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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

Inmates have nothing but time on their hands. We should give the mathematically inclined unsolved problems to turn over, and simple Raspberry Pis (even disconnected from the internet) for the means to code new software. If you have nothing but a wall to stare at for 12 hours a day, you may create something useful.

If I had the power I would free every non-violent prisoner. Any person in jail for putting a substance into their own body, or for selling such a substance, does not deserve to be there. Such a waste of society's resources and talent.

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I argued this with my dad saying that people deserve our compassion and someone could discover a cure for cancer.

He said he'd rather die from cancer than help someone who committed a felony.

I actually don't have a problem with him choosing to die rather than helping a felon. What's important is that he not be allowed to determine criminal justice policy.

this is one of those old biblical sayings, one who bites off their nose to spite their face. The face who is given to them out of the goodness of someone's heart if done through the process of enriching society with their work, I guess we'll be damned if they've helped the public let everyone die so we can punish that one person.

Revenge never improve the lives of anyone besides providing a momentary moment of peace, but society can be vengeful as well when you eliminate a brain who could improve the lives of others. This conundrum exists everywhere. Every religion, every person on the planet has seen this happen.

Incarceration as a form of punishment is absolutely not 'revenge'.

Unfortunately a very american view. Hope new generations can right our wrongs.

I've heard this from the EU, China, Australia, India, Canada and Japan... It seems to be popular in "law and order" societies.

I am not sure if i call all of the countries in this list "law and order".

It kind of just sucks that people and their offspring has to suffer through a bad decision this bad. I wish we had better use of the downtime they have in prison, to societies benefit, onstead of the private corp that is the prison operator.

You are making an unfounded assumption that prisoners on the whole desire to benefit society. I certainly know convicted felons and former inmates who truly do fit that mold, but I also know vastly more who could not be bothered to give a single seconds thought for society or what benefits it.

I too have personal examples on both sides.

I have an acquaintance who was convicted of fraud, sentenced to 5 years, got out early due to performing community service in jail. Haven't heard much from him after he got out though.

I have another friend who was convicted of manslaughter, he's been a very productive member of society since he was released and I feel that he's very trustworthy. I've known him for 15 years and maybe he's had some parking tickets...

A former peer was convicted of sex crimes in the early 2000s, he's reoffended in multiple countries.

A friend of a friend was convicted of eco terrorism, they've been on the run but keeping in contact somehow, they've apparently destroyed millions of dollars in properties and have yet to be caught again.

If you look at the police blotter in my city, its pretty much all repeat offenders.

That's tough :(

Judging from comments in all of the posts about psilocybin and MDMA that reach the front page, a nonzero population of HN is guilty of a felony.

Or driven over the limit 3 or more times.

Outside of maybe DPRK and France (I kid but they do take their speeding seriously) speeding is a civil crime. Speeding by some large amount (20+ in most of the US) can be a misdemeanor at the cop's discretion. You'd have to do something far beyond speeding, like provoke a police chase or something, to catch a felony. I'm unaware of any state where you can catch a felony charge from speeding and only speeding (delusional prosecutors trying to charge people with things that have zero hope of sticking notwithstanding).

Sorry, I wasn't clear. By "over the limit" I meant blood alcohol content, not speed. In many states, the third time you drive over the legal BAC limit, it's considered a felony.

That said, I do know someone who was driving recklessly (30+ mph over the limit). His kid was in the car, so they did charge him with a felony (endangering a child) and he served prison time.

Is this really true? I doubt many HN users are much above 'simple possession', which is a misdemeanour in most states, including California.

Simple possession of a federally classified CDS I (which all psychotropic substance are) is a felony in almost ALL 50 states. It may be a misdemeanor in a few, but that is not ‘most’ states.

> If you have nothing but a wall to stare at for 12 hours a day, you may create something useful.

No one in prison has 12 hours to just stare at a wall, being in prison is an involved affair. It's also presumptuous that prisoners are at all in a position to manage their time or availability. Further, even if they did have the time to just stare at a wall.. what quality of work would you honestly expect? No collaboration, no hope, no incentives. Sounds like misery to me.

> Such a waste of society's resources and talent.

Those resources don't _belong_ to society. They belong to the individual.

>Those resources don't _belong_ to society. They belong to the individual.

>Currently it costs an average of $52.61 per day ($19,202.65 per year) to keep an adult inmate incarcerated in the State of Indiana .

https://faqs.in.gov/hc/en-us/articles/115005238288-How-much-...

>SUMMARY: The fee to cover the average cost of incarceration for Federal inmates in Fiscal Year 2015 was $31,977.65 ($87.61 per day). (Please note: There were 365 days in FY 2015.) The average annual cost to confine an inmate in a Residential Re-entry Center for Fiscal Year 2015 was $26,082.90 ($71.46 per day)

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2016/07/19/2016-17...

Households in Indiana have a median annual income of $55,746, the national median annual income is $61,937.

Federal minimum wage is 7.25 an hour, or $15,080 annually. That doesn't even cover 1 inmate.

Where do you think the money comes to fund those prisons? Taxation of everyone which is definitely society and not an individual.

The tax dollars I pay to house, clothe, feed, and provide medical care for people who have no reason to be imprisoned are the resources that belong to society that are being wasted. The waste of talent limits his or her contributions to the world.

What about people who have ignored safety laws and put people in risk or who have committed fraud?

For drug usage it would probably make sense to use some kind of alternative prison which is focused on getting people off drugs and not punishment.

Make them pay restitution, bar them from the career they committed fraud in.

I don't know - it seems like we jump to prison way too early for so many offenses, why not try more reparative approaches first.

One of the people killed in the recent London Bridge stabbing was Jack Merritt. He was involved in a programme to train prisoners in law. This was called "Learning Together" because it put prisoners alongside law students. Some of those prisoners were dangerous men who'd caused real harm to people.

It was transformative, and really helped people turn their lives around.

There's a radio interview here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00035vj

Just want to note that "risk" is a highly malleable term, and "risk of risk" is not unheard of either.

Criminalizing the risk of a bad outcome is a slippery slope toward losing a heck of a lot of freedom. Damn near everything is risky on some level. This is why we generally asses civil penalties and fines when people do dangerous things but don't actually hurt anyone.

Letting the citizenry speak their minds, bear arms, and be safe from unwarranted searches all comes with some level of "risk" to everyone.

> We should give the mathematically inclined unsolved problems to turn over, and simple Raspberry Pis (even disconnected from the internet) for the means to code new software.

This reminds me of the ReiserFS story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Reiser

How so? He developed ReiserFS before he was convicted, so I’m not sure what the connection is.

I'm with you about the first paragraph. People, even violent criminals like the guy portrayed here, deserve a second chance. And in general, sentences in the US are very harsh in my opinion. But I disagree with your extreme statement in the second paragraph.

> I would free every non-violent prisoner. Any person in jail for putting a substance into their own body, or for selling such a substance, does not deserve to be there. Such a waste of society's resources and talent.

Drugs are a waste of society's resources and talent. So many bright young people turned into junkies.

Also, giving hard drugs to someone is a form of violence. The britons did that to weaken China in their attept to colonize it. Pimps often get their women on drugs to make them not leave. etc etc.

The extreme thing to do is to put people in prison for consuming/selling drugs.

Consuming drugs may be a vice but so is gambling. You don’t put gamblers in prison just because they gamble.

It is also possible to have a healthy relationship with drugs (or gambling). Most people can and do have a healthy relationship with drugs already e.g. alcohol.

Again, throwing people in prison because of your judgement of their choices is an extreme thing to do.

Imagine if we threw people in prison because they were eating to much sugar and becoming obese!

Giving people choices about what they want to consume is not violence. Forcing or coercing them to do so, is. This is what Britain did in China and what pimps do to prostitutes.

There is a difference between gambling (which is illegal in many forms and in many places, so is punishable in similar manners to drug consumption) and drug use. That difference is legality. The prevailing theory is that people who deviate from what society deems (as a whole through a representative legislature) acceptable behaviors are to be punished, and since incarceration is the prevailing punishment it is imposed. Not saying I agree with the position, but there is a clear difference between legal and illegal actions at a societal level.

As for what you termed selling drugs, a person who sells clearly illegal, potentially toxic, and often addictive chemical agents outside of the lawfully prescribed means of doing so are in a very separate category than the consumers of those drugs. Individuals selling heroin, fentanyl, or crack are clearly acting outside the law and in many cases doing so without regard (and sometimes explicitly benefitting from) the massively harmful effects of these drugs and the addictive attributes they possess.

I wouldn't make my worst enemy try to program without the internet...

Programming without the internet isn’t hard. It’s like driving without a GPS. You have to commit more to memory, or, you know, use offline resources.

If you're able to set things up beforehand, it's not even that hard to get crutches like offline copies of Stackoverflow and Wikipedia via DB dumps

I got started with python via a book on a plane, no computer, no internet (a looong time ago)...

Did similar once... but hadn't run through the first setup piece where it ran through installing all the dependencies for the approach in the book.

Which (obviously) couldn't work, as there was no way to download those dependencies mid-flight.

Made some progress with the book during the flight, but it was mostly theoretical rather than being able to do the things. ;)

My introduction to programming in the 90's was a phonebook-sized tome called "Learn Visual C++ in 12 easy lessons" or something like that. It came with a CD with Microsoft Visual C++ 1.0. For some reason, it didn't work; I couldn't compile hello world.

So I learned C++ just by reading the book, learning all about complicated object oriented features without ever having written any code. About six months later or so I got access to a Borland C++ compiler, and at that point I could actually do stuff.

It's possible to learn to program that way if you don't have any better alternative, but it's not a path I'd recommend if you do.

Ah, working through K&R was such a pleasant time, back in undergrad.

Which book?

They’re referring to K&R’s The C Programming Language [0].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_Programming_Language

I learned to program without the Internet. There was just a blocky image on the TV, a rubber keyboard, and 16K of RAM. The overwhelming majority of the available memory resided in the programmer's head.

While I'd never consider trying to impose that approach on someone, I'd certainly suggest it. It really encourages attention to detail and total focus, which are increasingly valuable skills these days.

Yeah, but you can't provide the Internet because there are those who will use it to coordinate crimes. So that leaves choices:

* No programming

* Programming with no Internet

Preload it with books.

Dave Beazley did it AND talked about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ4Sn-Y7AP8

Summary: he was involved in patent litigation and had to analyse a codebase on a computer locked in a vault. He couldn't bring in any electronics but he did discover that Python was installed on the machine he was using. The video describes the rest.

How about providing web access through remote desktop that has a browser with websockets, flash, and non-GET requests disabled and only retrieving pages through a squid cache?

They could just solicited donations of programming books for prison libraries. There are a few million prisoners in America, getting one programing book for every ten prisoners would only mean a few hundred thousand books. I'm sure that many could be scrounged up. That's really not that many books in the grand scheme of things. And for such a worthy cause, I'm sure you wouldn't have trouble finding people to donate a book.

Sounds like it'd be a variable result. eg depending on the skill and personality of the person involved, over time they may or may not learn to exploit that system too.

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