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Prisons Are Banning Books That Teach Prisoners How to Code
- HillaryBriss 7y agothe US job market for coders is kind of saturated anyway, and given the extreme selectivity tech companies apply to job applicants, avoiding coding might be a good thing for people in that particular sub-population. i mean it will probably save ex-cons a lot of heartache. our beloved tech employers are likely to discriminate against ex-cons just like they do other minorities and protected classes. what is the point of raising an ex-con's hopes of getting a coding job? the tech companies are going to find some reason or other to reject them anyway. just sayin'
- scarejunba 7y agoI absolutely do not have this feeling in the Bay Area. I can't think of a single person among my friends who feels this way.
- rutierut 7y agoAs a freelancer billing triple digits an hour I've never been asked if I had a criminal past, just sayin'
- HillaryBriss 7y agointeresting. do you know if they carried out any background checks on you?
- whamlastxmas 7y agoI've never had a background check done that I know of at any of my dev jobs
- kennywinker 7y agoBig tech would. Small tech is way less likely to. My last job at a startup had no bg checks. My last job at a tech giant had bg checks.
- kennywinker 7y agoIt’s almost like there are multiple industries built on prison labour that might feel threatened by prisoners learning employable skills and never coming back... strange.
- marcoperaza 7y agoThis is a disgrace. The idea that someone is going to be a menace to prison computer systems because they read a few books is really laughable and betrays such a thorough ignorance of how these things work. No one cares about prisons because it’s not an issue that affects most of us in any way and prisoners aren’t a powerful interest group. The absurdities of bureaucracy are allowed to fester without checks. What does the person in charge of approving books, who is probably ignorant of technology themselves, gain from allowing a book? Nothing. What do they lose if allowing a particular book leads to problems? Potentially a lot. So they’ll only allow only the safest material for which their judgment could never possibly get questioned. I don’t think there’s a conspiracy to keep prisoners uneducated and likely to come back to prison. There’s just no reason to for the people in charge to do better. I don’t know how feasible it is, but if we’re going to have private prisons, maybe they should be rewarded when prisoners successfully reintegrate after their release.
- dang 7y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20240090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20240090