Comment by TacticalCoder
3 years ago
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.
Having spent 10 years locked up with criminals I cannot think of a single one who made more money than if they had taken a legit job. Especially bad if you factor in the years behind bars.
I remember one 19-year-old kid crying in the bullpens one day. They'd just offered him 34 years. His cousin persuaded him to come rob a 7-11 with him. When they get there cousin hands him an AK47 and says "point this at the cashier while I grab the money". Kid had never touched a gun before. Accidentally pulls the trigger and fires a shot past the cashier's head into the wall. I asked him how much him and his cousin got. $1800.
Certainly. But it's not quite as binary as you make it out to be. Lowering the threshold to having a stable job for the people might change the proportion quite a bit. If we gave them excessively lucrative jobs as you suggested, we may be able to prevent most recidivism!
>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.