If you want to reduce monoculture, then monoculture is a bad idea :)

First of all, I actually had a lot of fun in jail. My education made certain aspects of the prison system very easy for me to navigate, such as legal documentation and debating with guards. My ability to mend broken electronics very quickly became known. These things made me feel very safe, since people were actively protecting me. It also made me feel quite important in the community.

It started when someone came to me and asked what I knew about mending mobile phones. In UK jails, many people have mobiles, usually obtained by over-the-fence smuggling. Pay-as-you-go credit vouchers are a major form of currency. This guy was very important on the wing - he had a crew of other guys who walked around with him and people often came to pay him. I said I knew enough about phones, and what did he want? He explained that someone had owed him money but couldn't pay. He'd taken the guy's phone as payment, but the phone was pin-locked and he couldn't get in. The phone was an old samsung, one which I knew (having previously owned one) didn't impose any limit on the number of pin attempts. So I told the guy: yeah, I know a few tricks. But I need to get my tools out so I'll do it overnight. (Note: I didn't have any tools). The guy left me with the phone overnight, and I sat up through the night to try all 10,000 possible 4-digit combinations. Thankfully, the correct code turned up in the mid 2000s. So the next day this guy turned up and was amazed that I had figured out the code. He went round telling everyone that I was some tech wizard and that people should always come to me with their problems. In return for the job he arranged for me to have a Playstation 2 in my cell for two weeks, and to get access to a phone whenever I wanted. For the rest of my time, people would bring me trivially broken electronics and I would retire for the evening to make it out like I was doing something difficult, then return the fixed item the next day. It massively increased my quality of life in there.

Secondly, it opened my eyes to how people less fortunate than me live their lives, and how terrible the prison system is for most people. Many, many people in jail were severely mentally ill. There was no support for them. Some were killed in jail, either by inmates or staff, because they flipped out and people got scared. Another large group of people were hopelessly addicted to very harmful drugs. People who exploited this group were the most powerful - they would have drugs smuggled in, then build an army of addicts who would do their bidding to get the next fix. It was a really explosive situation. Almost every act of violence was drug debt related. Immigrants were completely screwed in jail, because there was no way for them to navigate the bureaucracy. I helped several people avoid deportation, including one cell-mate who had a hit contract out on him in Jamaica because he defended his business when yardies tried to extort him. He couldn't read or write, so he couldn't fill out the asylum application. His patois was so strong that his lawyer couldn't really understand what he said, and the border agency was going to send him back to Jamaica to be killed. I wrote letters to the border agency, the prison governor and the home secretary and he was granted asylum and an interpreter was arranged so that his legal visits would be more productive. Hundreds of others in similar situations go without that help every year.

Thirdly, I saw some horrible things. For example: 'syruping' - when someone mixes sugar into a bucket of boiling water and dumps it on someone's face. The dissolved sugar makes the boiling water cling to the skin longer, and the skin peels off leaving the raw flesh exposed. I also saw someone held down by four guys, who performed anal surgery on him with a sharpened spoon to extract drugs he was hiding. He later maimed all four of his assailants, stabbing them in the neck with a pen (saw that too). Another was a guy who was clearly paranoid schizophrenic. His cell was opposite mine. He started screaming one night and barricaded himself in. He then stripped off and covered himself with baby oil, and started setting fire to his cell. The guards came in riot gear to tackle him, but he was so slippery it was like trying to catch an eel. He gave them the run around for quite a while before they eventually fired sedative darts into him and he collapsed screaming. He died in hospital.

Fourthly, I felt so ashamed of myself that I changed my life forever. I was a middle class white kid with a great education who got obsessed with hacking and document security as a teenager and went down for figuring out how to perfectly replicate the driving license, thus throwing away many of the advantages that luck, society and my parents had given me. Everyone else in there had no such advantages. Most of them were born to a life where poverty, drugs, violence and lack of education all being concentrated in their environment led to them being systematically channeled into prison. I was there essentially through misplaced intellectual curiosity, while others were there because their lives were so bad out of jail that crime was actually a rational survival choice. Society failed them, while it tried to hold me up with both hands. I was, and am, disgusted with myself. Upon leaving jail I learned programming, worked freelance to pay for my tuition while I got a degree, got a PhD, and am now working towards spending my life using my skills as efficiently as I can to improve the lives of as many people as possible. If I ever have a lazy moment, I just have to cast my mind back to prison, and the disgust with myself rises up again, and I launch myself back into work with an energy I never knew I had before prison.

Finally, I would say that my criminal record has not held me back. I no longer have to legally disclose it, but when I did I always did so with a letter explaining some of the circumstances and how deeply it had affected my life. I had several positive comments about my disclosure, and I have never been turned down for a job I've applied for. It doesn't have to hold you back - your attitude has to convince a potential employer that your background makes you a great candidate, not a worse one.

Good luck with everything :-)

So UK is getting as bad as the US? Or has it never been good over there? Given how mental health conditions and incarcerations (for whatever reason) go hand in hand, I'd expect any sane society to tackle the former even more ferociously than the latter.

Note that my father was among the people who took early retirement in disgust at the way things are going, so my views are almost certainly coloured by that.

I could be wrong, but my understanding is that this is not a "luxury" that we enjoy in the U.S. Once you have a conviction, it is there forever. So much for doing your time and paying your debt to society. I really hope I am wrong about this, but I fear that I am not.

It was grueling for her to discuss it -- she was trembling and wringing her hands, and it was suddenly obvious why she had been strangely nervous during the entire first part of the interview -- and difficult for us to sit and hear it; not because her crime was awful (her punishment did not involve jail time) but because she was clearly being put through the wringer.

Honestly, it was a factor in us choosing to hire her; otherwise she was fairly even with the other candidates we interviewed, but we were impressed that she was going into a line of work that would require her to make this same confession to strangers many, many more times in the future.

It felt really wrong, regardless. Especially after that experience, I think there should be an expiry date for mistakes like hers.

For instance, it's common for local news companies to report arrests & mugshots on their websites. I'm assuming there are similar aggregators for arrests and convictions that span larger areas than a single news company, and these are the same people that service background checks.

What obligation(if any) do they have to respect the fact that a conviction has been expunged or sealed by the courts?

For most people it's not about rehabilitation, but deterrence, retribution, and physically restraining inmates from committing crimes in mainstream society.

I completely agree with Shon about the impact of long sentences. He says:

Five years is about the maximum amount of time for someone to “get it” and change and create a different life. More than that, and prisoners feel hopelessness and they think “why bother, I just need to get through this and go home.” It’s very difficult to “seize the day” in prison and use every day to prepare for release when you staring at a 10- or 20-year sentence in the face.

I would add that many people become institutionalised. After a few years in prison you can become socially important in the community. But on the outside, you are nobody. The longer you're in there, the less attractive it looks to reform and try to build a life on the outside.

I think the idea was to make it easier to notice them, as parent suggested.

The thing is, they weren't small phones. People didn't smuggle them in their colons - they used code systems to arrange for their friends to throw things over the fences in particular places. Mini-riots were organised to coincide with throwovers. Drugs get in the same way.

There were a whole lot of more inventive methods used too. Suffice it to say that the problem is not the size of phones. It's that if you deprive people of their freedom, they spend all their time thinking about how to get it back. They will eventually work out how to get a little piece. Tiny phones won't make the blindest bit of difference.

Firstly, how do you charge a phone? I wouldn't have thought cells had plug points.

Secondly, is there any realistic way of stopping phones getting in? Building higher fences, and putting sensors on them, sounds like one way of stopping throwovers for example.

T

Another fact many people don't know is that you can buy things, legally, in prison. By things, I mean pretty much anything in the Argos catalogue. You get an allowance of £10/week which you can save up (you have to earn it or have it sent in - it's not free). Some people had playstation 2s. Lots of people had stereo systems.

Many of the phones came without chargers, but people were very good at reworking electronics. I saw one system where someone had rewired the inside of his casette player to have two contacts so he could slot in his phone battery and it would charge when he pressed play, in a nicely hidden compartment.

I think there's not really any way of preventing smuggling. Like all systems of oppression, prisons stimulate peoples desire for freedom. When you have 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to think about a way to smuggle something in, and then you have 10k people in a prison, and people get transferred between prisons... eventually someone will come up with a way, and it will spread fast.

What is possible, however, is for the prison to run its own cell tower with whitelisted IMEIs - i.e. only the guards' phones.

Having thought about it, hand cranked and solar chargers are fairly cheap and small.

It's a down to earth practical guide aimed at someone who hasn't been to prison before. The ToC features such chapters as Sharing A Cell, Violence, Getting Stuff Done (Complaints and Applications and so on. Smoking teabags, making toast using the radiator, cooking noodles in the kettle, making rope out of sheets to pass things between cells, flash-distilling vodka using ice cubes and a live 240v mains cable, it's all in there.

I highly recommend it to anyone who has ever wondered what prison really involves, day to day, from a prisoners point of view. Or anyone really. It's a fascinating document, very much DIY, reads a bit like a txtfile from back in the day.

I ran a black-hat collective between the ages of 13 and about 17. That led to getting lots of offers to hack for money, and through discussion with the people making those offers, eventually to getting interested in document security. I developed a way to replicate the UK driving license with all security features using commodity hardware. It fooled police officers and every official that ever looked at it. I sold the licenses to fund my desire to improve the design and manufacture. People used them for, among other things, fraud. 'conspiracy to defraud' was the crime.

We deliver your package by anonymous drone. Drop from any height with or without parachute at any hour of the day.

You mail us your package together and a form specifying when, where and how your package should be delivered. Use the calulator on our webpages to calculate the price of the delivery. Cash or check is accepted. Any change can be delivered with your package.

Specify drop height, parachute, time and coordinates. We will deliver within 30-60-120 minute windows at different prices.

Governments are able to play the game of constantly one-upping electronic warfare systems, but you could make it too expensive for civilians to have any sort of control or visibility when flying a drone over your site.

Oh and the drones I have seen available can't handle enough weight to lift much of anything.

Couldn't they instead mortar things into the prison? Shoot a capsule with a phone on a very steep ballistic trajectory.

In my state an inmate was broken out with a helicopter. The Dept of Corrections had an interesting solution. Anyone caught looking up at the sky goes into solitary confinement. No one has tried it since.

You don't patch the cause of the problem, you break the part of the will that would even make you think about the solution. It is much cheaper and it creates a more malleable population.

Not that I approve of the approach but the voters wanting anything that can't be painted as 3 hots and a cot.

Stealing an identity is trivially easy. Society revolves around relationships of trust between organisations and individuals, and the trust runs amazingly deep. The basic information you need to do it is publicly available: date of birth, mother's maiden name (on the birth certificate and parents' marriage certificate respectively, copies available on request from the records office).

Carrying out the ID theft takes resources and balls. You'll need to be able to manufacture ID documents, or have access to someone who does. Nowadays you can buy them on one of the onion dark markets. Generally you want a driving license, as this is the easiest to forge form of ID that gets you complete access. Banks, governments, etc. will accept it.

Sadly, making driving licenses is not too hard - document security is pretty weak. You'll need to make yourself some ultra-high resolution scans, trace the entire design in illustrator, and then get hold of some printing equipment. You usually want to print on teslin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teslin_(material)), and laminate with a high-quality laminator. UV seals can be easily replicated by hacking an epson printer to use modified cartridges with UV pigments injected into them. Holograms can also be replicated by dusting your laminate with interference pigments and reverse-printing in clear ink to fix the design. It can all be done on commodity hardware.

With a driving license and dob/mother's maiden name you can then access a huge amount of someone's sensitive information, and more importantly, control their relationships with organisations. I don't want this to be a tutorial, so I'll simply say that with several more pieces of information you can take out credit in someone's name, control their existing accounts (e.g. by adding yourself as a new cardholder), or start causing trouble in their name.

A final word of caution. While it's easy to get people's information from government records offices, it's even easier to get it from them personally. We used to call people and social engineer them into giving us their DOB, bank account numbers, secret words, etc. Don't be stupid with your information: never tell someone your data down the telephone unless you called them. Oh, and if you're thinking of committing identity fraud, think again. It's not hard to pull off, but you're not smart enough to do it without getting caught. Everyone gets caught in the end.

How would you know if they didn't?

There is nobody who likes to be woken by a dawn-raid!

Old-school hackers still like proper handles rather than random strings for usernames, even for one time posts.

The devil is in the details.

You need to assess the risk, taking into account the very low probability of having your identity stolen and the fairly low inconvenience, against the time and effort it takes to take protective measures. Don't live in fear of it.

That said, the single best way to protect yourself from random ID theft is to use a decent bank with good fraud protection. In the UK, Barclays and HSBC are very good, Natwest and Halifax are very bad. Citibank is a bad US one.

If someone steals your ID and drains your bank account it's going to be much harder and more time consuming to get your money back. If someone opens credit cards under your ID it will be easier to correct than losing your bank account but can still be very time consuming. Often people discover the issue when they're applying for new credit, such as a mortgage. Correcting your credit issues can take months to resolve. They could lose a house they're trying to buy if they don't get approved.

edit: nobody should be so unaware of their own credit record that they lose a house sale because of undiscovered fraud. Keeping on top of it is very cheap and as simple as registering on a website (UK example: https://www.creditexpert.co.uk)

and don't put your damn personal information on facebook!

You are now a harder target than most people.

I think that's the most important lesson learned from this tale.

The hard part, I imagine, is testing that's a good-enough fake. Standing in front of the passport agent or getting pulled over are probably the worst possible times to learn your print was an eighth of an inch off in the wrong place.

That said, most people will never hand them to a customs agent, and I had reports that mine were accepted as ID by police officers on several occasions. Maybe the forger is more sensitive to the differences than most.