Life After White Collar Crime
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
> A reporter from Absolute Return, a trade publication for the hedge-fund industry, asked Grant, “How do Wall Street skills usually translate in prison?” His reply: “These skills are not only in large degree useless, they are probably counterproductive.” As he told me recently, “Business rewards a certain type of attitude and assertiveness—all things that will get you killed in prison.”
....
> Before reporting to prison, he advised them, mail yourself the phone numbers of family members and friends on the visitors’ list, because “you’ll be too discombobulated to remember them once you’re inside.” And remind your wife never to touch paper money on the morning of a visit; almost every bill bears traces of drug residue, which will set off the scanners.
....
> He draws a distinction between his work and the industry of white-collar “prison coaches” who offer bespoke services for a price. Among them, Wall Street Prison Consultants promises to “ensure you serve the shortest sentence possible in the most favorable institution.” It sells consulting packages at the levels of Bronze, Silver, and Gold, the finest of which includes “Polygraph Manipulation Techniques,” “Prison Survival Orientation Coaching,” and an “Early Release Package” that helps clients apply for a drug-treatment program to reduce the length of a sentence.
I believe there's a lot of work to be done to help people re-integrate with society.
This is a theme with YC. Another cool startup they have backed is: Recidiviz https://www.recidiviz.org
https://thecorners.substack.com/p/if-you-cant-take-in-anymor...
so - America has an extremely large prison population. I've never heard this before though. I mean I've heard the money has trace amounts of drugs thing, but not when visiting family members in prison don't touch paper money.
You'd think it was a common problem, people touching paper money and setting off scanners and then getting stopped, searched and maybe questioned depending on a lot of stuff, like skin color. Being black and touching money on the day of visiting a relative in prison must be in some ways an extremely dangerous thing to do.
Unless of course this guy is full of shit. Or I just haven't heard of this problem which I guess is also a possibility, it's just - my sensors are going off here.
A mass spectrometer of the type they use at airports for explosives, can be used for drugs and easily acquired by any prison.
The people behind him, also trying to get into the prison to visit someone?
But I guess one should try to see how it works.
Then when you call the group of people you were meeting and say "They won't let me in, finish your drinks and let's head somewhere else" they somehow figure out how passports work.
Maybe they thought I was pulling out my passport to be a nuisance like the parent comment and would try again with my drivers license when they said no.
This. There are no super scanners that detect drug reside in prisons or jails. There are occasionally dogs though. Dogs will catch if you handled old school drugs (coke,heroin,etc). If a dog alerts on you - the guards know something is up. But that doesn't mean there is enough evidence on you for an arrest. Often jails/prisons will round up a shift of guards and let the dogs smell around - this catches a few bad guards occasionally. Recently, things have changed. Right now the big issue in jails/prisons is fentanyl - it is difficult to train k9s on fentanyl due to it's handling - and there are not enough k9s or departments that can do it (since it is so dangerous). Good luck finding 25 micrograms in mail or on visitors.
Are these people going to the same sort of prisons where getting killed is a serious risk?
I do know someone (I'm not going to disclose any details to protect his privacy). But I don't think he'd agree with you on that.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/220920/number-of-state-p...
And given that there are ~ 1.8 million people in prison in the US, you have 1 in 15000 chances to be murdered in prison per year.
For context, your chances are 1 in 20000 in the general US population [1].
[1] From the reported 5 per 100,000 people murder rate, which includes the 0,5% of the population in prison (though the latter is such a small percentage that doesn't really change the general result).
So it’s 1 in 10,000 per year aka a 1 in 500 shot of being murdered in a 20 year prison sentence which seems dangerous but still unlikely.
If you say so. That's not a compelling response. Any data other than "I say it's meaningless"?
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-jail...
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2021/06/23/jail_mortality/
etc
Both links are about jails, when the discussion was about prisons. Their pedantry was completely on point.
And while prisons and jails are similar enough that you can group data from them to get a view of the entire legally detained population, that doesn't make statements about one entirely transferable to the other. They're different institutions run by different people and housing different (though overlapping) populations.
1) Prisons and jails are horrible places, and inmates are not given enough protection against violence from other inmates, or the guards. Murder statistics are horrifying.
-- or --
2) There are no safe prisons, anywhere.
If it's (1) you'll get no argument from me.
And I wouldn't expect prisons/jails to have the same (or comparable) variety in murder rates as there is between say rural Utah and South Side Chicago.
So the argument is kind of moot.
God Bless America.
This sounds like bullshit. Those sound like things that will get you challenged but not killed. Animal nature is to challenge the strong but prey on the weak.
Obviously 2008 brought many examples of risk not being properly accounted for but that's mostly something different.
"Since the turn of the millennium, the prosecution of white-collar crime has plummeted—but this should not imply a surge in moralism among our leading capitalists. After the attacks of September 11th, the F.B.I. began to shift resources toward counterterrorism. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers cut the budget of the Internal Revenue Service so sharply that it had the same number of special agents in 2017 as it had half a century earlier, even though the national population has grown by two-thirds."
This couldn't be right, but I heard at one time, it was down to eight employees, and two room in a federal building's basement.
Just throw it into a pumped up stock market, and watch the money flow in?
It's basically only the wealthy whom have access to that free money though.
The poor are screwed as usual. I still miss my 5% cd rates.
Are you kidding me. 18 months (of which he will likely only serve 12 at a prison camp) for stealing $350k seems very lenient. He should have put it in bitcoin would have made $1.8 million or about 10 years at NASA. People have gotten longer sentences back in the 2000s for fraud on ebay. I would say he got very very lucky to only get 18 months for such blatant and large fraud. He could have easily been handed a decade or longer.
In the end only them know if they broke the laws or not, but for sure it's not the 0% which society implies.
Trump has been mentioned and the consensus around him is pretty high that he committed white collar crimes, but at the same time I think that the intelligencia pricing Obama's possibility of white collar crimes at 0% is too low.
Same goes for the elite of the elite in business:
Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin...only them know what they did, and if something about them emerges it should be received as a surprise ....but not that huge of a surprise if you get what I mean.
Musk we know that he has repeatedly violated securities laws, but for sure there is much more brewing below the surface that we don't know of.
Fwiw, "insider trading" is not an actual law. It's a constantly-shifting regulation maintained by the SEC.
In the example you're citing, Musk tweeted financial information about Tesla. This would have been totally precedented and OK for the company to release as a PDF on their website, but there was no standing principle on whether a tweet counted as a public release of financial info. After deliberation and some caveats, the SEC said "Yes, this is fine" [1].
I don't think this counts as a "violation of security law". Would most CEOs have played it safe and asked their lawyers first, who could have consulted the SEC, and waited six months for a draft new regulation? Probably. But I don't think it makes the tweet illegal, or even especially wrong.
(I'm talking about the 420 tweet)
Also what the sibling wrote.
I agree with some of the nuance, too: