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Maine's remote work program is an incredibly promising development to prevent recidivism. The amazing thing about it is that it gives real jobs to prisoners tha

Maine's remote work program is an incredibly promising development to prevent recidivism. The amazing thing about it is that it gives real jobs to prisoners that they can seamlessly continue after they get out of prison. Normally when you get out, it's impossible to get a job, and the clock is ticking. This leads to desperation, which leads to bad behavior. There is a real risk of exploitation, but if it's properly managed, remote work for prisoners is one of the most hopeful things I've heard about the prison system. It gives people purpose while there and an avenue to success once they're out.

lo_zamoyski 1y ago
This sounds good. It is important that we recognize all of the purposes of punishment instead of overemphasizing one or neglecting the other. Punishment has three ends: retribution, rehabilitation, and deterrence. It is important that you pay for your crime for the sake of justice; it is charitable and prudent to rehabilitate the criminal, satisfying the corrective end of punishment; and would-be criminals must be given tangible evidence of what awaits them if they choose to indulge an evil temptation, thus acting as a deterrent. In our systems today, we either neglect correction, leaving people to rot in prison or endanger them with recidivism by throwing them back onto the streets with no correction, or we take an attitude of false compassion toward the perp by failing to inflict adequate justice, incidentally failing the deterrent end in the process.
- tomrod 1y ago
  Rehabilitation is retribution. So many things can never have full repatriation. The best we can do is have society acknowledge, forcefully, the wrongs done via prison sentencing. But then many countries go wrong on policy - punitive imprisonment leads to worse individual and social outcomes than a rehabilitation focus.
- ty6853 1y ago
  One of the most baffling elements of the justice system is how little the victim is involved in the justice. 'Society' should not lord the lion's share of the justice decisions over the victims. Quite often the victim would prefer compensation and release over getting fuck all while the perpetrator languages in prison at the tax dollar of the victim. Much of 'justice' has been usurped from the victim into a jobs campaign for the state.
  - dfxm12 1y ago
    I think you're confusing or conflating civil and criminal courts. If someone breaks a law, that's generally a matter for the state to decide in a criminal court. If someone was damaged (i.e. if the victim feels the perpetrator owes them compensation), that's a matter for them to bring up themselves in the civil courts. These are separate functions; one situation could be tried in both courts. A famous example off the top of my head is that even though OJ Simpson wasn't criminally convicted of murder of Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman, a civil court found him liable, awarding tens of millions of dollars in damages, to be paid to their families.
    - ty6853 1y ago
      There's no element of the civil trial I'm aware of that allows the prisoner to be released to perform activity to compensate the victim. In practice imprisoning the perp against the wishes of the victim robs them of their civil awards, either by delay or denial.
    - cootsnuck 1y ago
      No, I don't think they are confusing those things. I think they are critiquing the system at large and are alluding towards alternatives such as restorative justice.
    - Scoundreller 1y ago
      > A famous example off the top of my head is that even though OJ Simpson wasn't criminally convicted of murder of Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman, a civil court found him liable, awarding tens of millions of dollars in damages, to be paid to their families. The trick here is to be fortunate enough to have a biiiiig monthly retirement pension that the courts can barely touch, or enough wealth to have already bought your mother a nice house (though I now read OJ screwed that up by not transferring her the title). https://www.southcoasttoday.com/story/news/nation-world/1997/08/29/judge-o-j-s-assets/50601297007/ https://www.southcoasttoday.com/story/news/nation-world/1997... https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-dec-01-me-59847-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-dec-01-me-59847...
  - 1y ago
- coredog64 1y ago
  You're missing a function: Removal. Locking up criminals prevents them committing additional crimes that impact the general public. Data from the last few years shows that there's definitely a Pareto aspect to criminal populations, and absent an ability to rehabilitate, removal is the next best option for society at large.
  - lo_zamoyski 1y ago
    I would argue that removal can be analyzed into the other categories, or into something that isn't the province of punishment. 1. the deprivation of freedom is retributive 2. the prevention of additional crimes can be said to be deterrence of an active sort 3. the protection of society isn't part of punishment per se, but a separate end This becomes clear when we consider imprisonment in relation to various crimes. Violent criminals are imprisoned in part because they are a threat to the physical safety of others. However, is an embezzler or a mayor embroiled in shady accounting a threat to anyone's physical safety? Probably not. So the purpose of their removal is less about crime prevention and more about retribution.
    - BlarfMcFlarf 1y ago
      The idea is that if they are making a rational choice to embezzle or not (and have other viable options for living), then knowing jail time is a possible outcome changes the expected payout equation. In that way it can be preventative, but only in those specific sorts of cases.
  - jmpetroske 1y ago
    Would love to read into this research if you have a link or something to search
- HappMacDonald 1y ago
  > Punishment has three ends: retribution, rehabilitation, and deterrence. One might argue a fourth end as well: removal. When people talk about "cleaning up the streets" they don't mean causing ruffians to clean up their act, what they refer to is removing the ruffians entirely. To "someplace else". To "Not in my backyard". Out of sight, out of mind as is often said. For profit prisons may view prisoners as cheap labor or levy bait, but for the voting public who gets no cut of that action the real inducement starts and ends with "make the problem go away". Sweep human beings we do not know how to cohabitate with under a rug. Retribution may appeal to those directly wronged, or to the minority of sadists in a population. Deterrence is oft admired, but few honestly believe it's really possible given that harsh sentences never seem to cause crime to go to zero (sensationalism-driven media that magnifies every mole-hill notwithstanding) and that repeat offenses outnumber first offenses. Rehabilitation appeals to those with compassion, though nobody has a clear bead on how to actually land that plane with more than the lowest hanging fruit of only-slightly-off-course offenders. So I think the real elephant in the room is that people want/demand/rely upon removal.
  - Ray20 1y ago
    >harsh sentences never seem to cause crime to go to zero Harsh sentences work great when used with the inevitability of punishment. It is obvious that a harsh sentence does not discourage a criminal to commit a crime if they expect to avoid any responsibility
    - HappMacDonald 1y ago
      Yeah, and part of the problem is that punishment cannot be made inevitable (any more than crime can be made "zero" as I'd inferred, despite what public expectation might look like xD). First of all you have criminals who are low-functioning enough for whatever reason to fail to understand how actions connect to consequences in reality. Be it due to mental illness, or overestimation of their abilities. No amount of certainty is enough to dispel the "That won't happen to me" presumption from a pretty big chunk of the population. Next you have desperate people: either due to "risking punishment may actually be safer than risking privation while obeying the law" and/or due to presumptions of having nothing left to lose. And finally you have cartels, where folks organize so well that their internal governance and capacity to levy violence actually stands toe to toe against the civil governments that they operate within the jurisdictions of. This is the civil equivalent of a tumor, with all of the oncological complications that that often implies. So I would caution that "inevitability of punishment" is an unreasonable goal to try to justify harsh sentences, and I would estimate that any historical accounts of governments who have achieved that feat were probably also totalitarian enough to be able to lie about their resulting crime statistics along the path.
- nlitened 1y ago
  I think there's also a fourth "end" to prison punishment, but I don't know the proper name for it. It's when you remove the dangerous person from a society for a while, so they can't commit crimes for that while. This is very important part of prison punishment with people with criminal tendencies, and this is why recidivists get longer prison sentences for each subsequent repetition of a similar crime. Unfortunately we have to admit that some (small) percentage of criminals cannot be rehabilitated, so they must be isolated from society.
  - ChadNauseam 1y ago
    The technical term is incapacitation. (Other commenters in this thread are also referring to it as “removal”.) For criminals that act alone, variations in the severity of the sentence doesn’t seem to have the impact you might expect it to have on how much it actually deters people. (And there is the issue that people in prison can share strategies between themselves for how to more effectively commit crime, which is not an ideal outcome.) So indeed, incapacitation is a very important factor. When it’s studied, you often see numbers like “increasing the sentence by 10 years prevents 0.2 crimes due to deterrence and 0.9 crimes due to incapacitation”. I say this applies to people acting alone because, although I have no proof, I suspect that organized crime is a bit more “rational” in their response to changes in sentencing. If sentencing were set up so that engaging in a category of crime was not profitable for the criminal organization, I’m pretty sure they would realize this and stop. This logic doesn’t apply to individual people, because the average person committing a crime has no idea what the sentence is or their odds of getting caught, and they obviously don’t do it often enough that the random variation is amortized out.
- bdangubic 1y ago
  It is important that you pay for your crime for the sake of justice damn…
- rustcleaner 1y ago
  >"It is important that you pay for your crime for the sake of justice" Oh dang, there's that pesky religious mechanic again! Why can't we build on pragmatism rather than ensuring the Justice God has enough blood-years drained from criminal-victims? Two crimes don't make a justice! Irrelevant addendum: I think I will mix atheism and anarchism as they are very compatible concepts, in that they stand in skepticism of essentially the same species of entity with two masks: church and state.
  - Breza 1y ago
    I've read the Bible. Especially as you get towards the end, the books don't seem to have an especially lofty view of the criminal justice system. I will agree with you that a criminal justice system built "on pragmatism" would certainly conflict with the tenants of many world religions. I recently read Reforming Criminal Justice: A Christian Proposal, which outlines why pure pragmatism needs to be tempered by a respect for, and indeed love of, every person accused or convicted of a crime.
dfxm12 1y ago
Do participants get paid a real wage?
- glommer 1y ago
  Preston was free to negotiate his pay with us, and we pay him a full salary. Just no health care benefits.
  - dgacmu 1y ago
    Does he actually get the salary, or does the prison take huge overhead?
    - glommer 1y ago
      they take an (actually very reasonable) cut, but he is free to take his salary.
      - kgwxd 1y ago
        No cut is reasonable.
        jjmarr 1y ago
        They need money to pay for oversight. Any time prisoners talk to someone on the outside, it's a potential conduit for contraband or organized crime.
        Balinares 1y ago
        The exact same is true of people working outside of prison.
        gbalduzzi 1y ago
        I think it's reasonable to assume an additional risk for people in prison. Even though the enrolled people are completely trustworthy, doing this prevents untrustworthy people to simulate interest in the program just to be able to contact the external world for illegal activities.
antihero 1y ago
It's amazing. Absolutely insane that people are incarcerated so long for non-violent drug crimes, though. Turso also looks really neat for small Payload sites.
- CobrastanJorji 1y ago
  Oh absolutely. Voters always favor harsher punishments or making things worse for those already convicted of crimes. You never get any more votes by pushing for lower punishments for any crime or by doing anything to reduce recidivism. I suspect that a pretty solid litmus test for "politician who is actually trying to make the world a better place" based just on how they vote for lowering recidivism.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - rustcleaner 1y ago
    Justification to abolish democracy, and because everything else is worse I guess we're going to have to go to a voluntarist ancap NAP-respecting society!
- tptacek 1y ago
  I agree with you. This is a crazy high sentence (15-30). But worth nothing that the fact pattern behind it was also pretty crazy.
- badc0ffee 1y ago
  "Non-violent drug crimes" brings to mind hippies selling weed or mushrooms. But this guy was selling carfentanil. I'm not saying he's to blame for the opioid crisis turning street people into shambling zombies, clogging emergency services with overdoses, and causing death, but he certainly played a part.
  - cortesoft 1y ago
    He played a lot smaller part than the Sackler family, who ran Purdue Pharma and pushed their drugs into communities. They killed a lot more people than this guy, and yet none of them are in jail.
trod1234 1y ago
One of the biggest problems with the prison system in the US is that prisoners are often saddled with the debt related to or imposed on them by their incarceration which they can't pay back. The inability to find a job coupled with the crushing interest is what leads to desperation, and then repeat criminal behavior. > There is a real risk of exploitation Centralized systems always have a risk of corruption when power is concentrated in few people. Those job roles also many times attract the corrupt; and even when you have people who go in with a good moral caliber, the regular dynamics of the interactions may also twist them into being corrupt. Its a rare person with sufficient moral caliber that can survive such a job (as a guard or other prison staff) unscathed and still be a good person afterwards. Many avenues of education also do not prepare them appropriately for work in the private sector, and some careers are simply prohibited. For example becoming a chemist or engineer when they have a conviction related to ethics violations in such fields.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
larodi 1y ago
Wonder if they acquire the skills to break into systems, why would they choose not to do it in this crazy world out there? Particularly if somebody spends long time, or has spent so far.
_DeadFred_ 1y ago
How do they make sure the prison isn't just employing people already experienced in the field to make the prison money? How do they ensure people are treated fairly (normally prisoners aren't really even allowed sick days, they can't chose not to work overtime if required, etc)? Do they audit to ensure number of sick hours are comparable to non-prison work? Do they ensure prison guards bonus' aren't based on inmate performance (UNICOR does all of the above bad practices resulting in sick people being forced to work overtime in order to get the guards their bonus)? UNICOR/the Federal system 'strongly encourages' people with CAD experience, etc do the McDonalds remodel contracts, the World Trade Center work, etc. These are people that worked in the industry prior to prison and that are not traditionally been hired back after release, so it's simply being used to make UNICOR money on big contracts based on incarcerated individuals pre-existing training being exploited. In addition having structural CAD work done by people with zero say in their job, their deliverables/quality, their hours, etc seems like a bad idea. I don't know why outside engineers are using this work. The UNICOR McDonalds remodels are probably fine (though you can tell by the current feel of McDonalds that the remodels were literally done by prison inmates), but the UNICOR World Trade Center stuff seems super sketchy.
philjohn 1y ago
Yep - turns out the Nordic countries had it right all along. When you focus on rehabilitation and not just punishment you get lower redicivism rates. Who would have thought it?
- gabeio 1y ago
  > When you focus on rehabilitation and not just punishment From a book I recently read on the subject they seem not just to focus on rehab and lack of punishment. If there are disputes with others within the facilities the ones in the dispute must sit down and talk through their issues and find a resolution. This helps ingrain proper anger management & helps re-acclimate them to normal society where violence is rarely the best option. And it makes a ton of sense, if they never are taught how to talk out their issues they will go back to how they have handled those issues all along.
  - philjohn 1y ago
    To be honest, that could certainly be filed under "rehabilitation". Giving people the skills they need to be productive members of society is definitely in that wheelhouse.
    - gabeio 1y ago
      Fair I was thinking of the substance abuse definition, and hadn’t included enough into that word.
  - koolba 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - kurikuri 1y ago
      They were likely in a homogeneous population when they committed the crime that got them there in the first place, so that confounder might not matter much at all.
    - wizzwizz4 1y ago

lo_zamoyski 1y ago

This sounds good. It is important that we recognize all of the purposes of punishment instead of overemphasizing one or neglecting the other. Punishment has three ends: retribution, rehabilitation, and deterrence. It is important that you pay for your crime for the sake of justice; it is charitable and prudent to rehabilitate the criminal, satisfying the corrective end of punishment; and would-be criminals must be given tangible evidence of what awaits them if they choose to indulge an evil temptation, thus acting as a deterrent. In our systems today, we either neglect correction, leaving people to rot in prison or endanger them with recidivism by throwing them back onto the streets with no correction, or we take an attitude of false compassion toward the perp by failing to inflict adequate justice, incidentally failing the deterrent end in the process.

tomrod 1y ago
Rehabilitation is retribution. So many things can never have full repatriation. The best we can do is have society acknowledge, forcefully, the wrongs done via prison sentencing. But then many countries go wrong on policy - punitive imprisonment leads to worse individual and social outcomes than a rehabilitation focus.
ty6853 1y ago
One of the most baffling elements of the justice system is how little the victim is involved in the justice. 'Society' should not lord the lion's share of the justice decisions over the victims. Quite often the victim would prefer compensation and release over getting fuck all while the perpetrator languages in prison at the tax dollar of the victim. Much of 'justice' has been usurped from the victim into a jobs campaign for the state.
- dfxm12 1y ago
  I think you're confusing or conflating civil and criminal courts. If someone breaks a law, that's generally a matter for the state to decide in a criminal court. If someone was damaged (i.e. if the victim feels the perpetrator owes them compensation), that's a matter for them to bring up themselves in the civil courts. These are separate functions; one situation could be tried in both courts. A famous example off the top of my head is that even though OJ Simpson wasn't criminally convicted of murder of Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman, a civil court found him liable, awarding tens of millions of dollars in damages, to be paid to their families.
  - ty6853 1y ago
    There's no element of the civil trial I'm aware of that allows the prisoner to be released to perform activity to compensate the victim. In practice imprisoning the perp against the wishes of the victim robs them of their civil awards, either by delay or denial.
  - cootsnuck 1y ago
    No, I don't think they are confusing those things. I think they are critiquing the system at large and are alluding towards alternatives such as restorative justice.
  - Scoundreller 1y ago
    > A famous example off the top of my head is that even though OJ Simpson wasn't criminally convicted of murder of Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman, a civil court found him liable, awarding tens of millions of dollars in damages, to be paid to their families. The trick here is to be fortunate enough to have a biiiiig monthly retirement pension that the courts can barely touch, or enough wealth to have already bought your mother a nice house (though I now read OJ screwed that up by not transferring her the title). https://www.southcoasttoday.com/story/news/nation-world/1997/08/29/judge-o-j-s-assets/50601297007/ https://www.southcoasttoday.com/story/news/nation-world/1997... https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-dec-01-me-59847-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-dec-01-me-59847...
- 1y ago
coredog64 1y ago
You're missing a function: Removal. Locking up criminals prevents them committing additional crimes that impact the general public. Data from the last few years shows that there's definitely a Pareto aspect to criminal populations, and absent an ability to rehabilitate, removal is the next best option for society at large.
- lo_zamoyski 1y ago
  I would argue that removal can be analyzed into the other categories, or into something that isn't the province of punishment. 1. the deprivation of freedom is retributive 2. the prevention of additional crimes can be said to be deterrence of an active sort 3. the protection of society isn't part of punishment per se, but a separate end This becomes clear when we consider imprisonment in relation to various crimes. Violent criminals are imprisoned in part because they are a threat to the physical safety of others. However, is an embezzler or a mayor embroiled in shady accounting a threat to anyone's physical safety? Probably not. So the purpose of their removal is less about crime prevention and more about retribution.
  - BlarfMcFlarf 1y ago
    The idea is that if they are making a rational choice to embezzle or not (and have other viable options for living), then knowing jail time is a possible outcome changes the expected payout equation. In that way it can be preventative, but only in those specific sorts of cases.
- jmpetroske 1y ago
  Would love to read into this research if you have a link or something to search
HappMacDonald 1y ago
> Punishment has three ends: retribution, rehabilitation, and deterrence. One might argue a fourth end as well: removal. When people talk about "cleaning up the streets" they don't mean causing ruffians to clean up their act, what they refer to is removing the ruffians entirely. To "someplace else". To "Not in my backyard". Out of sight, out of mind as is often said. For profit prisons may view prisoners as cheap labor or levy bait, but for the voting public who gets no cut of that action the real inducement starts and ends with "make the problem go away". Sweep human beings we do not know how to cohabitate with under a rug. Retribution may appeal to those directly wronged, or to the minority of sadists in a population. Deterrence is oft admired, but few honestly believe it's really possible given that harsh sentences never seem to cause crime to go to zero (sensationalism-driven media that magnifies every mole-hill notwithstanding) and that repeat offenses outnumber first offenses. Rehabilitation appeals to those with compassion, though nobody has a clear bead on how to actually land that plane with more than the lowest hanging fruit of only-slightly-off-course offenders. So I think the real elephant in the room is that people want/demand/rely upon removal.
- Ray20 1y ago
  >harsh sentences never seem to cause crime to go to zero Harsh sentences work great when used with the inevitability of punishment. It is obvious that a harsh sentence does not discourage a criminal to commit a crime if they expect to avoid any responsibility
  - HappMacDonald 1y ago
    Yeah, and part of the problem is that punishment cannot be made inevitable (any more than crime can be made "zero" as I'd inferred, despite what public expectation might look like xD). First of all you have criminals who are low-functioning enough for whatever reason to fail to understand how actions connect to consequences in reality. Be it due to mental illness, or overestimation of their abilities. No amount of certainty is enough to dispel the "That won't happen to me" presumption from a pretty big chunk of the population. Next you have desperate people: either due to "risking punishment may actually be safer than risking privation while obeying the law" and/or due to presumptions of having nothing left to lose. And finally you have cartels, where folks organize so well that their internal governance and capacity to levy violence actually stands toe to toe against the civil governments that they operate within the jurisdictions of. This is the civil equivalent of a tumor, with all of the oncological complications that that often implies. So I would caution that "inevitability of punishment" is an unreasonable goal to try to justify harsh sentences, and I would estimate that any historical accounts of governments who have achieved that feat were probably also totalitarian enough to be able to lie about their resulting crime statistics along the path.
nlitened 1y ago
I think there's also a fourth "end" to prison punishment, but I don't know the proper name for it. It's when you remove the dangerous person from a society for a while, so they can't commit crimes for that while. This is very important part of prison punishment with people with criminal tendencies, and this is why recidivists get longer prison sentences for each subsequent repetition of a similar crime. Unfortunately we have to admit that some (small) percentage of criminals cannot be rehabilitated, so they must be isolated from society.
- ChadNauseam 1y ago
  The technical term is incapacitation. (Other commenters in this thread are also referring to it as “removal”.) For criminals that act alone, variations in the severity of the sentence doesn’t seem to have the impact you might expect it to have on how much it actually deters people. (And there is the issue that people in prison can share strategies between themselves for how to more effectively commit crime, which is not an ideal outcome.) So indeed, incapacitation is a very important factor. When it’s studied, you often see numbers like “increasing the sentence by 10 years prevents 0.2 crimes due to deterrence and 0.9 crimes due to incapacitation”. I say this applies to people acting alone because, although I have no proof, I suspect that organized crime is a bit more “rational” in their response to changes in sentencing. If sentencing were set up so that engaging in a category of crime was not profitable for the criminal organization, I’m pretty sure they would realize this and stop. This logic doesn’t apply to individual people, because the average person committing a crime has no idea what the sentence is or their odds of getting caught, and they obviously don’t do it often enough that the random variation is amortized out.
bdangubic 1y ago
It is important that you pay for your crime for the sake of justice damn…
rustcleaner 1y ago
>"It is important that you pay for your crime for the sake of justice" Oh dang, there's that pesky religious mechanic again! Why can't we build on pragmatism rather than ensuring the Justice God has enough blood-years drained from criminal-victims? Two crimes don't make a justice! Irrelevant addendum: I think I will mix atheism and anarchism as they are very compatible concepts, in that they stand in skepticism of essentially the same species of entity with two masks: church and state.
- Breza 1y ago
  I've read the Bible. Especially as you get towards the end, the books don't seem to have an especially lofty view of the criminal justice system. I will agree with you that a criminal justice system built "on pragmatism" would certainly conflict with the tenants of many world religions. I recently read Reforming Criminal Justice: A Christian Proposal, which outlines why pure pragmatism needs to be tempered by a respect for, and indeed love of, every person accused or convicted of a crime.

dfxm12 1y ago

Do participants get paid a real wage?

glommer 1y ago
Preston was free to negotiate his pay with us, and we pay him a full salary. Just no health care benefits.
- dgacmu 1y ago
  Does he actually get the salary, or does the prison take huge overhead?
  - glommer 1y ago
    they take an (actually very reasonable) cut, but he is free to take his salary.
    - kgwxd 1y ago
      No cut is reasonable.
      - jjmarr 1y ago
        They need money to pay for oversight. Any time prisoners talk to someone on the outside, it's a potential conduit for contraband or organized crime.
        Balinares 1y ago
        The exact same is true of people working outside of prison.
        gbalduzzi 1y ago
        I think it's reasonable to assume an additional risk for people in prison. Even though the enrolled people are completely trustworthy, doing this prevents untrustworthy people to simulate interest in the program just to be able to contact the external world for illegal activities.

antihero 1y ago

It's amazing. Absolutely insane that people are incarcerated so long for non-violent drug crimes, though. Turso also looks really neat for small Payload sites.

CobrastanJorji 1y ago
Oh absolutely. Voters always favor harsher punishments or making things worse for those already convicted of crimes. You never get any more votes by pushing for lower punishments for any crime or by doing anything to reduce recidivism. I suspect that a pretty solid litmus test for "politician who is actually trying to make the world a better place" based just on how they vote for lowering recidivism.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- rustcleaner 1y ago
  Justification to abolish democracy, and because everything else is worse I guess we're going to have to go to a voluntarist ancap NAP-respecting society!
tptacek 1y ago
I agree with you. This is a crazy high sentence (15-30). But worth nothing that the fact pattern behind it was also pretty crazy.
badc0ffee 1y ago
"Non-violent drug crimes" brings to mind hippies selling weed or mushrooms. But this guy was selling carfentanil. I'm not saying he's to blame for the opioid crisis turning street people into shambling zombies, clogging emergency services with overdoses, and causing death, but he certainly played a part.
- cortesoft 1y ago
  He played a lot smaller part than the Sackler family, who ran Purdue Pharma and pushed their drugs into communities. They killed a lot more people than this guy, and yet none of them are in jail.

trod1234 1y ago

One of the biggest problems with the prison system in the US is that prisoners are often saddled with the debt related to or imposed on them by their incarceration which they can't pay back. The inability to find a job coupled with the crushing interest is what leads to desperation, and then repeat criminal behavior. > There is a real risk of exploitation Centralized systems always have a risk of corruption when power is concentrated in few people. Those job roles also many times attract the corrupt; and even when you have people who go in with a good moral caliber, the regular dynamics of the interactions may also twist them into being corrupt. Its a rare person with sufficient moral caliber that can survive such a job (as a guard or other prison staff) unscathed and still be a good person afterwards. Many avenues of education also do not prepare them appropriately for work in the private sector, and some careers are simply prohibited. For example becoming a chemist or engineer when they have a conviction related to ethics violations in such fields.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

larodi 1y ago

Wonder if they acquire the skills to break into systems, why would they choose not to do it in this crazy world out there? Particularly if somebody spends long time, or has spent so far.

_DeadFred_ 1y ago

How do they make sure the prison isn't just employing people already experienced in the field to make the prison money? How do they ensure people are treated fairly (normally prisoners aren't really even allowed sick days, they can't chose not to work overtime if required, etc)? Do they audit to ensure number of sick hours are comparable to non-prison work? Do they ensure prison guards bonus' aren't based on inmate performance (UNICOR does all of the above bad practices resulting in sick people being forced to work overtime in order to get the guards their bonus)? UNICOR/the Federal system 'strongly encourages' people with CAD experience, etc do the McDonalds remodel contracts, the World Trade Center work, etc. These are people that worked in the industry prior to prison and that are not traditionally been hired back after release, so it's simply being used to make UNICOR money on big contracts based on incarcerated individuals pre-existing training being exploited. In addition having structural CAD work done by people with zero say in their job, their deliverables/quality, their hours, etc seems like a bad idea. I don't know why outside engineers are using this work. The UNICOR McDonalds remodels are probably fine (though you can tell by the current feel of McDonalds that the remodels were literally done by prison inmates), but the UNICOR World Trade Center stuff seems super sketchy.

philjohn 1y ago

Yep - turns out the Nordic countries had it right all along. When you focus on rehabilitation and not just punishment you get lower redicivism rates. Who would have thought it?

gabeio 1y ago
> When you focus on rehabilitation and not just punishment From a book I recently read on the subject they seem not just to focus on rehab and lack of punishment. If there are disputes with others within the facilities the ones in the dispute must sit down and talk through their issues and find a resolution. This helps ingrain proper anger management & helps re-acclimate them to normal society where violence is rarely the best option. And it makes a ton of sense, if they never are taught how to talk out their issues they will go back to how they have handled those issues all along.
- philjohn 1y ago
  To be honest, that could certainly be filed under "rehabilitation". Giving people the skills they need to be productive members of society is definitely in that wheelhouse.
  - gabeio 1y ago
    Fair I was thinking of the substance abuse definition, and hadn’t included enough into that word.
- koolba 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - kurikuri 1y ago
    They were likely in a homogeneous population when they committed the crime that got them there in the first place, so that confounder might not matter much at all.
  - wizzwizz4 1y ago