Comment by macintux
3 years ago
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-...
One thing has become abundantly clear over the last few years: people in politics regularly do things that go against their most cherished beliefs when it is politically expedient. Those that hold out are notable for how rare they are, and it frequently ends their political career.
One of the several hundred thousand nazis, erm German refugees, the Eisenhower administration brought here in 1953. This was much larger than operation paperclip. The GOP reloaded with that cohort. Their descendants are still wrecking havoc upon our country. I'm sure some come and have done well for us but many are trouble. That huge S&L scandal back in the late 80s was by some of them.
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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...
Agreed. It's not "powers that be" that impose this system on Americans, it's we Americans ourselves. We vote for politicians who are tough on crime - meaning long prison sentences, unsafe conditions, no robust public defense.
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I said "prisons...are for-profit enterprises", not "prisons are privately owned". Government-owned prisons still rely on, and provide revenue to, companies specifically designed to profit from the prison population.
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> Private prisons are problematic in their own right, but they only make up 8% of the total prison population
It's not how many people they are in charge of that matters, but how much money they donate to politicians to be be "tough on crime", and how much other soft money influence they have to make citizens think that crime is a problem that politicians need to be tough on, and to demonise politicians who aren't (which right-wing media is all too happy to help with).
Even if private prisons only have a small slice of the prison pie, they still work hard to make the pie as big as possible.
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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.
Yes, my introduction to the world of commercial software development was an internship at a company that built products for prisons.
To be clear, I said "prisons...are for-profit enterprises", not "all prisons are privately owned". Even state-owned prisons are cash cows for the prison industry. I'm not interested in what narrative you identify with, I'm stating a fact.
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The criticism of private prisons (or the prison industrial complex) in general is more than just referring to privately owned and run prisons, its referring to prisons, jails, detention facilities, psychiatric hospitals, private security and guards, transportation and logistics, health care services, surveillance and other technology providers, food/commissary/library services, communication/phone services, cash bail creditors, etc. etc. all run for-profit.
The other issue is more in general about having incarceration rates that are "four to six times that of its high-income peers in Europe and Asia". So you might recognize that as an issue too and think perhaps its the privatized prison system, the root causes for crime like inequality, disenfranchisement, homelessness, the reasons for drug use in the first place, or even just perhaps switching to an evidence-based rehabilitation system.
But now imagine you are a liberal, you need a way to acknowledge and talk about these problems without ever actually having to change anything. So that's why liberal journalists are talking about non-violent drug offenders and the 8.41% private prison population and so Biden stopped the justice department from renewing contracts for federal private prisons and he pardoned all prisoners of federal non-violent marijuana possession charges. Of course it doesn't actually do anything, but that was the point. And that's what liberalism is.
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.
This has nothing to do with "fake internet points" and everything to do with firsthand experience that most citizens lack completely.
You chastise those that "appease the masses" but mention Venezuela's prison system. How much firsthand experience do you have with Venezuela's prison system? My wager is that your concept of their prison system is based on articles specifically designed to "appease the masses".
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
Apologies. I read a news article about him being charged with carfentanil possession and assumed the conviction referred to that. Apparently the carfentanil was found in his apartment and he was later caught with the other synthetic opioid.
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Did you mean 30 kilograms?
2 milligrams * 15000 = 30 grams
> 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"?
Those that profit off of the prison system, whether it be the ecosystem of companies supporting the system or those that are employed by it.
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.
I agree. But society has a hard time accepting that rehabilitating people with criminal records is more useful than punishing them.
You’re saying if only we’d given this particular guy more free stuff he wouldn’t have gone back to flipping carfentanil for $20k a weekend? That seems pretty far-fetched.
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'm wondering if one of the factors here is that the public is funding this opportunity, and that many, many non-criminal members of that public are doing the $10.50/h thing with no such support and very limited opportunity.
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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.
*guilty twice
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I love this thought that people in the US with felony convictions can just go out and be: "productive, tax paying member of society".
I'll place a wager that if you called <$CURRENT_COMPANY> and ask them if they even HIRE felons, they'll tell you "No, as a matter of corporate policy."
So, what then -- work for $10/hr so that you can barely make rent in your project housing and spend your entire life a single injury or natural disaster away from financial insolvency and homelessness?
That's a bleak existence to even think about, much less spend a lifetime living.
The US criminal justice system is fundamentally broken, and we DO NOT AFFORD convicted felons the opportunity to have a decent life as a normal member of society.
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I think there are two independent issues here.
Getting out and going straight back to dealing drugs is obviously a bad move.
But it’s a move that is far more likely to happen because of the abysmal state of the system and the kinds of “opportunities” it affords to people trying to transition back to normal life. It’s a system that is predisposed to getting people stuck in the same patterns.
“He had his chance to be productive” is stretching the word productive pretty far.
“The system” is made up of individuals. People who have offended and their tendencies. People who think they know how an offender must live their life and the limits that must be placed on them post-incarceration. And if the system leads to recidivism, that is a reflection of the whole system, not just the individuals re-offending.
So while I agree that going back to dealing drugs is not a winning move, it should give us pause that people regularly end up doing exactly this despite the consequences.
If the goal is to transform criminals into functioning members of society, then from a purely utilitarian perspective, the system is broken. And the “opportunities” one is given and told they should be grateful for are often laughably insufficient.
To draw an overly simplistic analogy: people stopped pirating music and started paying for it as soon as it was reasonable to do so. I don’t condone piracy, but I certainly understand why people did it.
Selling drugs that can kill people obviously puts this in a different category. But the overarching ideas are similar.
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