> He had his chances to be a productive, tax paying member of society and he blew it
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.
1000x this. I only became a successful, productive member of society because a friend personally asked the CTO of a tech company to approve hiring me despite my computer crimes felony -- and the CTO took that chance. The company later went public for $B and now I am an angel investor and open source contributor etc, but I got lucky that I knew the right person at the right time. Our records follow us forever, and corporations/HR departments do not take risks like that.
He was not born a drug wholesaler. He made that choice…twice! Rehabilitation is not the sole or even primary goal of incarceration. Nor should it be. But I do agree. People who’ve done their time shouldn’t have to wear a permanent scarlet letter. I just have little sympathy for repeat offenders of very serious felonies. This guy wasn’t a small time street dealer. He is probably partly responsible for many fentanyl overdose deaths.
I think I probably have more firsthand experience with this subject than most.
All I can do is share my own viewpoints:
1. It's not uncommon for hard-opiate users to willingly ingest or even seek out fentanyl. I have multiple dead friends whom I asked repeatedly not to even stop using heroin/fent, but just to consider smoking it instead of shooting it. Opiate addicts live on the razor's edge between life and death where they're alright with taking the gamble every time they push the plunger. It's sad, and heartbreaking, but it is what it is.
(My father and his wife are dead from an opiate overdose as well, fwiw. Suspected fentanyl.)
2. There's a very solid chance, given his background and history, that the author was also using himself. If you live with a hard-drug addiction, you eventually become a husk of a person and you will hurt even the people who love you the most, so that you can keep using. Again, sad and heartbreaking, but it's the nature of the demon. One of the worst parts of getting sober isn't often the withdrawal, but coping with the regrets and memories of the decisions you made while using.
None of this is to say what was done is okay, or that people ought to have sympathy.
But what I do mean to do, is shed some light on what these sorts of situations are really like.
From a purely moral/ethical perspective, this doesn’t withstand scrutiny.
The foundational ideas underlying the justice system are inherently religious (in the literal sense) in that they depend on a world view that takes at face value the notion of free will, and assumes that all causal factors are under the control of the perpetrator.
The more we learn about the mechanics of the brain, the less we have a reason to believe in what people typically mean when they say someone did something freely and of their own accord.
This is not to say that people who do bad things shouldn’t be locked up for it. Negative consequences are still important. But the other things we attach to incarceration: retribution/revenge/punishment depend on dubious moral/ethical viewpoints that do not withstand scrutiny and are rooted in old religious moral dogma.
There is a category of brain malfunction that puts someone in the category of a “survivor” deserving our sympathy, support, and respect. And not long ago, those same survivors were looked at as social pariahs for the misfortune of being born with a deficient brain.
But when the malfunction (or collective systemic factors) leads someone to break the law, we’re predisposed to fall back to the deeply entrenched Judeo-Christian viewpoint that insists we are all free to make choices, and this freedom means the wrong choice is sin, and therefore a direct moral indictment.
Except the person who steals food out of necessity has no choice in the place of their birth. No control over growing up in economic circumstances that make it more likely they’ll get caught in the broken prison system. We can retroactively judge the person who deals drugs, but if everything else was equal and we had their brain, we’d have done the same thing.
And again, none of this means that serious crimes aren’t serious or that incarceration isn’t necessary, but we need to fundamentally shift the framing of why we do it, and what is or is not acceptable while doing it.
> Rehabilitation is not the sole or even primary goal of incarceration
In the US, it is evidently an anti-goal: the US incarceration system is structured as if it were deliberately designed to do the opposite of rehabilitation, to take people who are minor and nonviolent criminals and turn them into major and violent criminals.
> Rehabilitation is not the sole or even primary goal of incarceration. Nor should it be.
I don't understand this perspective at all. "We shouldn't punish them after they've served their time, but let's make sure they don't leave with any new job prospects either."
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.
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.
1000x this. I only became a successful, productive member of society because a friend personally asked the CTO of a tech company to approve hiring me despite my computer crimes felony -- and the CTO took that chance. The company later went public for $B and now I am an angel investor and open source contributor etc, but I got lucky that I knew the right person at the right time. Our records follow us forever, and corporations/HR departments do not take risks like that.
If you want to change a life, get a company to hire one person that you know is a decent human being but once made a bad decision.
Often, it's that single opportunity that so many of us ever need.
He was not born a drug wholesaler. He made that choice…twice! Rehabilitation is not the sole or even primary goal of incarceration. Nor should it be. But I do agree. People who’ve done their time shouldn’t have to wear a permanent scarlet letter. I just have little sympathy for repeat offenders of very serious felonies. This guy wasn’t a small time street dealer. He is probably partly responsible for many fentanyl overdose deaths.
This is a nuanced topic.
I think I probably have more firsthand experience with this subject than most.
All I can do is share my own viewpoints:
1. It's not uncommon for hard-opiate users to willingly ingest or even seek out fentanyl. I have multiple dead friends whom I asked repeatedly not to even stop using heroin/fent, but just to consider smoking it instead of shooting it. Opiate addicts live on the razor's edge between life and death where they're alright with taking the gamble every time they push the plunger. It's sad, and heartbreaking, but it is what it is.
(My father and his wife are dead from an opiate overdose as well, fwiw. Suspected fentanyl.)
2. There's a very solid chance, given his background and history, that the author was also using himself. If you live with a hard-drug addiction, you eventually become a husk of a person and you will hurt even the people who love you the most, so that you can keep using. Again, sad and heartbreaking, but it's the nature of the demon. One of the worst parts of getting sober isn't often the withdrawal, but coping with the regrets and memories of the decisions you made while using.
None of this is to say what was done is okay, or that people ought to have sympathy.
But what I do mean to do, is shed some light on what these sorts of situations are really like.
1 reply →
From a purely moral/ethical perspective, this doesn’t withstand scrutiny.
The foundational ideas underlying the justice system are inherently religious (in the literal sense) in that they depend on a world view that takes at face value the notion of free will, and assumes that all causal factors are under the control of the perpetrator.
The more we learn about the mechanics of the brain, the less we have a reason to believe in what people typically mean when they say someone did something freely and of their own accord.
This is not to say that people who do bad things shouldn’t be locked up for it. Negative consequences are still important. But the other things we attach to incarceration: retribution/revenge/punishment depend on dubious moral/ethical viewpoints that do not withstand scrutiny and are rooted in old religious moral dogma.
There is a category of brain malfunction that puts someone in the category of a “survivor” deserving our sympathy, support, and respect. And not long ago, those same survivors were looked at as social pariahs for the misfortune of being born with a deficient brain.
But when the malfunction (or collective systemic factors) leads someone to break the law, we’re predisposed to fall back to the deeply entrenched Judeo-Christian viewpoint that insists we are all free to make choices, and this freedom means the wrong choice is sin, and therefore a direct moral indictment.
Except the person who steals food out of necessity has no choice in the place of their birth. No control over growing up in economic circumstances that make it more likely they’ll get caught in the broken prison system. We can retroactively judge the person who deals drugs, but if everything else was equal and we had their brain, we’d have done the same thing.
And again, none of this means that serious crimes aren’t serious or that incarceration isn’t necessary, but we need to fundamentally shift the framing of why we do it, and what is or is not acceptable while doing it.
2 replies →
> Rehabilitation is not the sole or even primary goal of incarceration
In the US, it is evidently an anti-goal: the US incarceration system is structured as if it were deliberately designed to do the opposite of rehabilitation, to take people who are minor and nonviolent criminals and turn them into major and violent criminals.
> Rehabilitation is not the sole or even primary goal of incarceration. Nor should it be.
I don't understand this perspective at all. "We shouldn't punish them after they've served their time, but let's make sure they don't leave with any new job prospects either."
1 reply →
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.