Hacker News Reader

Comment by dantillberg | Hacker News Reader

But what of possible negative repercussions? I imagine that prison administrators that get poor reviews on Yelp are more likely than average to respond negatively to reviews received, and more likely than average to expend a lot of energy figuring out (even if they are wrong) who wrote the review, and exact revenge upon them.

It would be less snarky, but maybe it would be better to send these faxes to state/federal elected representatives that could act to change things for the better, and that would (generally) have less motivation to seek revenge?

View on HN

I can't say I know what happens at a prison, but I'd assume there's some person(s) working as office admin at these places who sort out the incoming faxes. I'd be surprised if these don't just get trashed when received as they have no real bearing on the prison operations. I doubt Yelp reviews would sway elected reps either, unless there was proof a person they represent who can vote was upset. In other words, I imagine these faxes just waste some prison admin time in filtering them into the trash/recycle heap.

I imagine anyone writing these reviews from within the prison might anticipate them being read by prison staff, regardless of whether they were faxed to the prison.

Off the top of my head I imagine that most prison administrators are political appointees and probably know far less about the actual conditions of the prison and are less removed from the day-to-day running than one might expect. They have the ability to enact top-down changes in operations, but generally have no motivation to do so. I would think feedback like this would be quite valuable to them, so they could gain a perspective on what's going on that isn't coming from their direct reports.

that's quite an imagination you have.

Thanks. I don't particularly care about the topic, otherwise I'd go about fleshing out my musings with actual information. In this case I might use Quora to validate the basics and then spend some time on Google to answer particulars as I think about them.

But I'd say a good imagination is a necessary tool if one wants to understand the world. Without it, I wouldn't know where to start a search. Here I made my work available for others who might want to build on it, since I'm not all that interested in it.

Hey, don't let your absence of caring about the topic, or lack of "actual information" stop you from sharing on HN the things you imagine based on no actual information or experience! You might not care to spend the time to learn anything about what you're talking about, but you can still spend time sharing your uninformed 'musings' on things you "aren't all that interested in" with HN! Keep on rocking!

Read the thread again, I think you'd find that my contribution to this topic has been more constructive than yours.

Reading the reviews it's about 95% joke reviews with an occasional honest one about visitation or conditions. I doubt anybody takes them seriously.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com