, do they have computer and internet access in prison?? And free meals, healthcare and lodging? I might have taken that deal when I was young, busting my ass at shit jobs and renting shit places with crazy roommates.
I could have been that guy, and worse.
When I was 19 I got caught selling a bunch of MDMA at a night club. Undercover police caught me, and by God's grace they chose to let me go.
MDMA had just begun to carry a minimum 10 yr prison sentence throughout the state.
I had no idea what I was doing in my life, like I was asleep and not awake, until I got caught that night.
About 15 minutes into the interrogation at the scene, Officer Garcia - I still remember him - knowing my mental state of panic and realization of reality, said to me "You know, when I was your age I did the same thing, and I was forgiven and let go. So what I'm going to do is forgive you and let you go this time. Go home, and don't ever do this again."
I drove home at about half the speed limit that night, trying to process what had happened. First time I had experienced such forgiveness and mercy.
The aim of my life now is to maximize the amount of good I can do for others. I'll never forget. I could still be in prison. Maybe as an open source computer programmer, but prison nonetheless.
It's a big risk to let someone go like that; will they actually repent, or continue causing harm?
That man gave you your entire life back. It's not just the time you would have served, but it would have ruined so much of the rest of your life too.
Oh yea. Part of me coming to reality was the officer helping me realize that it would have ruined my family, and had quite a criminal record.
He did give him back his life.
But how is it possible that his life was at risk at all? Why a 10 year sentence for taking drugs? The government should simply not have that power.
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Or, rather, he declined to steal his life away and imprison him for what they obviously both agreed was a bullshit reason.
I don’t think declining to be a villain warrants the same response as choosing to be a hero.
The power of stories like this never fails to humble me. There are countless (less dramatic) incidents like this in every life. Your experience brings them back into focus.
Offtopic, but minimum sentences are nuts. What's the point of judges and juries etc if we make the law so aggressive that they hardly have a say anymore?
The minimum sentence had been recently enforced at that time because things were getting really out of hand with MDMA flooding the markets. Probably tons of deaths, adulterated compounds, and ruining people's brains.
I say ruining people's brains because, in the world of raves I was involved in, most customers were teens, and I knew quite a bit who kept taking it excessively for self-medication, eventually just to get through the day, and I would see the decline in their cognitive functions over time. It was really sad. I denied selling to those people because they scared me. But...I was selling nonetheless. So unaware of the consequences of my actions...
Juries ultimately have the final say in conviction. Its well within their right to go not guilty for any reason.
Judges and lawyers absolutely hate it, but juries aren't there just as a logical check on laws as written and facts as presented. Juries are a check on the legal system and laws themselves.
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> What's the point of judges and juries etc if we make the law so aggressive that they hardly have a say anymore?
Minimum sentences don't impact the juries say, which doesn't extend to sentencing in the first place, at all.
Kudos to officer Garcia. I don’t know many people who still bring that kind of responsibility to their job. So much easier to just follow the rules. Even among judges I know only very few who have the guts to make an actual judgement, which, after all, requires to say “I” - which seems almost an audacity today.
Sounds like the plot of Les Mis!
Les Mis has a totally different feel when you've been locked up. It touches me even deeper.
Was about to say! Real life Jean Valjean
You should not have been arrested.
MDMA should have been legal.
End of story.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-023-02565-4 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34708874/ https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/18/well/mind/mdma-ecstasy-ri... https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/07/03/australia-just-lega...
It's legal or decriminalized in Portugal, The Czech Republic, The Netherlands, and Switzerland, by the way. Surprise: Those are now the countries with the lowest number of drug deaths and drug related crimes in Europe.
Haha I understand your point. But it is a dangerous substance when used without medical supervision.
And more importantly, what I was selling was presumably MDMA. I didn't have kits to check the batches for adulteration. What if people died? I was not ready for that responsibility.
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Although I agree with you, imho the point the parent was making was that:
a) when you are 16-18-20-22 you don't know sh*t about life - you are still a newbie. It doesn't mean that drug-trafficking is excused but when I look back at my 18yo self, I could have died 100 times between 18 and 22. And I could have 'taken some people with me' while doing so.
b) it's in the person. When given a second chance you can either turn your life around (and a Mr. Garcia will never see you again) or you can go back the very next day and maybe a Mr. Garcia will be finding your corpse in a back alley because a trade went sour.
As for Preston Thrope - hang in there. It's a long path to salvation - almost endless. As long as you keep your head up high and give the good fight, good things will (probably?) come. I've watched enough of John Oliver's Last Week Tonight shows to know that you got myriad of forces that want to see you fail so keep walking and dreaming!
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Ok...? Why would you start debating MDMA legality when someone's sharing their story?
Also, all the studies you linked are about using it in therapy vs using it at a rave?
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I don't think MDMA is "legal or decriminalized" in the Czech Republic...? Sure, consumption of _anything_ is decriminalized here (you are allowed to possess only a tiny amount for your own consumption) but other than that, owning, offering, selling, importing, etc. MDMA is very much criminalized here!
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In Switzerland the sentencing isn't very tough for possession in small quantities, but you certainly cannot _sell_ MDMA and hope for lenient treatment.
Are you sure it's decriminalized for selling? Selling and consuming are not the same thing.
Also some the best countries to hide criminal activity without having to hide yourself. <3
NACAB
Whatever people are incarcerated for, the fact of the matter is that 95% of the people currently incarcerated in the US will one day live next door to one or more of us. Isn't it better to prepare them to live there, self-sufficent and contributing to society? (Disclosure: I am the Cofounder of Unlocked Labs, Preston's current employer and formerly incarcerated myself). I can say without hesitation, Preston is an incredible employee whom I am happy we provided this opportunity for.
You're doing the Lord's work :) Thank you.
Almost 10 years inside here. Going on Monday to have all the charges dismissed.
Great to see you here Jessica =)
I didn't realize Unlocked was your organization.
Nice to see you in the conversation as well and yes, I am a cofounder
There are a lot of historical examples arguing for and against you. But murder and rape is far different than getting popped for heroin or selling weed and our laws already reflect that
Rehabilitation is rehabilitation.
In contrast, the American system aims for penance, which is why we call it penetentiary. You have to "pay for your actions" - which has absolutely nothing to do with rehabilitation and preventing recidivism. Paying for your actions is deeply ingrained is the American zeitgeist - making the concept of favoring rehabilitation appear immoral.
Regardless, it could be argued that rehabilitating a perpetrator of more severe crimes is a harsher form of punitive justice. Living with your (newly acquired) guilt and regret about your actions is more difficult than hanging out with, and learning from, your peers in crime university - prison.
Also, selling heroin is often manslaughter.
What are the recidivism rates on those crimes like? Our laws often reflect misguided morals, not hard data. Justice is supposed to be blind. That's an ideal to reach for, not reject out of hand.
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Can you please let him know about this? I wanted to contact him but I can’t find his e-mail address anywhere.
It's a little late, so this will get buried, but I had a similar experience. I caught two felonies (both from the same incident) Luckily, I had a good job at the time and it was my first offense, so I was able to get house arrest. After seeing what could have been my life, I completed my BS in CS, online part-time and convinced the state of California to let me move there. I received five years of probation, so even though I was off house arrest, I had to convince the state of California to take me as a probationer. I don't think this is usually offered, even though I had gainful employment waiting for me. I feel very fortunate. Since then, I've worked for various startups and Fortune 50 companies as a software engineer. I was lucky enough that the tech industry valued me more for my skills than punished me for my past. I will be forever grateful to the state of California and the tech industry for this. I've looked into, and tried to volunteer for various programs that try to teach inmates or felons technical/engineering skills. All have fallen through. I'd love to hear what you're working on OP, and if you want to brainstorm a way we can try and help more inmates turn their life around through software development.
Thank you for sharing your story. It's wonderful that you want to pay your fortunes forward.
I don't think they work directly in prisons and jails, but https://www.underdogdevs.org/ is a group that works to train formerly incarcerated people in software and tech. They built mentee/mentor relationships between professional development and those wanting to learn.
Thanks for sharing this.. send me an email if you'd like. preston@unlockedlabs.org
As a former software engineer for over a decade and current corrections officer in a max level state facility, this is a very interesting topic. My facility has a large college presence within it. While there are problems with it, I think overall it is probably a net positive for the staff and inmates. At the same time, I don't believe that we have more than maybe a small handful of nonviolent/drug offenders; anybody on the outside advocating for murderers, rapists, and those in for armed robbery to have access to more of the normal comforts of the outside world is going to have a hard time and not much support. Even the medium level prisons have those types of people in them. So what facilities would wider access to remote learning and work become available? There would need to be honor facilities inmates must work towards proving they're responsible enough to be transferred to. Right now budgets are being slashed, we're at 60% staffing as it is, and the whole state is in the shit. And this is a "progressive liberal" state. It would probably take the federal government to start throwing money around for pilot programs, no state is going to increase their prison budget to accommodate this.
I think for all the criminals that are going to be released back into society at some point, recidivism should be at the top of our mind, not punishment.
If you can stop them from doing it again by locking them up in comfort for 10 years instead of discomfort for 20, then that is what we should do (assuming that doesn’t cause more people to do it in the first place).
> If you can stop them from doing it again by locking them up in comfort for 10 years instead of discomfort for 20, then that is what we should do.
You're never going to stop many of them from reoffending. Even the "best" rehabilitation programs have crime rates far above the general population.
The additional 10 years is 10 more years where they can't hurt innocent people. The justice system exists for the benefit of society and innocent citizens, not criminals.
> assuming that doesn’t cause more people to do it in the first place
Why would you ever assume that? Punishments absolutely have a deterrent effect.
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Thanks for more first hand insight, from a related but different perspective.
I'm curious: what led you to leave software engineering? SWE to corrections officer sounds like a rare journey.
I was going to make a joke like "He probably wanted to do less stressful work."
Then I read that it's not far from the truth: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32554517
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My life circumstances were such that I needed a job in a new area where that's all I was qualified to do (meaning I can breathe) while earning enough to live on. Software engineering is not an option within 90 minutes of here. Even if I could get a job in software here and it paid the same, software is significantly more stressful than my current job, the future is unsure as tech is always changing, the people I work with are closer and more friendly/outgoing, and the time off is amazing. When I leave work I'm done, there's no reading up on/practicing the latest stack without any guarantees it's going to increase my employability. When I walk out of the prison, my own personal life is all need to think about. I'd probably not take the job for less than a 50% increase in what I make now. And wages here are so low it just wouldn't happen. I do still enjoy coding but I like it as a hobby. And honestly, I was probably never very good at it.
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Some statistics here: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2023.html
~60% of the state prison population (~600k of ~1m) are imprisoned for a violent crime. Much higher than I would have guessed.
One of the article's key points is that violent crime does not mean "caused physical harm" and that entire categories of crime are considered violent by law, whether or not any violence was perpetrated during the commission.
"The fourth myth: By definition, “violent crime” involves physical harm
The distinction between “violent” and “nonviolent” crime means less than you might think; in fact, these terms are so widely misused that they are generally unhelpful in a policy context. In the public discourse about crime, people typically use “violent” and “nonviolent” as substitutes for serious versus nonserious criminal acts. That alone is a fallacy, but worse, these terms are also used as coded (often racialized) language to label individuals as inherently dangerous versus non-dangerous."
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>> the success of the Maine model of corrections should highlight the absolutely embarrassing lack of opportunities in the rest of the system
Very well said. And I am glad we have a model now, if one was ever needed. I hope other prison systems take note.
As someone actively working in this space, I can tell you they are. Maine is following the so-called Scandinavian Model. It essentially comes down to giving incarcerated people a chance to practice normal daily activities and social interactions. The facilities feel more like highly secure dorms than jails. The way a head of a different DoC said still sticks with me:
We send people away for years, tell them exactly what to do every day and they get to make exacrly one choice every day: do you obey or not? That's the only choice you get to make. Then, after 3, 5, 10 years, we send them out into society and tell them, "Make better choices." But we haven't prepared them for that at all. We have given them almost no chances to make decisions and learn how to make good ones. We just tell them the decision to make and they do it. There's no space for practicing good decisions in traditional prison settings.
Multiple other states are pointing to Maine as proof that the Scandinavian model can work in the US and are incorporating their learnings into their plans and trainings.
We send people away for years, tell them exactly what to do every day and they get to make exacrly one choice every day: do you obey or not? That's the only choice you get to make. Then, after 3, 5, 10 years, we send them out into society and tell them, "Make better choices." But we haven't prepared them for that at all. We have given them almost no chances to make decisions and learn how to make good ones. We just tell them the decision to make and they do it. There's no space for practicing good decisions in traditional prison settings.
This really puts things in perspective. Thank you for sharing!
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None of the places I was housed at had any opportunities, really.
One place had computers to learn typing. You weren't allowed computer books in that facility in case you used them to figure out how to hack out of the jail. So, bless the elderly nuns, they smuggled in "C# in a Weekend" for me, with the CD-ROM, so I could teach programming classes when the guards weren't paying attention.
Seems like a good idea, but from the article it sounds like a lot of the difference between Maine and his earlier prisons was the culture that existed amongst the prisoners themselves. Obviously prison officials can try to influence this (indeed, it sounds like the authors transfer to Maine was an attempt to do that), but it seems like the kind of thing that's hard to do with just, like, correspondence college degree programs and the like.
This is an incredible post, and I encourage everyone to read it.
I wish I knew better how to help incarcerated people. Based on the Norway(?) model, I feel like help would reduce return rates, but I don't know how to go about it.
I just got out after 10 years. I work with a lot of people just coming out (just been helping a guy locked up for 40 years, he's doing great).
The biggest issue is that 95% of them will be returned within a few months. Drugs is the main cause. You get out, you have no ID, no job, no family, no friends. You're stuck in a halfway house that is just like being in prison (lots of rules, line up for meal service etc). All the other guys there have a ton of drugs and you swear you won't touch them, but then you do because you're bored and sad. And then you're addicted again. And now you need money to buy more drugs. So you go do something goofy to get money and you get caught and locked up for another 10 piece. Or your parole officer drug tests you and violates your parole and you go do another 3 piece. Or the halfway house owner gets sick of you coming in after 7pm smelling of alcohol so he calls your parole officer and you go do another 3 piece.
Cycle repeats until you die in prison.
The no ID thing is interesting. The article mentions that as a major issue as well. Seems like it'd be a pretty cheap intervention to just issue all out-going prisoners a gov't photo ID on their release.
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Recidivism rates are astonishingly high in all countries. Norway has the lowest at 20% within 2 years. The real rate is higher because most crimes aren’t solved. So in the best case, rehabilitation makes someone 300x more likely to commit crime than the average Norwegian.
It's unfair to say it "makes" them that way. They were incarcerated because they already proved willing to commit a crime. It failed to change them back into an average citizen, sure. Understandably a very difficult problem. It's quite possible that it makes them worse instead of better but we'd need different evidence to show that.
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By that logic, the worst possible recidivism rate (surely 100%) would make someone 1500x more likely to commit crime than a non-offender. That’s still a pretty good case for having effective rehabilitation (unless you insist on the death sentence for all prisonable offences)
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There are reasonable suggestions for organizations to support, at the bottom of the post.
Yes, though supporting an organization always feels like expecting someone else to do the hard work. I'd like to do more.
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I'm always amazed at this country in which incarcerating someone for 10 years (!!) for non violent drug dealing is economical, but public healthcare and education aren't.
It starts to make more sense when you look at the 13th amendment:
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Private prisons are in the business of cheap labor, not rehabilitation. It would be extremely expensive to effectively change the lifestyles of millions of people and treat their addiction, not to mention those around them who become traumatized due to their mistakes and follow in their footprints.
We simply lack the necessary amount of political will to do an end run around this by decriminalizing harmful drugs and providing safer pathways of use that can lead to treatment for addiction. Partially because, again, cheap labor! But no doubt also due to moral puritanism.
I’m happy to see there is some movement in state constitutions to do away with this kind of punishment, and even house/senate resolutions proposed to amend the federal constitution, although I don’t know what’s become of that effort.
> Private prisons are in the business of cheap labor, not rehabilitation.
How so? From that post and a few others I've read touching on the topic, it didn't seem obvious that prisoners are being put to work.
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This comment is everything.
Not to mention that due to understaffed and over budget facilities, rehabilitation programs are generally the first things to get cut.
You might consider emailing him. It's lonely in jail/prison. Suddenly everyone you thought were your closest friends don't speak a word to you again.
If you're lucky, you've got a wife or parents that'll write to you or take your calls.
Wow, I know you've been locked up, brother.
Nobody will take your call the second you step inside a jail. Best man at your wedding? He's not picking up, I promise you. Literally nobody will call you or write to you. You will get nothing except maybe from your mother. If you are married, forget it.
Humans only like to associate with success. Once you seem to be failing literally nobody will want to even speak to you.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fair-weather_friend#Noun
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I wanted to contact him to tell him that he was wrong (he got to the front page without using any of his proposed techniques [1]) but I couldn’t find the e-mail. I have no LinkedIn either; right now I almost feel like submitting an issue to one of his github repos just to get his attention. Can you point me to his e-mail address?
[1] https://pthorpe92.github.io/humor/How-to-get-on-hackernews-f...
I got it from his GitHub page:
https://github.com/PThorpe92
His email is preston@unlockedlabs.org
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> kicked out of my parents house for being a stupid 17yr old
That's child abuse in my book. If you are a parent, you are responsible for your children. That's it. No age limit. Nothing. They need a place? You are responsible for providing them a place to live. This isn't to say you have to be responsible for their crimes, but you should never be allowed to force your child out of your house. YOU brought them into this world. They are your responsibility. Forcing a child out? You are a terrible parent. Yes, some children thrive, but others don't. I'm sorry, but it's on you.
If you aren't ready to take care of your children or make sure they are taken care of for the remainder of their life, you shouldn't have children. 18 and you force them out? You are in the wrong.
Author here again: I told myself I was done chiming in, but this is just something I have to clarify.
My parents are absolutely amazing people, and they are the only reason my life has any hope at this point. They were still figuring things out, and didn't understand why I was such a rebellious asshole. Having 4 kids and two of them teenagers isn't easy, and they have been incredibly supportive to my younger siblings when one went through some troubles, and have been supportive to me the entire time. I know this is something my mother feels terrible for, but I feel like I was going to do what I was going to do, and I put no blame on her for anything.
This was the only thing that was going to get me to comment, because i know it breaks my moms heart.
Doesn't change what they did. Things might be better now, but they still failed. Being a failure doesn't mean you are always a failure, and you can improve. That you have a good relationship with them now is proof of that. But it doesn't change the fact that they were wrong for what they did.
Don't take their growth away from them.
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That's pretty harsh. Children turn into adults, and not all of them turn out great. As a parent my responsibility is to get them to adulthood with as much chance of success as it is possible for me to provide. At some point they do absolutely become responsible for their own decisions. Do I ever want to find out what it would take to throw my own child out of the house? Of course not. Am I going to toss them out when they turn 18? No plans to. But this idea that you should be responsible for another adult for the rest of their life just because you created them...? That's silly.
In this case the one singular event of being kicked out at a specifically vulnerable age of 17-18. The rest of their life was influenced by that.
> That's pretty harsh. Children turn into adults,
No, it's not. It's reality. And you only think it's harsh because you are ignorant. And that ignorance will not prepare you for reality.
> But this idea that you should be responsible for another adult for the rest of their life just because you created them...? That's silly.
No, it's reality. And if you think otherwise, you are not ready to be a parent. Or you'll have a rude awakening when it turns out you are wrong.
Maybe you get lucky and they are able to support themselves, but if you think you raising them to 18 means you are done, it just means you are ignorant.
> Children turn into adults,
No, they don't and that's your ignorance.
Not all children grow up to be adults mentally. Not all children grow up. There are numerous conditions that mean you are responsible for them for the rest of their life, ensuring they get the care they need.
And trying to wave that off as the exception, it just means that you are ignorant. You should go into being a parent understanding that this might happen.
I see way too many parents throwing their kids into the water and letting them sink or swim. Sorry, but if they drown, it's on you as the parent. You failed them. You are the failure.
And that's child abuse, and people that think like that are worthless.
Do better.
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The apparent lack of opportunities for anyone is easy to solve with Dorm Room Welfare:
Open free dorms next to the campuses of community colleges. Anyone who is physically able to live on their own, but who can not afford to live on their own can move in and live there as long as they are working towards being economically self sufficient.
Working towards being economically self sufficient can mean passing academic classes, passing career and technical education classes, taking remedial classes, completing a high school equivalency degree, passing K-12 classes online, earning certifications, working in internships, working jobs at a training wage, or other things
I suggest we replace all other welfare programs with drom room welfare.
This does not solve the problem that many of us do not want to hire convicted criminals.
> This does not solve the problem that many of us do not want to hire convicted criminals.
The issue that keeps people from hiring ex-offenders isn't hard to solve:
One part is social. This one requires a little leadership and a little bit of re-defining what is an acceptable attitude.
The other part is a financial issue and is EASY to solve politically: most business insurers will raise rates or not insure companies that hire ex-offenders.
In my home state we were able to get a law passed that shifted liability for a hired ex-offender who committed a crime on the job to the state so insurers could not make hiring ex-offenders ridiculously expensive.
We were able to sell the idea to our legislators and local city councilors with a simple trade: the Democrat-controlled city council wanted to pass laws making it illegal not to hire ex-offenders. The Republican-controlled legislature wanted to give tax credits to businesses that hire ex-offenders. I suggested instead of passing unconstitutional laws or handing out corporate welfare we could solve the problem by making it illegal to charge more to insure a business that hires an ex-offender, and at the same time, absolving the insurer of having to pay claims because of the hire. The city and state decided to try it out, and it's helped a lot of people over the past eight years.
You could just make criminal background checks unlawful, which is the case in Ireland. There is police vetting for people who work with the vulnerable and certain key jobs, but the average person will never face vetting for a job.
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Thank you for at least acknowledging this.
I'd wager that if people with convictions on their record, had even a 10-20% chance of being hired at a decent establishment, we'd see recidivism go down by a statistically significant amount.
I know the justice system. The grand majority of folks coming in and out of prison genuinely do not want better for themselves, it's a lifestyle choice that they've accepted (or resigned themselves to, depending on how you look at it).
But for the fractional percentage of incarcerated individuals that DO decide "Okay, I've had enough, I'm done with this and I want better for myself" and mean it, they aren't afforded such a luxurious opportunity for a bland life in suburbia.
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This sounds like the deal I have had with my (young-adult) kids (who live at home).
Unfortunately, some parents believe in "tough love" (throw them into the ocean to learn them to swim).
I don't at all care for the way in which he mentions his crimes were nonviolent and tells us about being arrested for dealing ecstasy (a drug with little taboo associated with it) while skipping over the fact he's currently in prison for dealing choke-on-your-own-vomit synthetic opiods, not cute party drugs.
That stuff killed a coworker's son a few years ago. Died right in his own recliner.
Indeed. He had an ounce of U-47700, a synthetic opioid equivalent to about half a pound of morphine. With intent to distribute. And this is not his first prison sentence for distribution. I think opioid dealers are a different and worse class of dealers compared to, say, MDMA. That's a personal opinion. At any rate, he's paying for that crime, and when he's done he'll return to a normal life, hopefully, and I'll wish him well. Until then, he should be honest about who he is—or was—before his supposed epiphany.
https://www.doj.nh.gov/news/2017/20171011-preston-thorpe-sen...
People do things they're not proud of in desperate situations. Also, everyone was 18-21 once.
Speaking as someone who (barely) survived an unintentional acetyl-fentanyl overdose that hospitalized me with rhabdo and almost killed my then-fiance -- him dealing this stuff is not the end of the world.
I think a lot of people on HN don't know what it's like to be someone below the poverty line who is also entangled with the law. If you're looking for hell in a first-world country, that's about as close as you can get in the USA.
> People do things they're not proud of in desperate situations.
Having to get an office temp job for minimum wage at 24 isn't ideal but it's a stretch to call it "desperate" and somehow justifying pushing opiates.
> what it's like to be someone below the poverty line
Which he wouldn't have been with the job options he had available at the time.
He was 24.
People do things they're not proud of in desperate situations
See that's the thing. Did you read one word in the post about him being remorseful or apologetic to the people he might've killed by selling them U-47700, a drug that's essentially unstudied in humans? I didn't.
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Yeah this guy belongs in jail and clearly doesn’t think what he did was a problem at all. In the midst of an epidemic that kills tens of thousands of Americans a year the dealers of these drugs make the front page and are cheered on as “victims.”
The victims here are the families and children of the people whose abuse he profited greatly off of.
Author, here:
As a severe opioid addict myself for over 10 years, I am absolutely ashamed of having any part in that life. It is a burden that I will have to continue dealing with every day for the rest of my life.
In no way am I trying to say that I did not deserve to go to prison. The focus of this post, was about the facilities made available to those people who do end up in prison, so that they do not return.
As to the references... yes I am a non-violent drug offender. That isn't a label I gave myself, that is a fact: there to let readers know that I am not here for murder or rape or something of that sort. Involvement in opioids and that lifestyle/culture is something that I did not have any contact with UNTIL I was sent to prison. Perhaps we should consider whether 1. Prison is making people worse (that is just an objective fact) 2. We want to be institutionalizing people that clearly are capable of much more, who turn to things like dealing out of their drug habits, or lack of resources/options.
Before anyone wants to go google'ing and coming up with immediate judgements, why don't you look into that there was absolutely zero prosecution of the case being referred to.. They said they found "residue" in my apartment, put out a nationwide manhunt for me, then immediately dropped the case as soon as I was judged by the media and the judge. They couldn't just destroy my apartment and all my stuff and say "we found nothing". Leaving them to prosecute me for 1oz of a synthetic opioid 8x stronger than morphine, that itself, had a potency of roughly 1%. It was almost completely inert. absolutely useless. and this was a completely unrelated case.
To the person who said I sold drugs to kids.. Where exactly do you get off making such horrible claims about me? Do you live in such a bubble that you think that every drug dealer sits around behind dumpsters at high-schools and asks kids if they want to try some 'pot', thats really laced with angel dust? Oh and they all put rainbow fentanyl in your kids halloween candy too right?
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The opioid epidemic has killed a good chunk of my friends over the years. It was rampant in the form of "cheese" when I was a teen; one of my closest friends was left to die when he began vomiting from an overdose. When I was in the Marines I saw Marine after Marine prescribed opioids for pain and injuries after deployments, many of them separated out and continued using. As an adult I've lived in the Bay Area and Portland; I've gotten to observe first hand what culture these drugs cultivate on our streets. I've gotten to see opioids make their way, sometimes by mistake, into the rave scene and the constant fear it creates among people who want nothing to do with those drugs. We have Narcan at our house because people consistently use the church parking lot next door to shoot up in their car. I've personally ran down the street and through the fence to go bang on doors because I saw someone passed out for too long - not because I want them gone, but because I don't want to see someone else die.
To put the entire mantle on dealers would be a mistake, imo. Their choice to sell can come from a variety of incentives: sometimes from clout, sometimes their upbringing, sometimes lack of opportunity, sometimes lack of education, many times a mixture of the above. Often enough these people are users themselves; the pain the people they sell to endure they also typically endure.
I don't view this post as victim-seeking and I don't really view him as a victim. Instead, I view this as a critique of prison culture that reinforces its outcomes. I view him as someone that wants to change and has the capacity to change, but there is little if any pipeline or incentive to do so. If there is one, it seems frail. When people want to change we should have a stepped pipeline for reintroducing them to normality and finally society.
Like you, I'd like to see less opioid related deaths in the future but I think there's more than one way to get to that goal. If there's a way that can make productive citizens out of people rather than shutting them away forever then I'm all for it because, frankly, the threat of a felony or life imprisonment didn't stop people before. In fact, that's when the prison population and recidivism bloomed.
The guy is in jail and is serving his sentence. I could understand given recent scandals with opioids that people view perhaps justice in this area as "patchy", though.
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He also completely glosses over why he was really in solitary confinement. I guarantee it is not merely because of his "influence".
I recently read a book about experiences in the UK prison system: 'A Bit of a Stretch: The Diaries of a Prisoner' by Chris Atkins (there is an associated podcast, which is also excellent). It is a fascinating, but rather depressing read about his experiences being incarcerated for tax fraud and how broken the UK prison system is. It is no wonder the re-offending rates are so high.
I'm guessing much of the US system (where I understand a lot more for-profit private companies are involved) is at least as broken.
As a Brit prisoner in the USA I understand the that USA systems are far, far worse than the UK systems.
Are you in contact with your family at all?
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I'd like to make a couple of points to think about:
I'd been addicted to opioids for a couple of years. And I was very happy that I was able to get original non-counterfeit pills on the dark net, from vendors that had thousands of positives reviews. Being a nerd, and successful when it comes to business, risk-free supply had never been an issue. Luckily I bought Bitcoin when they did cost $0.20...
Fighting the dark net has always been a stupid idea. It's the cleanest way for people to get the substances they need, with the lowest amount of risk in every single regard. Lowest risk to get your substance cut with something unhealthy, lowest risk of getting ripped off, lowest risk of getting into criminal circles.
Fighting the dark net means pushing people to street dealers, increasing suffering, violent crime and deaths.
So, why did I get addicted? Depressions, anxiousness, and finally: Being on the autistic spectrum, which now seems absolutely obvious from earliest childhood memories, but my parents never took me to a neurologist to get that diagnosed. I just lived with being "different". Until I could not take it anymore, and tried to help myself with substances.
How did I get off the addiction? Did a search for the best-rated neurologist in the region, made an appointment, got treatment. It took a while, but in the end a combination of substances was found that worked out better than opiates.
But that being said: Those substances are the same that I can get as prescription medication, or as "drugs" on the street. It's just that now I no longer have to spend Bitcoin on it, but get them for free from the health care system. Yay!
Please remind yourself: Nearly everything that is taken and sold as "drugs" on the streets is used to treat some problem, just in a very dangerous way, without proper education, without proper risk management.
Whatever that scary drug that your parents and your school are warning you about to be evil: It's just medication. The poor people die on the street trying to get their supply, the rich guys get a subscription to get it for free.
If your country has a problem with drugs on the street, and with crime due to people trying to get those substances, your country SIMPLY HAS A PROBLEM PROVIDING HEALTH CARE to its citizens!
So please stop demonizing substances, demonizing substance "abuse", demonizing people providing those substances in a clean and safe way via the dark net, and demonizing people who sadly did not have the luck of their health care system helping them.
And go fix your health care systems.
I resonate with this comment strongly. I have never been diagnosed, but I strongly suspect I am neurodivergent. My extreme social isolation/anxiety in my college years and twenties led me to dependency on alcohol and cannabis. I never tried hard drugs, but my life back then was just one tiny twist of fate away from me becoming an opioid addict.
I did manage to become sober, and a lot of social challenges have become more manageable now that I have a better framework for understanding my mind.
You might want to try Ketamine. In some countries it's now available legally from neurologists as nose spray. If not, get it from the dark net or a friend in the rave community. Or ask as friend who is a veterinarian. You get mix your own nose spray with that.
Before Ketamine, I never in my life had been able to get into a group of people with them being closer than about 50cm to me. Which means: I could never join a dancefloor.
With Ketamine, that poof went away, and I could.
The same happened for a couple of my neurodiverse friends. One girl her hole life could not be in the same room as others while eating. Now she can.
A single dose also has anti-depressant effects for five days.
Interestingly, it's now in some countries allowed to be used as treatment for social anxiety after positives studies on that. On the other hand, there is now a clinical study that say it's not better than a placebo. Weird.
However, for me (and my nerd friends) the before/after effect is so drastic, I can rule out a placebo effect. My neurologist agrees. I trust clinical studies and always consult them, but something must have gone wrong there.
And yes, this is a good example of a substance that in many countries can get you into jail, while in other countries it can make a most DRAMATIC positive change in your life.
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What blew my mind is that ~667/100000 or ~.67% of Americans are incarcerated according to the numbers in this post and the population according to the German Wiki page for the US. Wikipedia says it's .531% on the English language website, .629% on the German site. (Don't know which year for either or if juvenile detention is counted on German site.) That is A LOT! A LOT!
The last time this topic came up on HN (not that long ago, a matter of weeks), I dove into the rabbit hole a bit. Turns out that the lion's share of the difference in incarceration rates between the US and other countries comes down to sentencing. Crime-for-crime, the US doles out a lot more time than e.g. Western European nations.
A lot of people think it's drug crimes. Not really. Just the same old crimes as everywhere else, punished with 2-3x the amount of time.
This is basically what US voters have asked for up until recently. Being tough on crime is a feature for a politician. Three-strikes laws, etc.
It's largely a function of the much higher rate of violent crime in the United States
Well, it looks like he finally did it!
https://pthorpe92.github.io/humor/How-to-get-on-hackernews-f...
Edit: He says he posted this literally yesterday. LOL
Parts of Preston Thorpe's story of redemption have similarities to Andreas Kling: https://awesomekling.github.io/I-quit-my-job-to-focus-on-Ser...
> It was October 2018 and I had just completed a 3-month rehab program at a state addiction clinic in Sweden. I was unemployed, staying with family, and had basically nothing going on.
> With no drugs or other vices to pass the time, the days seemed impossibly long. I struggled to find activities to fill them. I enrolled in school for a while, but it wasn’t for me this time either. Eventually I turned to programming, since it’s always been my big interest in life.
If I get locked up maybe I would finally get to doing the exercises from the art of computer programming.
It isn't the worst deal because you don't have to worry about paying rent, so you can just focus 100% on getting good at whatever skillset you choose to pursue.
Today he reached a personal goal - https://pthorpe92.github.io/humor/How-to-get-on-hackernews-f...
The site doesn't show the date, but I emailed him and he says he posted it yesterday. Ain't that just the way!
TFA is interesting but I've got a problem with this:
> I was left with the difficult choice of either living there and walking to a temp agency with hopes of making $10.50/hour doing manual labor (without an ID or social security card at this point), or getting on a bus to NYC to see some associates, and coming back in a week or so with $15-25k in my pocket and living in comfy luxury hotels until I could rent an apartment I chose the latter, obviously, and was back in prison after 14mo.
That is not obvious. My father was left with nothing at some point in his life, living like a hobo in an abandoned, broken, leaking RV next to gypsies (heck, he'd even, for free, help the gypsies' kids with "homework").
And he was still proud --and still is-- of never having done anything illegal.
People choose to engage in crime, and there's nothing obvious about it.
Nobody needs the latest iPhone or the latest sneakers. They believe they "flex" with the latest iPhone and sneakers (I've got a whole different idea of flexing btw but that'd be another topic). They choose the easy path.
And that is not obvious at all. Most poor people and by very, very, very far, even most hobos, are not thieves and are not drug dealers. When you deal drugs you have on your conscience how miserable you make the lives of so many others: it's not even about legality here.
I had a friend and roommate at one point (and still friend to this day), we'd split rent and he'd barely make any money. Serving pitas at a tiny kebab/pita place three nights a week for hardly any money. And he was okay with that. He didn't care about clothes or cars or phones or fancy hotel rooms or whatever. He'd just be honest and survive.
What I'd like to know is why people believe it's "obvious" they choose a criminal life for $25 K a week instead of an honest life flipping burgers.
It's not obvious and that mindset of "fancy luxury hotel rooms" and "latest iPhone" should just die. Nobody is impressing anyone with these utterly pointless bullshit.
Asking newly-release prisoners to have the absolute strongest constitution and pain endurance is also not obvious to me. The average person would struggle in this situation, and we expect formerly-incarcerate individuals to be even stronger than them?
It doesn't offend me at all to see it highlighted as "obvious" to the author. For some high proportion of these individuals, it is obvious (and indeed seems like the only choice).
Crime will always pay better than legitimate alternatives. You can either choose to sacrifice the extra income or risk going to prison– that's kind of just how society functions.
> For some high proportion of these individuals, it is obvious (and indeed seems like the only choice).
Then they can go back to prison. Society need not be blackmailed into giving ex-cons excessively lucrative jobs in hopes of luring them away from crime.
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>have the absolute strongest constitution
you don't need to have the 'absolute strongest constitution' to work a boring min-wage job in the United States of America. Ask any refugee who migrated to the country what a hard life looks like.
Smart people like this guy, who choose to go into the drug trade do it because they think a crappy 9-5 job to get back on their feet is beneath them.
This entire post is based on misunderstanding why the author used the word "obviously" here: You're reading about an incarcerated developer, so you obviously know he chose to commit a crime again at that point in the story. He wasn't saying it was the obvious choice to make.
But OP claims to be committing nonviolent drug crimes. Depending on your philosophy you may feel you’re not doing anything morally wrong by selling drugs. Upholding the law for the laws’ sake isn’t obviously good.
It’s admirable that you’re father did what he did without resorting to becoming a negative influence on society, but I bet most people on HN have broken the law in some small way many times in their life. Breaking the law and hurting others are not always the same.
MDMA either puts me to sleep or makes me talk faster than freaking Busta Rhymes raps, without effort. I recorded it once and it's crystal clear. Fun stuff.
Need to get to the science of that mechanism.
My experience with MDMA is that it just feels like weaker meth which would sure explain it
Haven't tried Meth yet. Jessa Reed almost inspired it couple o' years back when I was at my weakest but when her teeth fell out in the middle of an interview I decided to wait into my late 50s.
The is incredibly inspirational. It’s a light we can potentially use to guide our prison system out of the dark ages.
I’m really happy that you found a way out of the trafficking life. That was a really nice thing to read and I think a lot of people will resonate with it. (Computer nerds that had tough times in life). I’m wishing you all the best in your fight against addiction and I’m definitely adding Unlocked Labs to my list of donations. Thanks for sharing your story.
It is incredible story. I wish you all all the good luck you can get and happy life after you get out of prison. I also wish that prison systems in the US and Canada will adopt this "Scandinavian" model. So much better to put people back on right track instead of being vengeful fucks who would chase person the end of their days,
Preston Thorpe, about your epiphany moment, any possible relationship with Jesus ?
This lays in a similar domain with a french startup named Vainu that back in 2019 started to use incarcerated people for data labelling.
Look it up.
> particularly those affected by the war on drugs, like myself, who has spent 1/3 of his life imprisoned for non-violent drug crimes
Still not quite ready to take responsibility for his actions... You weren't magically "affected" by the war on drugs. You went into crime for the easy money, but found out you weren't very good at avoiding getting caught.
Meanwhile working class people have lesser and lesser purchasing power to the point were renting and homeownership are out of their reach; subemployment / "gig" employment ("innovating" by removing without workers rights) is rampant.
Nothing like a system that produces a high amount of marginalized / vulnerable people and then blames them for going for "easy" money like drugs or prostitution.
I would expect the tech crowd here to be more inclined towards blameless postmortems / systemic safety.
It's not like they've scammed others with crypto or tried to overtake markets with price dumping tactics or bribed the governments to use their software or spied on billions for profit.
They've just lorried stuff other poor people wanted. That should not be illegal. The above should.
this was a cool read. i hope you get out soon and be a software dev somewhere
Awesome and amazing.
Amazing read
Great post
I guess I read this blog post very differently from many other commenters. I don't see this as being entitled or avoiding responsibility for his actions. He's just telling his story. He knows he fucked up. But he also knows the system is fucked.
If you can't possibly understand how growing up without positive influences can lead someone to a life of crime, you're probably too privileged to be the target audience of this article. Just move on.
>I don't see this as being entitled or avoiding responsibility for his actions
Did others commented that? If they read this post like that, then they are part of the problem.
> If they read this post like that, then they are part of the problem.
On the other hand, they aren't. One part of the problem is in jail as he should be, and another part of the problem is you.
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> He's just telling his story. He knows he fucked up. But he also knows the system is fucked.
Here in the UK we have something called Joint Enterprise [1] which is controversial for a numnber of reasons, I've read this chaps blog, I can relate to his circumstances in a number of ways having grown up with the rave culture in the 90's, I've seen many people turn a blind eye and escape prosecution, mainly because its too hard to prosecute, demonstrating the laziness of the police as evidence gathers and the judicary.
What annoys me is how these so called law abiding people manage to remain in their job. People claim to live in a democracy, none more so that many in the US, and yet AFAIK noone gets taught law as a mandatory subject when growing up. If you are not taught something how can the public even debate it? Is this the legal system applying a form of Darwinism on the population in a dictatorial fashion? Is this a form of intellectual torture being applied on some who want to enjoy themselves in non-alcoholic ways?
If I had the money I'd get a Judicial Review to find the reasons why judges dont want people to be taught the law as a mandatory subject for a number of reasons, and for adults to be kept up to date with legal changes in a TLDR fashion, that doesnt rely on the opinion of the state broadcaster and other news outlets. Some people are too busy to watch/read the news, which is the only en-masse way to keep up to date currently, and there is also the issue of why is legal conformity pushed on people if they are doing no harm? Just what exactly is a democracy and do you really have a say?
If Roe v. Wade (1973) can mandate a change across a country like the US, are these judges who shy away from making a countrywide decision to keep people abreast of legal changes, not only undermining the idea of democracy, but also just keeping themselves in a stealth sado masochistic schadenfruede-like position of authority with accompanying lucrative income?
Has any scientific study measured the dopamine receptors of judges or serotonin receptors or testostorone levels when they pass a judgement? Has the scientific community shown they derive pleasure from controlling other peoples lives in non scientific ways, because I see the reoffending rate is quite high, and the system is clearly not fit for purpose.
To the original poster, just remember there are some people who agree with your actions, enjoy the mental mind games of programming, it can keep you occupied even when not in front of the computer. :)
The Law of 'Joint Enterprise': Graham Virgo Cambridge Law Faculty [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjBwCmwpvMI
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> it is not an excuse.
Things can be a reason without being an excuse.
Sure I'm not in jail and on the surface I have my act together, but my entire life has been fucked up by what are now called "ACEs" and it's a miracle I'm as stable as I am.
I'm not going to let people off the hook, but I am able to sympathize...especially knowing the wrong person or event at the wrong time would have quickly sent me down the same path.
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>Many more people then you might think have had a unsatisfactory childhood. However, most of them get their act together at some point during growing up
Dιδ they have the same exact family circumstances, growing up experiences, psychological capacity, and so on? Or at least very close ones?
Or are you comparing different cases and expect them to have handled things the same?
>Pointing at your past as an excuse for criminal acts is pretty fucked up, IMO
It's not an excuse, it's an explanation, and a description of the forces and circumstances which led you there.
People's family and early life circumstances are hard to overcome, and just because some percentage of people manage it, doesn't mean it's easy for the rest, or that the people that did do it wouldn't also have slipped if they didn't have some lucky breaks (from psychological perspective all the way to the people they met, the connections they had, some rare good mentor or a good friend influence, etc.).
I hope you know how alone you are in this compassionless response.
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Dude was already in crime at 17. He didn't really have any time with the luxuries of adulthood to figure out his own life.
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I hate to quote so much of the post—it's well worth a read—but I think it's bookended by two very different experiences that convey so much about the U.S. prison system.
> A few years later, I left prison with $0 in my pocket (lawyers and commissary are expensive, and nobody pays you what they owe you when you come in), to a rooming house with hallways that smelled like crack-smoke and were filled with parole officers and junkies. I was left with the difficult choice of either living there and walking to a temp agency with hopes of making $10.50/hour doing manual labor (without an ID or social security card at this point), or getting on a bus to NYC to see some associates, and coming back in a week or so with $15-25k in my pocket and living in comfy luxury hotels until I could rent an apartment… I chose the latter, obviously, and was back in prison after 14mo.
...and later:
> I am very grateful for the opportunity, but I recognize that this is very much the exception and not the rule, and the success of the Maine model of corrections should highlight the absolutely embarrassing lack of opportunities in the rest of the system, to do anything but become a bitter, broke criminal; deprived of not just your freedom, family, financial security and reputation, but also of your self-identity as someone worth investing in changing. We need to do better as a society, and understand that, yes, there are people in the system that deserve this kind of punishment, but a large majority of our prison population are just regular people… non-violent drug offenders like myself. There are plenty more, like me, that are capable of being responsible, productive, tax paying members of society if given the opportunity, but you cannot expect anyone to change when you just lock them up in a cage with a bunch of other criminals where there is a subculture of endless negativity.
Prisons in the USA are for-profit enterprises that rely on a consistent population. They have no incentive to rehabilitate, in fact it's the opposite. What I don't understand is how a country with so many advantages like the USA could come up with arguably the worst prison system in the world. As a citizen, it's embarrassing that this is accepted by those in power as a good solution.
> how a country ... like the USA could come up with arguably the worst prison system in the world
I will leave you with this quote by John Erlichman:
"We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities, (...) We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
Source: https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/
Background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman
And, because everything is complicated, the family denies it all:
The 1994 alleged ‘quote’ we saw repeated in social media for the first time today does not square with what we know of our father. And collectively, that spans over 185 years of time with him,” the Ehrlichman family wrote. “We do not subscribe to the alleged racist point of view that this writer now implies 22 years following the so-called interview of John and 16 years following our father’s death, when dad can no longer respond. None of us have raised our kids that way, and that’s because we were not raised that way.”
Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-...
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Private prisons are problematic in their own right, but they only make up 8% of the total prison population at the state and federal level. imo, we (the citizens) are to blame for constantly championing a system of accountability that believes accountability is putting a man in a box and taking every future opportunity he doesn't know yet away from him. You can certainly blame those in power, and they share some blame, but we also elect to these sentences.
https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/private-prisons-in...
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Serious question: does this come from real first hand experience of knowledge of the issue or are you simply repeating the NYT/the Atlantic/Vox etc.?
My understanding is that about 8% of US prisons are privately owned. Perhaps that's not a good thing, but I don't think it is at all correct to say that "prisons in the USA are for-profit enterprise" when the actual number is so low.
I have also heard this narrative for a long time that the prisons were filled mostly with non-violent drug offenders, only to learn that this description only applies to about 3.5% of the prison population. Maybe that's not a good thing either, but again I feel like I have been intentionally deceived after reading supposedly high-minded journalism into believing a fundamentally false understanding of what is going on.
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As it turns out, Maine (where the author of the article ended up) has gotten rid of all their for-profit prisons, as of 2020.
https://www.criminon.org/where-we-work/united-states/maine/
> Prisons in the USA are for-profit enterprises
About 7-8% of US jail and prisoners inmates are in for-profit correctional institutions, most are in public institutions which are not operated for profit.
Private, for profit prisons are an issue, but they are very much not the norm in the US.
A very small number of prisons are for profit and advocates of being soft on criminals love to push the idea that they make up a majority, just as you implied.
> As a citizen
Of where?
I, as a lawful citizen of the United States of America, am not embarrassed by the prison system.
I am embarrassed, however, by folks who use hyperbole without merit to try and appease the masses without having the courage to go against the grain for fear of getting "downvoted" and losing faked internet points.
The fact that you believe the USA has the worst prison system in the world, compared to somewhere like, I dunno, Venezuela, supports my prior point.
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He was convicted of possessing 30 grams of carfentanil while on parole for his previous conviction. A lethal dose of carfentanil is 2mg, so it was at least 15,000 doses.
1. https://www.doj.nh.gov/news/2017/20171011-preston-thorpe-sen...
Fuck me, carfentanil is one of those things I read about years ago, that seemed like it would never get anywhere near the recreational drug market, because it’s just too potent and too dangerous to handle safely…
Ah, I see from your link it was u-47700 he was arrested with. Certainly a potent and potentially lethal substance, but not exactly on the same scale as carfentanil. U-47700 is quoted as 7.5x the potency of morphine, fentanyl at 50-100x and carfentanil around 4000
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Did you mean 30 kilograms?
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> There are plenty more, like me, that are capable of being responsible, productive, tax paying members of society if given the opportunity, but you cannot expect anyone to change when you just lock them up in a cage with a bunch of other criminals where there is a subculture of endless negativity.
Of course they expect inmates to change, but towards even more criminality, not towards rehabilitation. This will justify them for being inmates in the first place (and thus the existence of the model) and justify them to come back later. It's a very profitable business model.
The whole article is fantastic though.
> Of course they expect inmates to change, but towards even more criminality, not towards rehabilitation.
Who is "they"?
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So he chose to go back to a life of crime and we’re supposed to feel bad for him? There’s a reason he was able to make 20k in a weekend, it’s a high risk high reward business and I have no sympathy for someone who skirts societal norms and makes a shit ton of money in the process while plenty of people suck it up and earn the 10.50 until they can get back out in their own. This guy and his entire post reeks of entitlement, beginning with “non-violent drug offenses” in the first paragraph.
That’s an opinion, he wasn’t arrested for possession in reality he made a ton of money selling dangerous drugs to kids. Maybe they should be legal, some of that I agree with (I spent a lot of my late teens and early twenties in jail or on probation for simple possession and have a felony to this day for it) but that doesn’t mean you should be able to peddle chemicals you don’t understand in large quantities. Your upbringing being bad doesn’t make that okay either.
I don't think it really matters if you feel bad for him or not, and focusing on that aspect does more harm than good. I think, given a choice between living in a fucked-up halfway house with your only prospect for the future being a shitty minimum-wage job, or falling back into your old crimes where you can make pretty solid bank doing illegal things (yes, with high risk)... most people would probably pick the latter.
I absolutely agree that "non-violent drug offenses" is a cop-out when describing high-volume drug dealing. Maybe he wasn't directly violent, but dealers like him directly contribute to dragging many more people into addiction, violence, and even death. I don't think people should be jailed (or even punished) for simple possession, but dealing -- especially on a large scale -- well, that's a different matter.
But ultimately what I really care about is outcomes. The bottom line is that it doesn't matter what we want someone to choose when they get out of prison. If we don't provide a compelling path for an ex-con to go straight, that's just us shooting ourselves in our feet. If that means spending more time and money housing someone in actually good conditions, and providing them direct access to higher education and better job opportunities, so be it. Ultimately that ends up being a lot cheaper for taxpayers than what we're doing now. And we get a much healthier society in the bargain.
Acting punitive toward convicts and ex-cons doesn't help anyone. It doesn't help the person involved, and it especially doesn't help ourselves.
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He's not asking for sympathy. The entire article is about how he ended up where he is now, how the prison he's at now has saved him from a life of crime by giving him a meaningful chance at a career, that this is an anomaly, and that it shouldn't be.
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I agree with you that just on the basis of this piece, he does not sound accountable and can appreciate given what you've shared about your own history why it might be particularly frustrating. At the same time, there are factual elements of the story that deeply bother me about the way we treat those who have previously transgressed. I believe that we do need systems of accountability, but I also believe that our current system is broken beyond repair and is not ultimately effective. Or rather it can only be effective if we collectively agree to condemn a certain class of people as criminals and therefore deserving of treatment we would never accept of non criminals. We would all do well to remember our own incredible good fortune in life.
Of course there are people in prison who are a menace to public safety and must be dealt with. And there must be consequences for harmful behavior even when it is "nonviolent" (which is a word that diminishes non-physical harm). But I truly struggle to understand how it is a good idea to segregate all the people who have previously transgressed, deny them opportunities for betterment and fully initiate them into criminal life.
Guilty once, guilty forever right? You're defined by your lowest moment and surely can never come back from it ; and surely serving your sentence is never enough to be allowed a second chance.
There's not a mention asking for sympathy in there. It's mostly factual, and explanatory of his experience. And the fact that giving opportunities to convicts to educate themselves and find their way seems a much better solution than just educating them to gang life.
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> Who else has an opportunity to spend 12+ hours a day learning something for years? With no other obligations or responsibilities?
Totally tangential, but this prison article reminded me of a short story by Cory Doctorow about a monastery for programmers. I imagined living in a room about the size of my home office, a bed, a desk, a decent MacBook Pro and a high-speed connection and just hanging out on the Internet all day reading articles and programming. Food and shelter taken care of, no obligations or responsibilities. Like the pictures of Norwegian prison cells.
That reminded me of a weird Internet streamer collective started by a Twitch streamer named Athene. He started a group called The Singularity Group [1] which allowed people to move into a house to volunteer work on philanthropic projects. They are responsible for the AI Jesus [2] channel on Twitch. There is some controversy since some see the streamer as having tried to start a cult [3]. They also created a few mobile games that run on their own crypto-currency.
At any rate, it is all quite interesting to me. It was very common in the past in almost all cultures for a certain number of men to just reject society and go off into hermitage. Sometimes those hermits would band together into brotherhoods. Often they would make beer, or honey or some other collective task to earn enough money for the members to spend the rest of their time in quiet contemplation. I can imagine such a life might be attractive to a lot of programmers who tend to be introverted and feel alien to normal society.
1. https://singularitygroup.net/
2. https://www.twitch.tv/ask_jesus
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDAkkiwmmBQ
There was a thread or submission recently on setting up a low cost room & board for aspiring people, that I loved, but haven't been able to re-find the thread.
> Sometimes those hermits would band together into brotherhoods. Often they would make beer, or honey or some other collective task to earn enough money for the members to spend the rest of their time in quiet contemplation. I can imagine such a life might be attractive to a lot of programmers who tend to be introverted and feel alien to normal society.
Lovely imagery & idea, thank you.
Rather than focus on the negative motivations (be introverted and feel alien), i think often there's hope optimism & drive; more modernly especially, some are marked out from others by being inspired people, seeking to be active forces. Caring deeply about enormous possibilities trying to spring forth. Finding capacity for the cause, finding support or even just peers for those folks is hard.
Programmers have such amazing leverage, but most day jobs are just work. The idea of sustainable no frills living among other Burton Klein type-1/Happy Warrior types, able to pursue the thing & tangle with it & ideally also have others enmeshed in their questing too: that has huge appeal. It'd be such a worthy investment to support, imo.
It is a good point that the final sentence could be taken negatively.
I wasn't trying to determine why any individual might choose such a path. I was thinking about the population of programmers and considering that the stereotypical traits associated with that population do seem to align with a set of traits that are conducive to hermit-like or even brotherhood-like lifestyles. I did choose negative-sounding stereotypical traits to highlight that fact (although introversion isn't necessarily negative).
I would even argue that my own experience is that the population of programmers on average tend towards self-reliance type mindsets (e.g. Henry David Thoreau) a little bit more than socially active mindsets. However, I personally know a few individuals who are social activist types and also programmers.
Even when you consider "brotherhoods" you can think of multiple reasons why someone might want to join up. Perhaps the person desires a community of like-minded activists. In fact, that is how many brotherhoods would grow after their establishment. Combating the "incursion" of these community building types in some traditions appears to be a feature (e.g. vows of silence). I remember watching a documentary on splits in these communities for this very reason. Some hermits felt that structured communities with explicit charters went against everything they were trying to do (usually some kind of mystic communion with God or similar). So you can imagine a bifurcation of such a community into those who wanted to be socially active communities and those who wanted just enough collaboration with others to allow them as much individual freedom as possible.
I don't believe that one of those groups was "positive" and the other "negative". But I do think it is worthwhile recognizing the difference in mindsets. You said "ideally also have others enmeshed in their questing too" - however, that is not a universal ideal. Be careful you aren't forcing yourself into spaces where that isn't the goal.
I've had a similar idea before.
I once was talking to someone who wanted to financially support independent scientific research. He had started a successful business (you may have heard of it, though I won't name it) and he wanted to put his money to good use.
He wanted to find people he could write a check to, basically. I suggested that if he wanted to advance science as much as possible, it would be far more efficient to run a dormitory for scientists with free room and board, as long as they do scientific research. I'm sure he could find many people who would accept a minimalist lifestyle for the opportunity to do research the system wouldn't otherwise support. (I'd be interested.)
He declined, stating that one major factor was the tax write-off he got from the donation, and I guess giving people a place to live doesn't have that benefit.
It is interesting to think that your definition of a "a dormitory for scientists with free room and board, as long as they do scientific research." is kinda-sorta what I think of when I consider the Institute for Advanced Study. If you squint hard enough, it is kinda-sorta what tenure in universities aims to provide.
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link to the Cory Doctorow story, "The Things That Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away", for anyone else who's interested: https://www.tor.com/2008/08/06/weak-and-strange/
I also highly recommend _Anathem_, by Neal Stephenson if the STEM monastery theme is interesting to you.
PhD can be like this but for a limited time.
I managed to read over 800 books when I was locked up. Every famous book by every famous author. I read it.
Can you suggest one or two recommendations? Maybe one that surprised you and one that lived up to the hype?
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Nice! Which ones stuck with you the most?
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Include me in the monastery.
Athene was indeed trying to start a cult (it had all the basic elements). And from watching him speak in the past, he did seem to me like a huge narcissist.
Haven't been following his latest projects much, and I can't speak to how the Singularity group has changed since back then. Though I have seen his AI channel sometimes. It's moderately entertaining.
I cant't comment directly on whether or not he was or wasn't actually trying to start a cult, but I am interested in cults in general (and any kind of esoteric/occult stuff) so I devoured a lot of content related to this. I mean, a 21st century digital cult!? That is some juicy stuff!
What I found was a young idealistic kid who was playing a character online. He was optimizing for views and we all know what kind of behavior gets attention online. The character was overblown and narcissistic. There is zero argument from me that if you take selected clips of him from when he was at the height of his streaming fame he was a dumb-ass edge-lord playing the role of a prophet or spiritual leader. He even leaned into it when he was accused because he thought it was funny. But when you watch recent videos of him (he does a pretty good react to Asmongold's react of him), I think I saw a different side.
All that being said, he isn't a kind of character I trust. He seems to me to be very much the kind of person where the ends justify the means. He has some pretty high ideals, some of which I agree with and others which I am sympathetic towards. It's like Greenpeace or animal rights activists ... even if I agree with their overall goals I often disagree with their methods.
I'm currently recovering from a grief, depression, intimate partner violence, State abuse, and whatever-the-hell-is-in-nationwide-legal-psuedo-cannabis-vapes based psychosis. Long story short: I sacrificed my physical, mental, emotional, and future well-being as a human shield so my non-biological daughter who I won't see again could have part of a childhood and not develop a cluster-b personality disorder like her mother. To those that don't understand what these people are like behind closed doors, you simply have no frame of reference. There are no words that will allow you to understand; many social workers and psychiatrists are often even fooled into serving as these people's unwitting thralls. Their nature is predatory. They smash mirrors within and without (even posting something public about it like here will summon a small herd of them to cover the tracks with doubt). They have no ideology other than predation, so they follow the ideology of the hour that gains them the most; they wear personalities like hats. It was after being attacked, yet again, that I was DARVOed (because I was actually escaping for good this time, and the cherry on top of these relationships is always, without fail, a DARVO kick-in-the-ass on the way out the door). Then, despite having over two hours of her attacking me over years of time recorded, including her pouncing atop me and snatching my phone on the very day in question, the brilliant detective at Atlanta PD warranted me, and I stayed in the Rice Street gulag where the schizophrenic kid was murdered by police via bedbug consumption (the police there use subterfugal torture methods to "keep people in line" by throwing them in freezing-in-winter, low-to-no ventilation, hot-in-summer, or bug-ridden cells, keeping lights on at all hours, refusing medical care, 30 people bricked in cells meant for 8, kept standing for days, COVID outbreaks in entire cell blocks, standard US prison system fare, torture by any sane definition of the word). It's when I looked down at the homeless man in that cell, the one laying flat directly in the piss and the shit on the floor so he can lay down in the real estate that no one wants, that I said to myself, "yeah, that's where I'm at."
It's after that, I underwent a psychosis so vast that every word, every symbol, every story, every axiom, every fear, every thought, and all of human history amassed into a unified and perfect whole; only after would I come to recognize that what I saw was identical to the ascent in Merkabah literature, Thelema's visit to the City of the Pyramids, Samadhi, and several other analogies for such experiences. Myself had disappeared, and in its place was a sacrifice burning through time like a star. There were only really two forces in the universe, entropy and creation, and the two were yet an illusion still of a singular. Dark matter became simply matter not yet light, returned to the path of least resistance towards supermassive black holes in the center of galaxies, dark energy became simply the remnant left by matter past the edge of observability to continue the pulling, decimation, and return, breaking the laws of thermodynamics that were merely local phenomenon, and creating novel matter in the process, the early stages of which would expand in an accelerated manner that would appear as a bang, but be more akin to a snake eating its own tail and growing.
I wandered in a daze, searching for what I called my fellow "wizards" or fellow autists or fellow disciples, not fully knowing what I was doing or why. I researched Benedictine and Bhuddist monestaries to try to escape the world. So yes, US hermits are very real, we are very noble, and we are fucking livid regarding the state of adequate hermitages. I'm currently in a low-rent studio, searching for minimum wage jobs, so I can pay less taxes to the undemocratic State. "Fully-employed" I'd make 1/4 million a year.
Whether you feel sympathy for Preston or not, the fact of the matter is that 95% of the incarcerated individuals in the US will one day love next to you and me. Wouldn't you rather they be prepared to live there, to have a job and resources? To be self-sufficient (Preston will not need welfare resources when he returns because of this opportunity)? (Disclosure, I am Preston's employer and formerly incarcerated myself)
you're a mentally ill tr4nny who murdered someone during a meth deal.
amazing how the few "sweetheart articles" online fail to mention this.
how is her gender relevant at all?
Wait, do they have computer and internet access in prison?? And free meals, healthcare and lodging? I might have taken that deal when I was young, busting my ass at shit jobs and renting shit places with crazy roommates.
I don't know what to tell you, but the quality of the roommates doesn't get better in prison.