6 ms·

There's an inmate in LA County jail who has been there 9 years awaiting trial on attempted murder. He is completely and totally institutionalized. A very nice

There's an inmate in LA County jail who has been there 9 years awaiting trial on attempted murder. He is completely and totally institutionalized. A very nice guy but intimidating. Cops can arrest you for any reason, and if you can't make bail, then they place you in jails with convicted violent felons, some on murder trials. In LA jails, you have to be racist. Depending on your pod and program, you have special requirements. You often have to fight, especially if you are black or Hispanic. If there's a brawl inside the pod, you have to fight other races or you will be beaten by your own. I sat in a tiny room for 11 hours with 50 inmates, half of which had face tattoos and were gang members. A room where inmates had been beaten to death and the others just cover up the cameras. Multiple times I wasn't called to court, they were "dry runs". Mental torture and real risk required just for due process. These types of systems only create more criminals. The deputies act like psychopaths, taunting and roughing up inmates. But not as bad since now the FBI has cameras watching them. The person who interceded in my misdemeanor case and put me in jail was the former head of California Homeland Security. His lawyer, also a former federal prosecutor, was in every court appearance lobbying the prosecutor. He also represented the Chief of Police, the City Council and the Sheriff. Their boss is a secretive billionaire whose former lawyer became the new Supreme Court Justice this year after he lobbied He is a very powerful person who hires former federal officials as political mercenaries. This all happened because they wanted to protect a wealthy sex predator. In 2-weeks, the Homeland official is actually testifying for the sex predator for his civil trial. He is presumably testifying against my credibility.

dleslie 9y ago
Well here's a person that could benefit from an internet where both the protocols and platforms were anonymous.
jsmthrowaway 9y ago
Hi, four-month felony pretrial inmate who is proudly defying recidivism here. I’m the kind of guy who thinks load balancing is a fun topic of discussion — ask anyone who knows me how incredibly unfit for jail I am — and I survived just fine. You seem to have had the shit scared out of you, and I wanted to clarify a few things for you. You don’t have to be racist to survive county. You simply stick with your race. There’s a distinction. Yes, if shit pops off and you’re not sticking up for your race, you can get called out. But nobody is asking the 70-year-old with a limp to roll heavy with the woods/kinfolk/whatever. There’s more an element here of getting marked as a bitch: prison, and to a lesser extent county, is a game of respect. Run store and someone steals from you? Handle it or it will be repeated, because they notice you don’t stick up for yourself. The smart ones watch. But the woods weren’t eyeing me when I played my daily game of spades with a kinfolk partner (and still friend). It’s not like that in county. Prison, maybe. DO behavior is intentional. County belongs to them. Prison belongs to the inmates. This was explained to me as “this is their house. Prison is ours.” The person explaining, our head wood, was looking forward to prison. Life is way different in prison, with mutual respect — again, I’m told. Jail sucks on purpose. If it didn’t suck nobody would care that they ended up there. This is the American approach to corrections, that of deterrence; in other places there is more of a focus on rehabilitation, and you’ll find a much different jail experience. Jail is a lot more fun when you make it abundantly clear to the DOs that you see through their psychopathy. It’s a control mechanism for those who don’t. Once they figure out it doesn’t work on you and you’ll play their game anyway, you can actually develop a decent rapport with DOs. Just never, ever, ever trust them. I grieved one and he used to pull tricks like calling me out right after a race meeting to make it look like I was a snitch (don’t even THINK about snitching, or enjoy PC). They know the game better than you do, and they’re paid to do it. Those dry runs were actually nice, I found, because it was a nice break outside. My cell was way better than transfer cells, though, and breaking routine sucks. Doing time is all about routine. By 30 days in, I had a schedule. The next 100 flew. Just keep to yourself, improve yourself during the downtime, get on a schedule, and play the respect game carefully and you’ll be fine. I got marked quickly as the computer nerd, but that also meant I could help people out with their legal stuff. Find a purpose and become useful, and stand up for yourself when needed. Lead with your shoulder and pivot, if it comes to that — I’ve fought more outside than in, though, and most of the violence I experienced was from DOs (tased once because I couldn’t hear orders in the shower, pepper sprayed twice). Help the right people and you’ll have the right friends, which is a big part of survival. Some parts of your comment confused me, so maybe you can clarify. Murder trial inmates are almost always confined in maximum. Medium is a larger cross section of crimes and classification, and most places call medium “gladiator school” or “gladiator academy” because there’s a lot more freedom than maximum and still some hard hitters. Minimum is like summer camp that you can’t leave, with everybody sitting for DUI or check fraud. Transfer cells mix this classification up, which is probably where you landed with the heavy hitters in that 11 hour room (that sounds like transfer), but a misdemeanor rap almost guarantees you were in minimum. Am I right? Or did you get classified as a hitter and thrown in school? I can’t speak to the rest of your comment.
- swang 9y ago
  okay so woods means white people, kinsfolk means black people. But DO = ?
  - noer 9y ago
    Detention Officer, I think.
  - jsmthrowaway 9y ago
    Detention officer, yes. Other places call them deputies, apparently. Prisons usually call them corrections officers (COs).
  - selimthegrim 9y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peckerwood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peckerwood
- jacquesm 9y ago
  You're supposed to be safe in jail. Just in case that had not sunk in yet because of your experience but whoever runs that jail should be in jail themselves.
  - jsmthrowaway 9y ago
    That’s the thing, though: you truly cannot rely on that, even more so than the outside world. Once you get there, you realize how much “supposed to be” is just words. You’re supposed to be safe at a country music festival or a church, too. But occasionally, you’re not safe in those situations and it’s through absolutely no fault of your own. So, you have to protect yourself. In jail, this means fighting when needed. In other situations, it’s just being aware and ready to protect yourself. DOs certainly respond if a fight takes place (it’s a chance to put some fools in the hole), but it’s the same concept as police response time. If you adopt that otherwise-correct attitude and treat it as more than just words, you won’t be ready for the inevitable. If you take care of things, you will be left alone; there’s some truth in that Hollywood trope about jail. The only person you can rely upon in jail is yourself, and that’s actually a lesson I’m glad I experienced, because it gave me different perspective on day to day life. Is this right? Not saying it is. I do know I’d much rather be in jail here than, say, Thailand or Peru. Every time they hit a Peruvian jail they confiscate five or six guns. Funny you say that, by the way, because Joe Arpaio ran my jail. :)
SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
Sincere question -- how do we spot things like this? Let's pretend for a moment that I'm a relatively competent programmer with small amounts of disposable income to spend on hobbies, such as running algorithms over government datasets. (Okay, that's a weird one -- but I think it's good to apply my craft towards politics.) I know a lot about making computers scan through large sets of data looking for patterns, and some about making websites and whatnot. I normally don't think technology does much for political problems, but this one legitimately sounds like we should be applying fraud-detection style algorithms to the names that appear in court records, looking for abnormalities. (Heck, we should probably look for all kinds of irregularities, not just in the pattern of names.) Identifying the problem doesn't magically solve it, but it sounds like being able to assemble subtle cases out of thousands of documents across hundreds of jurisdictions actually would provide utility towards addressing this. It doesn't stop the corruption directly, but it shines a pretty bright light on it. And it allows groups looking to tackle it head on to focus their efforts on litigating, instead of document finding or figuring out who the culprits are.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  The main problem is that most people in American society don't care what happens to prisoners. Don't be surprised if you employ these techniques only to discover nobody lifts a finger. That said, this would be a project I'd be interested in contributing to. If you set it up, shoot me an email.
  - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
    I'll be honest: I suspect that this is actually quite common and I have absolutely no idea how to fix it. But I suspect that much like homelessness, step 0 is gathering an accurate, systemic level picture so we can even understand what we're trying to fix. Targeted treatments and good intentions aren't working -- we need a system level mechanism. Ed: I replied to a cached copy; leaving in case anyone raises the same point.
    - pas 9y ago
drawkbox 9y ago
We have no rehabilitation or actual corrections when you are essentially sent to a crime university and network with criminals. I'll never understand why when you are kids and get in trouble, they separate you. When you are an adult criminal, they put you in with other criminals and create more criminals. Recidivism is high in those types of situations, in addition to how records are never cleared for good behavior. We have a serious corrections problem that does little in the way of correcting by grouping everyone so tight.
sevenfive 9y ago
You may as well name these people, to save us the effort of digging it up
- himlion 9y ago
  It's easy enough to google and find out.
  - sevenfive 9y ago
    It's even easier to type the two words, "Philip Anschutz"
- kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
  That would let them cook up libel charges.
- underwoodley 9y ago
  Based on Neil Gorsuch having worked for him, the secretive billionaire seems to be Philip Anschutz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Anschutz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Anschutz New Yorker article about 'a secretive mogul's entertainment kingdom': https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/01/16/the-man-who-owns-l-a https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/01/16/the-man-who-ow... This guy worked for the California office of Homeland Security, now works for Anschutz's company: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewbettenhausen https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewbettenhausen (I don't know anything, and I'm not claiming anything about the GP's allegation or their truthfulness. Just wanted to save others the time of making the same Google searches.)
QAPereo 9y ago
There's an inmate in LA County jail who has been there 9 years awaiting trial on attempted murder. He is completely and totally institutionalized. A very nice guy but intimidating. If he didn't go in a killer, he sure as hell should be ready to take a life by now. If someone robbed me of 9 years of my life, I'd make it my mission to rob them of any joy in their life.
- hans_mueller 9y ago
  sadly that's just positive thinking. most people don't toughen up, they just break and maybe commit suicide.
- jlg23 9y ago
  You mean, you are going to be politically active? "They" is an abstract entity, a set of rules agreed upon by your community - in essence: you agreed to them. Making someone's life miserable is not only a waste of one's one lifetime but not helping the next innocent person who is in pre-trial detention for years.
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    I don't think that 9 years of unjust imprisonment would make me a better person, I'm not that guy.
skc 9y ago
Terrible. And I'm willing to bet anything that there is no evidence that prisons actually achieve their stated purpose.
- coldtea 9y ago
  They excel at their non stated purpose: keeping many people employed, making fortunes for some (e.g. prison work), launching political careers for being "tough of crime", keeping blacks down, and satiating society's puritanical need for revenge and Old Testament style punishment.
alkonaut 9y ago
The US isn't known for an excellent prison system, but it is known for having a pretty good way for citizens to sue the government if they are mistreated. I was abused in prison I'd expect to be able to sue the state for damages. Is there a general exception to the expectation of security for prisoners that means they can't expect the state to protect their well being in there?
- coldtea 9y ago
  >but it is known for having a pretty good way for citizens to sue the government if they are mistreated. LOL. There are people proven innocent that get out of jail after 30+ years, with evidence hidden by prosecutors and their trial and other such shady stuff, and they get zilch.
- speedplane 9y ago
  If you're thrown in jail unjustly, why would you expect to be treated justly when you are proven innocent?
coldtea 9y ago
You can judge a democracy and a society by its jails.
pers0n 9y ago
Who is the wealthy sex predator?

dleslie 9y ago

Well here's a person that could benefit from an internet where both the protocols and platforms were anonymous.

jsmthrowaway 9y ago

Hi, four-month felony pretrial inmate who is proudly defying recidivism here. I’m the kind of guy who thinks load balancing is a fun topic of discussion — ask anyone who knows me how incredibly unfit for jail I am — and I survived just fine. You seem to have had the shit scared out of you, and I wanted to clarify a few things for you. You don’t have to be racist to survive county. You simply stick with your race. There’s a distinction. Yes, if shit pops off and you’re not sticking up for your race, you can get called out. But nobody is asking the 70-year-old with a limp to roll heavy with the woods/kinfolk/whatever. There’s more an element here of getting marked as a bitch: prison, and to a lesser extent county, is a game of respect. Run store and someone steals from you? Handle it or it will be repeated, because they notice you don’t stick up for yourself. The smart ones watch. But the woods weren’t eyeing me when I played my daily game of spades with a kinfolk partner (and still friend). It’s not like that in county. Prison, maybe. DO behavior is intentional. County belongs to them. Prison belongs to the inmates. This was explained to me as “this is their house. Prison is ours.” The person explaining, our head wood, was looking forward to prison. Life is way different in prison, with mutual respect — again, I’m told. Jail sucks on purpose. If it didn’t suck nobody would care that they ended up there. This is the American approach to corrections, that of deterrence; in other places there is more of a focus on rehabilitation, and you’ll find a much different jail experience. Jail is a lot more fun when you make it abundantly clear to the DOs that you see through their psychopathy. It’s a control mechanism for those who don’t. Once they figure out it doesn’t work on you and you’ll play their game anyway, you can actually develop a decent rapport with DOs. Just never, ever, ever trust them. I grieved one and he used to pull tricks like calling me out right after a race meeting to make it look like I was a snitch (don’t even THINK about snitching, or enjoy PC). They know the game better than you do, and they’re paid to do it. Those dry runs were actually nice, I found, because it was a nice break outside. My cell was way better than transfer cells, though, and breaking routine sucks. Doing time is all about routine. By 30 days in, I had a schedule. The next 100 flew. Just keep to yourself, improve yourself during the downtime, get on a schedule, and play the respect game carefully and you’ll be fine. I got marked quickly as the computer nerd, but that also meant I could help people out with their legal stuff. Find a purpose and become useful, and stand up for yourself when needed. Lead with your shoulder and pivot, if it comes to that — I’ve fought more outside than in, though, and most of the violence I experienced was from DOs (tased once because I couldn’t hear orders in the shower, pepper sprayed twice). Help the right people and you’ll have the right friends, which is a big part of survival. Some parts of your comment confused me, so maybe you can clarify. Murder trial inmates are almost always confined in maximum. Medium is a larger cross section of crimes and classification, and most places call medium “gladiator school” or “gladiator academy” because there’s a lot more freedom than maximum and still some hard hitters. Minimum is like summer camp that you can’t leave, with everybody sitting for DUI or check fraud. Transfer cells mix this classification up, which is probably where you landed with the heavy hitters in that 11 hour room (that sounds like transfer), but a misdemeanor rap almost guarantees you were in minimum. Am I right? Or did you get classified as a hitter and thrown in school? I can’t speak to the rest of your comment.

swang 9y ago
okay so woods means white people, kinsfolk means black people. But DO = ?
- noer 9y ago
  Detention Officer, I think.
- jsmthrowaway 9y ago
  Detention officer, yes. Other places call them deputies, apparently. Prisons usually call them corrections officers (COs).
- selimthegrim 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peckerwood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peckerwood
jacquesm 9y ago
You're supposed to be safe in jail. Just in case that had not sunk in yet because of your experience but whoever runs that jail should be in jail themselves.
- jsmthrowaway 9y ago
  That’s the thing, though: you truly cannot rely on that, even more so than the outside world. Once you get there, you realize how much “supposed to be” is just words. You’re supposed to be safe at a country music festival or a church, too. But occasionally, you’re not safe in those situations and it’s through absolutely no fault of your own. So, you have to protect yourself. In jail, this means fighting when needed. In other situations, it’s just being aware and ready to protect yourself. DOs certainly respond if a fight takes place (it’s a chance to put some fools in the hole), but it’s the same concept as police response time. If you adopt that otherwise-correct attitude and treat it as more than just words, you won’t be ready for the inevitable. If you take care of things, you will be left alone; there’s some truth in that Hollywood trope about jail. The only person you can rely upon in jail is yourself, and that’s actually a lesson I’m glad I experienced, because it gave me different perspective on day to day life. Is this right? Not saying it is. I do know I’d much rather be in jail here than, say, Thailand or Peru. Every time they hit a Peruvian jail they confiscate five or six guns. Funny you say that, by the way, because Joe Arpaio ran my jail. :)

SomeStupidPoint 9y ago

Sincere question -- how do we spot things like this? Let's pretend for a moment that I'm a relatively competent programmer with small amounts of disposable income to spend on hobbies, such as running algorithms over government datasets. (Okay, that's a weird one -- but I think it's good to apply my craft towards politics.) I know a lot about making computers scan through large sets of data looking for patterns, and some about making websites and whatnot. I normally don't think technology does much for political problems, but this one legitimately sounds like we should be applying fraud-detection style algorithms to the names that appear in court records, looking for abnormalities. (Heck, we should probably look for all kinds of irregularities, not just in the pattern of names.) Identifying the problem doesn't magically solve it, but it sounds like being able to assemble subtle cases out of thousands of documents across hundreds of jurisdictions actually would provide utility towards addressing this. It doesn't stop the corruption directly, but it shines a pretty bright light on it. And it allows groups looking to tackle it head on to focus their efforts on litigating, instead of document finding or figuring out who the culprits are.

sillysaurus3 9y ago
The main problem is that most people in American society don't care what happens to prisoners. Don't be surprised if you employ these techniques only to discover nobody lifts a finger. That said, this would be a project I'd be interested in contributing to. If you set it up, shoot me an email.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  I'll be honest: I suspect that this is actually quite common and I have absolutely no idea how to fix it. But I suspect that much like homelessness, step 0 is gathering an accurate, systemic level picture so we can even understand what we're trying to fix. Targeted treatments and good intentions aren't working -- we need a system level mechanism. Ed: I replied to a cached copy; leaving in case anyone raises the same point.
  - pas 9y ago

drawkbox 9y ago

We have no rehabilitation or actual corrections when you are essentially sent to a crime university and network with criminals. I'll never understand why when you are kids and get in trouble, they separate you. When you are an adult criminal, they put you in with other criminals and create more criminals. Recidivism is high in those types of situations, in addition to how records are never cleared for good behavior. We have a serious corrections problem that does little in the way of correcting by grouping everyone so tight.

sevenfive 9y ago

You may as well name these people, to save us the effort of digging it up

himlion 9y ago
It's easy enough to google and find out.
- sevenfive 9y ago
  It's even easier to type the two words, "Philip Anschutz"
kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
That would let them cook up libel charges.
underwoodley 9y ago
Based on Neil Gorsuch having worked for him, the secretive billionaire seems to be Philip Anschutz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Anschutz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Anschutz New Yorker article about 'a secretive mogul's entertainment kingdom': https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/01/16/the-man-who-owns-l-a https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/01/16/the-man-who-ow... This guy worked for the California office of Homeland Security, now works for Anschutz's company: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewbettenhausen https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewbettenhausen (I don't know anything, and I'm not claiming anything about the GP's allegation or their truthfulness. Just wanted to save others the time of making the same Google searches.)

QAPereo 9y ago

There's an inmate in LA County jail who has been there 9 years awaiting trial on attempted murder. He is completely and totally institutionalized. A very nice guy but intimidating. If he didn't go in a killer, he sure as hell should be ready to take a life by now. If someone robbed me of 9 years of my life, I'd make it my mission to rob them of any joy in their life.

hans_mueller 9y ago
sadly that's just positive thinking. most people don't toughen up, they just break and maybe commit suicide.
jlg23 9y ago
You mean, you are going to be politically active? "They" is an abstract entity, a set of rules agreed upon by your community - in essence: you agreed to them. Making someone's life miserable is not only a waste of one's one lifetime but not helping the next innocent person who is in pre-trial detention for years.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  I don't think that 9 years of unjust imprisonment would make me a better person, I'm not that guy.

skc 9y ago

Terrible. And I'm willing to bet anything that there is no evidence that prisons actually achieve their stated purpose.

coldtea 9y ago
They excel at their non stated purpose: keeping many people employed, making fortunes for some (e.g. prison work), launching political careers for being "tough of crime", keeping blacks down, and satiating society's puritanical need for revenge and Old Testament style punishment.

alkonaut 9y ago

The US isn't known for an excellent prison system, but it is known for having a pretty good way for citizens to sue the government if they are mistreated. I was abused in prison I'd expect to be able to sue the state for damages. Is there a general exception to the expectation of security for prisoners that means they can't expect the state to protect their well being in there?

coldtea 9y ago
>but it is known for having a pretty good way for citizens to sue the government if they are mistreated. LOL. There are people proven innocent that get out of jail after 30+ years, with evidence hidden by prosecutors and their trial and other such shady stuff, and they get zilch.
speedplane 9y ago
If you're thrown in jail unjustly, why would you expect to be treated justly when you are proven innocent?

coldtea 9y ago

You can judge a democracy and a society by its jails.

pers0n 9y ago

Who is the wealthy sex predator?