I spent 3 years in US prisons for drug charges picked up when I was an addict and did a 90-day stint in solitary for breaking up a fight between two acquaintances.
AMA.
I'll start with: Yes, "fishing" is one of the first things you learn. It's not just for solitary, you use it to get stuff under other people doors when you're not out of your cells on a regular unit too, or when you don't want guards to suspect something.
Another interesting thing fact -- where I was at, in solitary you could trade your 1-hour of your cell a day for an extra tray of food at either lunch or dinner. Because the guards had to let each person in the solitary block out, one-at-a-time, for an hour, they were lazy and would let you forfeit your one hour out to shower/make a paid phone call/walk around the cell block for extra food. Most people took the extra tray.
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Edit: While this is on the front page, want to raise a bit of awareness about US criminal "justice system" and prisons:
Guards would beat the shit out of you, strip you mostly naked, strap you to a restraint chair and cover your head with a hood, and then wheel you into a back room somewhere and "accidentally forget" about you for +8 hours until you pissed yourself, and then they'd come and laugh at you.
Thank you for sharing your experience and bringing these things to light. As Dostoevsky said, you can judge a society by how well it treats its prisoners. We are not a free people when we live under the threat of being out into a prison system as barbaric as the one we have.
I did have one positive interaction with a guard that stood out to me from my time in there
I was being transported to a hospital for a medical procedure, and I was talking to the guard who taking me, to pass the time. I asked him why on earth he would want to be a prison guard -- after all, they are in there with us for 10 hour shifts, and prisons are some of the most bleak/depressing places on earth. That has to take a toll on their mental wellbeing too.
He said that he originally was a regular police officer, but after seeing how much corruption there was in the police force and the things that happened, he felt like a hypocrite, so he said the better alternative was for him to be a guard.
That conversation has stuck with me for a long time now.
I put myself through community college working overnight shifts cleaning restrooms in a theme park and was briefly homeless a few times. Several of those times happened to coincide with finals week and resulted in missing exams and failing a few classes. It ended up that, by the time I graduated, the only major I could successfully complete was in Philosophy, with a minor in Biology. I was the first person in my family to ever go to college and didn't exactly have much in the way of advice or help to go on. It turns out those aren't particularly lucrative fields and don't really point you in any specific direction when it comes time to look for jobs.
Well, back then, the state of California guaranteed a minimum starting salary of $79,000, and paid overtime, to prison guards, which was roughly double what I was looking at making from doing anything else. So I applied. The only reason I didn't end up ever actually working in the prison system is that the background check and psych eval process took over a year to complete, and by the time they gave me an offer, I'd already joined the Army.
Almost 18 years later, after going back to school again while in the Army for Applied Math and Computer Science, here I am, but in another timeline, I'm a prison guard.
I taught a semester in a max security prison. It was described to me as a controlled movement facility. It was an interesting experience and one that stuck with me. That prison was a bad place. Thanks for your anecdote about the former police officer.
Thank you for doing that, it's an important job. I learned spanish by taking an hour-long spanish class every weekday while I was in there.
If your class wasn't mandatory, then I'm sure you know that most people were just there probably to get extra time out of their cell or to break the monotony. And I assume most of them were complete assholes to you.
After I am financially independent, I want to try to get state/federal funding so that I can go back to prisons and teach programming AND partner with companies to have jobs/interviews lined up for release dates.
The worst part about being incarcerated isn't even always the time you serve, it's that our justice system means that you usually can never get a good job again, regardless of what your charge was (in my case it was one of the lowest class of felonies). It's like a ghost that haunts you forever.
I quickly figured out they were mostly there to break the monotony. I threw out the curriculum and did basic graph theory and some logic stuff. I only had one run in with someone. The prisoners treated me decently. I gave them all passing grades and just wanted them to get out of the experience whatever they wanted to get out of it.
How did you get into that? It's something I would love to do but I never knew how or if you could volunteer to just do a single course, if you'd have any sort of support, etc.
The college I worked at had a few classes at the prison. I was an adjunct and agreed to do it. None of the tenured faculty would do it. Didn’t really have any support. Did wear a body alarm. One way the body alarm would be activated was if it was horizontal for more than 3 seconds.
Not the poster, but I taught a computer science class in prison. I did it through a college which operates a degree granting program in the state prisons (in addition to normal college operations).
Most of the professors were paid, I did it as volunteer work.
|After I am financially independent, I want to try to get state/federal funding so that I can go back to prisons and teach programming AND partner with companies to have jobs/interviews lined up for release dates.
There are certainly NGOs who will help you with this mission. Do some research and let us know.
I had a conversation with a police sergeant because of a car accident we had. He said that we seemed to be right, but some lawyers will likely try to sue us because it's in the gray area that they usually "farm". The thing I remember was he said something along the lines of, "These lawyers are even worse than police."
I didn't think police were bad, but that made me reconsider it.
Holy shit I didn't know that. Those guards belong in jail themselves, what they did is torture. Prison exists to remove from society people who are incompatible with it, nothing more and even that must be constantly questioned and re-evaluated. Nobody deserves to have their dignity stripped away like that.
Not only should the guards be up on charges, so should everyone else in the chain of command. 180F from a shower? That's insane, it shouldn't even be possible.
With what we do in the US, it’s not “punishment”, it’s sadism. Justice ends when excessive punishment begins and is deep into sadism when torture begins.
I'm sure most people would want that, but I don't think that we know how to "make people" change. Much in the same way that we don't know how to have school "make children" more academic, we don't know how to make inmates less violent / impulsive / thrill-seeking (except by the inexorable passing of time). I'd be very happy to be corrected, tho.
OTOH, giving proper (i.e. often involuntary) treatment for violent mental illnesses would for sure improve the situation.
You're assuming the accounting in the article is correct. Maybe it isn't:
> “Nobody can condone someone being thrown into a hot shower and killed,” Rundle said. “We read the same thing everyone else did, but it wasn't until we really investigated that we learned that is not what happened.”
I don't see how you can read that and take the word of that attorney general as anything but self-serving CYA bullshit.
Even ignoring for the moment the deferment of local news outlets to government officials' press releases, instead of actual journalism, the story simply doesn't line up.
Plus when your only defense is "you haven't proven it beyond a reasonable doubt (because of all of the attempts to make it impossible to recover evidence)", even though that holds up in the court of law, it is not very convincing to any layperson who knows how crime happens.
Bluntly put, this article and subsequent defense are textbook bootlicking.
Sorry, but I have a standard of not engaging with people who use the term "bootlicking" like this, because I've literally not once in my life seen someone use that term and also engage in an honest conversation.
I feel the same for those who assume as true statements by cops in their own interest, with no evidence, when they deliberately chose not to have any evidence.
Willing to have an honest conversation if you don't derail it with self-aggrandizing, pre-emptive character assassination based on incredibly tenuous associations.
Right wingers love to rail against cancel culture but have yet to fully recognize that they have employed the tactic forever with exactly the deflectionary style as above.
Ready to talk when you are but I won't hold my breath. If you decide to engage please bring something other than a parrot trained on police press releases.
Don't make apologies for people who choose torture and who chose to participate in said system / culture. It's a job; if they had morals they would quit, whistleblow, or punish colleagues for this behaviour. I can't believe the pay would be THAT good. There's clearly no adequate chain of command or repercussions for this crime.
Don't forget the thin blue line. The pressure to not snitch among them is huge, and comes from the top. During my time in I watched all of the decent COs become alcoholics/drug addicts and ultimately quit. We had one decent 'counselor' out of 5, and she was forced out for unauthorized use of government resources because she printed out a compassionate release request during COVID because inmates we illegally denied access to the law library, something she was quite clearly legally not only allowed to do but was supposed to do as part of her job (there is even a federal schedule of what they are to charge us per page if it is not a hardship case). If you complain, you will receive diesel therapy as the lightest of retribution from the Federal government. Your cell will definitely get tossed every day until your cellies tire of that and beat your ass.
It is way worse than that makes it out. Transfer times are designed to maximize prevention of sleep. You will be placed in very unsafe situations. You will go from small town jail to transfer station to detention center to small town jail via the longest route possible. You will be strip searched, a very invasive event, every time any movement is made. Your movement will happen to be right before/after meals are served, so you will "accidentally" be denied food. You will "accidentally" be placed with the opposite gang, the wrong custody classification, etc. so you will be in constant fear of your safety. You will be put in a single man cell with a big threaning guy, and they will kick him out of his bed and give in to you, and put him in a boat. Good luck not getting your getting you ass beat. You will be given no opportunity to use restrooms during movement. On conair you are shackled, hands in front, even when you use the bathroom. So no hygiene to clean up around back after going. Just a bit of the process.
It's not about making apologies. It's the opposite. You can blame the "bad apples" all you want and you will see no improvement whatsoever. You can instead choose to blame structural, systematic failures and get a lot of improvement out of little effort.
I find it interesting when folks look at themselves as different than others. I don't have any first hand knowledge of what is going on with these guards, but I do know that I am not better than them. I am just as human and have all of the same frailties so I cannot say what I would do in their situation. At best I can say I hope I would do better.
Most people fail to understand the psychological impact of jobs continually interfacing with some of the worst people in society. I say this not as an apology or excuse, but simply as a statement of fact and a challenge that needs to be overcome. It happens to prison guards, Police, EMTs, and many others.
A portion of the people you work with want to kill you or each other given the chance. Over time this leads you to dehumanize and hate them. Over time, this view gets generalized to most of the people in your care.
So we gonna apply this logic to all the other government workers working for toxic systems that hurt more than they help?
There are plenty of people who go into these jobs with the intention of being decent. The existing systems and culture suck that right out of them.
I knew an old bureaucrat. He got to make decisions that would or wouldn't financially screw families over. He said the worst part of his job was seeing all the younger employees in the cafeteria knowing they were being crushed by the system and turned into people like him and his other senior coworkers.
Most prisons exist in places that are economically depressed with few if any other jobs. In some cases, the entire existence of a town revolves around the prison. Quitting is hardly an option when it’s the only real option for putting food on your table and a shelter over your head.
You need to be able to save up enough for a rent deposit (often 2-3 months of rent), afford moving costs, coordinate support for kids if you're moving away from existing support (other family/friend/etc), and deal with a lot of stress of moving out of town. If you have something better you're moving to, but that's often hard for people to coordinate. Spending all that to go get a similar pay job, perhaps in same industry, on the hope/chance that you'll be around more/better opportunities... it's a hard call for many folks to do, assuming they can even think that far ahead or strategically. Many folks are likely more consumed with day to day (especially if they've got kids).
Agreed. I wasn't trying to excuse brutality, I don't think. I definitely need to spend more time on this series of thought about what maybe I would do in the circumstance - or what I should expect myself to do to live up to my own standard.
I suspect humans are far more malleable than they realize, and personalities change quickly with different contexts. For example, I am sure many Ukrainians who are now enlisting would have said they'd never kill another human.
Downvotes from creating a plausibly deniable strawman and then tearing it down are less than the upvotes from doing a good job tearing down the strawman. This kind of crap discourse is incentivized in a "if lawsuits are cheaper than recall we don't do a recall" sort of way.
HN (and other social media) is rife with this behavior/feedback loop.
The thing I think most law-abiding/normal people don't understand about the types of people in prisons is that they are almost exclusively habitual offenders.
Even in the US, which is heavily punitive instead of rehabilitative, you have to have run-ins with the law a number of times before you are sentenced to serve time, rather than probation or a halfway-house etc.
From my experiences, ~90% of people I saw during my time in jail and prison were coming in and out, constantly being arrested. There's no desire on their part to change, they're a lost cause.
For the tiny handful of people that genuinely do want to have a normal life and not go back to prison, our justice system is awful. No, solitary is not good for that.
You need supportive + rehabilitative programs. They won't solve everything, but for the small number of people who want to get out of the system, they need an honest-to-god out and chance at living.
I don't think that's as true anymore with the fentanyl stuff. I saw a lot of ex-marines that got hooked on pain pills because their bodies were beat up, moved on to fentanyl, started dealing to support habit, and hatch a 17 year bit because someone ODd. Lots of first time in trouble people caught up in fentanyl.
How do you balance punitive with rehabilitative? I have little experience in this but it seems like for a non-violent offender or a victimless crime the experience should be almost entirely rehabilitative, whereas for violent offenders there should be some kind of punishment. Both to discourage the behavior and as therapy for the victims.
The justice system doesn't really offer me any protection other than vengeance on someone who hurts or kills me or a loved one. There is some comfort knowing that someone might at least hesitate due to fear of consequences.
The thing I think most law-abiding/normal people don't understand about the types of people in prisons is that they are almost exclusively habitual offenders.
While that is true, there are classes of crime that are automatic felonies with mandatory prison time. Things like assaulting a police officer. Which doesn't have to be throwing a punch - simply resisting handcuffs is sufficient for the felony assault charge if the officer is mad enough and friendly with the prosecutor.
LOL. No. I did time in solitary. It literally makes everyone worse.
Most people are in solitary for fighting or disobeying instructions. Putting them in solitary does not change their behavior.
One thing - I was scared of solitary before I went there the first time. After the first time you realize there is nothing more (legally) the authorities can do to you once you're in solitary. You're in jail, in jail. Jail is boring as fuck. Solitary is super boring. But it's still jail. When you go there the second time you are prepared for everything and know how to run the system.
A lot of people also end up doing a long time in there because they misbehave in solitary, which is expected. You do it because (i) you're pissed off; (ii) there is nothing more they can do to you; (iii) it's fun to be finally be able to tell a certain guard that he is a piece of shit and his wife is ugly.
The first two weeks were very difficult. You have to sort of mentally come to peace with the fact that you're shut in this tiny room and you can't leave. It feels very claustrophobic and if you're the type that has anxiety disorders you will probably have to ward off panic attacks.
After the first two weeks, time started to slowly speed up, and the days all sort of blurred together. Thankfully I was able to get a newspaper every day, and a book every now and then, and so I just read every word of the newspaper (even the ads) for something to do, and slept a lot.
I think I handled it better than a lot of people would have, as I'm sort of introverted by nature. There's research on solitary confinement permanently harming mental health, but I think I got lucky on that one.
Also, at least where I was, this was EVERYONE's life (no just solitary) for a year due to COVID. Only with no legal protections, all constitutional requirements waived, because, you know, emergency, and totally not just because the staff were lazy and this allowed them to do zero work.
Yes. During COVID everyone locked down to their range/tier (constitutional violation because space is so small not allowed to be permanently confined in it). Minimum laundry (constitutional violation, must keep sanitation). No chow hall all food brought to the cells. No rec time/outdoor time (constitutional violation, everyone must be allowed 1 hour of recreation time). Only let out to make phone calls during a short window that didn't necessarily line up with your family could take your call. No law library access (constitutional violation, denying access to the courts adn remember inmates challenges are time bared, you only have 14 days to challenge an illegal sentence and something like a year to challenge unconstitutional from the time of discovery, and these are jurisdictional, I.E. can not be waived). No certified mail access (constitutional violation, denying access to the courts as all motions must be mailed). No family visitation (some of the guys family relationship especially with wives and kids were holding on by a thread, they needed those visits). While it might make sense because of COVID, a year of it was very wearing.
I think that parent was describing life inside a prison, but out of solitary confinement, not life in general, this sentence of their post suggests it: "and totally not just because the staff were lazy and this allowed them to do zero work."
I was on computers a lot as a kid and sort of taught myself programming (very poorly) in my early years.
When I caught this charge, I had just turned 18. It really ruined my life.
Currently, I work in tech. For a very long time I was barely making ends meet, working in a fast food restaurant for minimum wage while trying to interview to get a developer job.
I went through 8 interview processes, and received offers from all but one. Each one of them was rescinded when HR learned that I had a felony, as a matter of company policy.
It was really heartbreaking and a lot of times, it made me want to give up on life and just stop trying. I kept interviewing and going to events/networking, and eventually found a very low-paying job at a local place and sort of slowly worked my way back up from there.
If anyone here has some degree of power at a company and wants to make a difference in the world, convince your company to hire felons with non-violent/non-finance related offenses.
I never understood the whole felon thing, if that is allowed discrimination outside certain roles how can those people ever be expected back to society? Ofc, they are going to do more crime if it is their only realistic option for reasonable income.
> "if that is allowed discrimination outside certain roles how can those people ever be expected back to society? Ofc, they are going to do more crime if it is their only realistic option for reasonable income."
And you've found the answer to why the American judicial/prison-complex is a revolving door system.
"Welcome to the Hotel California. You can check-out any time you like,
But you can never leave!"
It's a method to exercise control over a large slice of the population and rob them of the means to challenge their position. I don't think too may see it necessarily as a fair measure that must be imposed on those people for the protection of them or others.
On the other hand you have egregious cases where such a measure would completely make sense but is ignored because of larger interests. One of them is how EU public institutions screen all their employees and filter out felons. And then a public institution like the European Central Bank names Christine Lagarde president, just 3 years after she received a criminal conviction of negligence in allowing the misuse of public funds.
A freshly minted criminal can be named president of an institution in more or less the same general area as where she committed her crime. But a someone with a minor drug charge can't take a dev job... Both are a stain on modern society.
But, are felons discriminated from most jobs in Europe? As an employer I’ve never checked the backgrounds, and I would be actually happy of giving someone a path upwards.
If the argument is that serving your time in jail rehabilitates you, then you shouldn't be limited in what roles you can take after you've served your time.
I assume the "certain roles" you are talking about is something like banking with someone with a history of felony fraud. I guess the argument is that maybe prison isn't 100% rehabilitative. But if that's the case, why should I, as a non-banker, hire a felon who, say assaulted a stranger with a baseball bat. Isn't there a similar chance that prison wasn't 100% rehabilitative?
There are a lot of people with a felony record who pose zero additional risk to their employer. Of course it depends on the person and it depends on the job. It certainly doesn't make sense to have a strict policy against all felons regardless of individual circumstances.
It depends on labor supply and demand curves. If it did not make sense, there would be an arbitrage opportunity for an employer by employing felons, but I have not heard of that happening on a large scale, at least at a white collar firm.
I find it ironic, though, to want to seek shelter in BRK to avoid a too tech heavy SPY, when BRK itself has maintained relevancy only by investing disproportionately in AAPL. It would seem prudent to cut out the BRK middleman and just directly invest in AAPL if one wants to emulate BRK’s success.
It seems fair for felons to work minimum wage last resort jobs, because non-felons surely deserve the same or better. But why are minimum wage last resort jobs so bad in this country?
I won't sling mud, but the jobs are the same you can already get as a felon (construction, kitchen, hospitality, factory, etc) and I had a negative experience with my interaction there
Thank you for looking though. I think it's important to offer felons the chance to get a decent job in a proper career field too.
There's one organization doing this called "Underdog Devs":
I did see 'tech' jobs there, but... perhaps they're just 'general recruiter' posts that are mixed in? I search for 'php' and found a bunch of job links come back...
So I just signed up for this site. It has Home Depot who won't hire you if you are on paper (supervised release) and other companies that will bring you on 'temp to hire' when they have need, but will seldom convert a felon to permanent. Shows a lack of understanding or communication with the people they are trying to 'help'. I got better support from the other guys my first 15 minutes in the half way house than this site gives. And that is in general how society is toward felons. A lot of half assed stuff to feel like, no look at all these services, they have a chance. But in reality not so much.
Sorry this previous post is pretty agressive, my frustration is definitely coming through there and they do not deserve that. I am sure they are well meaning. I wish I could delete it.
FElon friendly normally ends up meaning they know you have no other options and treat you about as good as you would imagine a company with complete knowledge that if you loose your job your PO could send you back to prison. Hello mandatory overtime, horrible pay, every shit task no one wants. It's way better to try and convince somewhere that isn't felon friendly to try and hire you.
AMA.
I'll start with: Yes, "fishing" is one of the first things you learn. It's not just for solitary, you use it to get stuff under other people doors when you're not out of your cells on a regular unit too, or when you don't want guards to suspect something.
Another interesting thing fact -- where I was at, in solitary you could trade your 1-hour of your cell a day for an extra tray of food at either lunch or dinner. Because the guards had to let each person in the solitary block out, one-at-a-time, for an hour, they were lazy and would let you forfeit your one hour out to shower/make a paid phone call/walk around the cell block for extra food. Most people took the extra tray.
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Edit: While this is on the front page, want to raise a bit of awareness about US criminal "justice system" and prisons:
I saw things like this regularly:
https://live-production.wcms.abc-cdn.net.au/c567d688cc89f084...
Guards would beat the shit out of you, strip you mostly naked, strap you to a restraint chair and cover your head with a hood, and then wheel you into a back room somewhere and "accidentally forget" about you for +8 hours until you pissed yourself, and then they'd come and laugh at you.
Lots of things I can't unsee from being in there.