Working on databases from prison

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.

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.

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.

Much of 'justice' has been usurped from the victim into a jobs campaign for the state.

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...

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-dec-01-me-59847...

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.

In most US jurisdictions the victim of a crime is allowed to make a statement during the sentencing phase of the trial. So the victim can certainly request release if they want it although the judge isn't obligated to adhere.

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.

If victims determined the sentences, I expect people would spend a lot more time in prison, way more than a non-emotionally involved and wronged person would think fair.

IMHO letting victims set the sentence would be the worst way to do it.

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.

List of prohibited items: https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/uscode.php?width=840...

In western philosophy an offender is considered to have offended against society even if their crime is of a personal nature. As such, they are tried, condemned, and punished by society according to codified rules. A victim, if there is one, is not really a part of this process.

There is a fundamentally sound basis for this philosophy, including equity (different justice for different people is no justice for anyone), impartiality, and respect for human rights.

There are other philosophies of justice: for example, the traditional "I'm strongest I get the best stuff" or "you dissed me ima kill you." Some are codified similarly to western justice ("killing a man is requires you pay his heirs 100 she-camels of which 40 must be pregnant, killing a woman is half that, killing a Jew one-third, and so on"). Others involve negotiation between victim (or their families) and offender -- which often works out well, since the offender is often is a position of power to start with and is very likely come out on top.

The simple "an eye for an eye" is just the beginning of a very very deep rabbit hole you can go down on the road to enlightenment.

The justice system is pretty far from actual justice in many cases, but this wouldn't get it closer.

Turso also looks really neat for small Payload sites.

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.

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.

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.

2) They wouldn't have to if they didn't insist on locking him up

Inmates are treated very differently by the legal system than regular people. Thirteenth Amendment: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States”

Framing it as offsetting the cost would also make it very easy to increase the cut, bit by bit, until it gets to a truly unreasonable level. And since the person is already in prison and we have to pay for them no matter what, why would they choose to work if the deal is so bad?

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

The dude is is prison, slave like conditions are ridiculous, but there should be a healthy overhead.

Happy to keep nerding out on comparative legal stuff from around the world! Just keeping this grounded in "you probably wouldn't enjoy living somewhere where your landlord can have you imprisoned for unpaid rent".

Evil is a threshold, it's not a competition with limited spots

Sometimes big crime families or notorious serial killers get away with it, but it doesn't lower the threshold for anyone else

It doesn't make it any better that someone else is doing even worse. You don't get to do a little crime, as a treat

I've voted for drug legalization (including possession). However, that doesn't mean that I condone all drug dealing behavior.

Do you have a source? It seems that guy was selling MDMA and marijuana. Here's the relevant quote from https://pthorpe92.dev/intro/my-story/

I was caught with MDMA coming in the mail from Vancouver, and some marijuana coming from california (the latter of which is what I am currently serving my time for right now)

https://www.courts.nh.gov/sites/g/files/ehbemt471/files/docu...

>"On December 24, 2016, three Manchester police officers responded to an apartment following a report of a domestic dispute. The report was made by the mother of Ashley Arbogast, who advised that her daughter had called her Stating that her boyfriend had broken her arm during an argument."

EDIT: another commentor found that it was MDMA and weed, so this discussion is purely theoretical and doesn’t apply to OP.

Once you've taken 10 years of someone's life there is no giving that back either. As technology progresses the cost of recording evidence will go down which will help convict and prove the innocence of people.

This is a state by state thing. FWIW in this case, ME doesn't have private prisons. I don't bring this up to imply everything related to their cut is on the up and up, however, I believe Maine is very much incentivized to make this a useful program in terms of keeping people from returning to jail (as opposed to squeezing every dollar from the prisoners).

* https://apnews.com/general-news-d68dca63e95946fbb9cc82f38540...

* https://www.doj.nh.gov/news-and-media/preston-thorpe-sentenc...

~2012 he was caught selling MDMA and marijuana, and went to prison

~end or 2015 or start of 2016 he was released on probation

[Edit: Added entry] December 2016 police responding to a domestic violence call enter his apartment to make contact with the alleged victim, and discover U-47700 (a synthetic opioid) https://www.courts.nh.gov/sites/g/files/ehbemt471/files/docu...

April 2017 the police find traces of carfentanil while executing a search warrant at his place - plausibly but not provably linked to some recent carfentanil deaths - and police announce they are searching for him. https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/man-wanted-suspected-let...

May 2017 he ends up back in prison.

Aug 2017 he pleads guilty to possession of U47700 (a synthetic opioid) with intent to distribute https://www.wmur.com/article/defense-plans-appeal-of-search-...

Oct 2017 he's sentenced to 15-30 years on the above charge, he has not been charged with possessing the carfentanil (yet) despite the apparent evidence https://www.wmur.com/article/man-facing-carfentanil-charge-r...

The articles aren't clear on this, but given his own recounting I assume that a suspended sentence for Marijuana was un-suspended as a result of the new charges and he is serving that sentence first, or concurrently.

Why not? I much prefer a society in which I can get away with some crimes to one where every crime is prosecuted.

I just wanted to point out that there is clear evidence that this individual was involved in at least one violent act, as is often the case with ‘non-violent drug convicts’.

It is now 4 PM, about to clock out for the day because I gotta wait for CI run thats >30m. I come back here and it's still going on. This is #3 comment I see when I open HN, ensuing thread takes up two pages scrolls on 16" MBP.

It's bad of me to write this because, well, who cares? Additionally, am I trying to litigate what other people comment?

The root feeling driving me to express myself is a form of frustrated boredom -- rolling with that and verbalizing concretely, a bunch of people writing comments with the one thing they're hyperfocusing on their record to drive a conclusion on their value as a person/morality, and then people pointing out that's not some moral absolute, asking for links, discussing the links...

...well, it's all just clutter.

Or YouTube comment-level discussion, unless we're planning on relitigating every case he's been involved in.

This all would be better if it the kangaroo court stuff was confined to a thread with all of the evidence against him, so we didn't have a bunch of weak cases, or if people didn't treat this as an opportunity to be a drive by judge. Article def. ain't about his crimes, and he ain't saying he's innocent or an angel.

(and the idea that "drug crimes" implies "hippie selling weed or psychedelics" so calling them "drug crimes" is hiding the ball...where does that come from? Its especially dissonant b/c you indicate the mere fact he sold an opiod is so bad that this guy is...bad? irredeemable? not worth discussing?...so presumably you care a lot about opiods, so presumably you know that's whats driven drug crime the last, uh, decade or two?)

No, they forfeited their freedoms and we're put away by due process, but if that's your point of view then we've nothing further to discuss. Incredible stuff on HN these days.

Speaking for myself, I'm actually just discussing the idea that a non-violent crime like drug dealing necessarily deserves a light sentence in general.

> Sounds like a you thing

It is a me thing. That's why I said "brings to mind".

I'm a product of my time. I remember when weed and psychedelics meant demonization and heavy sentences, and it was absurd because those substances aren't that dangerous.

This is the context in which I'm accustomed to calling drug dealing a "non-violent crime". So, I feel like I need to point out that things are not quite the same with deadly drugs like carfentanil.

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.

https://www.npr.org/2022/03/04/1084452251/the-vast-majority-...

Maine: https://www.corrections1.com/finance-and-budgets/maine-lawma... "the state can deduct up to 20% of their income — 10% for room and board, which is sent to the state’s general fund, not the Department of Corrections , and up to 10% to cover transportation provided by the department. Since 2020, the state fund has collected a total of $2.4 million.

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.

Selling drugs isn't evil. Not selling drug doesn't make you good. People take drugs for various reasons. If a doctor sells them they are good but if someone else sells them they are evil?

The person buying could have been fired and can't afford Doctors prescription so the person selling could be an angel.

Punishing is always a recipe for they punishment going back to society

> Why are they paid

Because people have expenses other than food and lodging. Prisoners do to, some save money for after they leave prison others spend it at the commissary.

People that sell fentanyl (or similar) are very bad for society, to avoid the triggering "evil". Look how many people have died in the last 10 years. It's insane.

EDIT: I personally know a young man that died from a fent overdose and it's likely he didn't know what he took had fent in it. 22 years old and the whole world ahead him. Completely destroyed his family.

And to be clear, I'm opposed to capital punishment and dangerous conditions in prisons. I'm just pointing out that I don't think your argument is very good. If you think we as a society are willing to flippantly put people in prison because it's cheap I don't see how you can trust us to no resort to other flippant measures if the cost was high.

However, ideally, I don’t think that it makes sense for someone to go to prison, which costs tax money, and meanwhile earn the same amount of money by remote working from prison as someone in the outside world, who actually has living expenses to pay for (which get taxed also).

So, I think, when it comes to fairness, it wouldn’t be unreasonable if a partial cut goes to the TCOO of holding that prisoner.

Now again, American prisons have their whole incentive model messed up, so I don’t even want to get in an argument about America’s implementation of this system and how it would lead to more problems— because it’s well-known and more than expected.

And only one company is allowed to import the specific leaves/material (coca leafs). The government restricts everyone from importing them unless it's one of the biggest companies in the world.

Perhaps our laws would be fairer and simpler if enforcement were draconian and uniform

i can't even, and it sounds made up.

Minority Report is a counterfactual to this claim. The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed. Technology is a tool to extend one’s grasp to meet one’s reach, and vice versa, and is a tool that serves power. Those with power are best able to bend tools to their ends, just or unjust.

> It is the duty of the poor to support and sustain the rich in their power and idleness. In doing so, they have to work before the laws' majestic equality, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Anatole_France

No, but our enforcement has limited resources. We can't arrest and jail every offender of every crime, so we pick and choose where to spend our enforcement resources. All the money spent pursuing, arresting, trying, and imprisoning this guy could have been spent going after people like the Sacklers.

> From the study, they determined that because the groups were created to be approximately equal, individual differences are not necessary or responsible for intergroup conflict to occur.

> Lutfy Diab repeated the experiment with 18 boys from Beirut. The 'Blue Ghost' and 'Red Genies' groups each contained 5 Christians and 4 Muslims. Fighting soon broke out, not between the Christians and Muslims but between the Red and Blue groups.

The whole thread is silly. I don't think a lot of people here are going to stick up for a 15 year stretch for a 24 year old for selling opiates. Probably don't need to pull the Sacklers into it.

Drugs are an anti-social drain on society, that sickens its buyers, turning them into zombies or criminals, and turns the sellers into greedy, violent people who corrupt law enforcement.

Your edge case of an angel doesn't translate to the actual realities of drug trafficking and addiction.

The state needs to get out of domestic warfare, war on drugs, war on poverty, war on crime, quit abusing its customers (aka "criminals"), and stick only to killing and oppressing foreign tribes! Put a 12 year cap on sentences, the state should have no right to take the life of its customer even if the taking is placing in a box. Also I would like to see UBI go to released felons first as well as the vote, as they have seen significant economic sequelae and injustice at the hands of the state!

People like big strong dominating government until it gets replaced with the Mormon church, or a Caliphate, then nooo it's not statesmanship but just religion. (Hint: all states are religions, and codes are religious texts. What do freedom of religion and freedom of association mean in this context, instead of the toothless safe-for-government one you're used to thinking of it in?)

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.

damn…

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.

Also you can establish homogeneity using genetic analysis such as the fixation index. Unsurprisingly, Swedes and Finns are extremely closely related.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixation_index#Autosomal_genet...

There are many possible metrics to measure heterogeneity, such as linguistic and religious diversity, variations in value systems, etc.

It cannot be understated how harmful fentanyl is and how low quality of a drug it is. Low quality as in the high sucks.

(I've never taken drugs and I don't drink)

And secondly, he has a good point. We don't want to make locking people up easy or cheap. It should be high-friction, it should take a long time, and it should cost the government lots and lots of money.

Why? Incentives. The government has no reason to prevent crime if locking people up is cheap. It's made even worse by the promise of cheap or free labor. Then, you run into issues where the government actually wants people to fail and do crime, so they can extract labor from them. We see this quite aggressively in some southern states like Georgia. A remnant of Jim Crow era America.

But, if prison is expensive, the government will be incentivized to put some of that money into crime prevention programs. Things like homeless shelters, food banks, job programs.

https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-myth-of-the-nordic-rehabil...

More broadly, scientific racism is bunk. (This is a generalisation: I didn't establish it in my previous comment, but it's true nonetheless.)

I live in Sweden and now the gangs are recruiting children because they don't get sentenced even for murder (maybe 2 years max).

The other side of prison is keeping the public safe - you also have zero recidivism with the Bukele approach.

Understanding that we are hetreogenic is hard.

Perhaps it'd be an interesting SFF novel.

That’s about as direct an accusation as it gets.

Americans have become too comfortable with their everyday sadism.

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.

https://www.wbtv.com/2025/06/17/what-forgiveness-charleston-...