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I sometimes wonder if these sorts of people who "succeed" in these odd ways on the wrong side of the criminal fence, would have had rather successful careers had just a couple of things gone differently towards the start of their life.
I'm not sure how true that is but what I do believe is that the following is 100% true:
- smart people - who grow up in disadvantaged locales - and have emotional trauma due to the above - may end up in a life of crime and then prison
How do I know this? I've worked with a couple people like this. Some ended up in prison, others almost went to prison and later on went to work in corporate America (no sarcasm intended here).
A friend and I got split up into different cell blocks because we were helping each other with litigation. Knowing this would happen we'd come up with a way to communicate across the facility. We had these 5x5 grids of letters, no "K", where 11 on the grid was A, 15 was E, 55 was Z etc. They had these touchscreen commissary kiosks where you could order food. The quantity of each item allowed up to 4 digits, e.g. 9999. So that gives you two letters. 1121 = AF for instance. We'd start at the top, Beef Noodles, 1121. Chicken Noodles, 2412 etc and work through the menu. We shared our login IDs with each other. We'd place these huge orders into the cart but never checkout. Then we'd log in to each other's accts from our separate cell blocks multiple times a day, read our messages and write our replies. Got caught eventually, 10 days in the Hole. I FOIA'd their investigation and it was very amusing seeing the report from the facility "Intelligence Dept" trying to decode all the messages.
Are they legally able to prevent inmates from helping the litigation of another? That's insane
The US is not a free society
Which from what I gather isn't very true - being smart can often lead to over confidence and making mistakes, and also a lot of crime is not premeditated.
The gifted are more over represented in prison then black males, however, most of those gifted are themselves minorities.
This includes white collar crime and all kinds of non-violent crimes though.
Is it the same for the violent crime subset?
My initial instinct would be that violent crimes are often committed out of passion, and are unrelated to intelligence.
Drinking openly is illegal in most of Mexico and the USA. If the area is run down and the shops are broken I will crack open a beer on the street without a second thought. I wouldn't think of doing it openly in some yuppie neighborhood where some Karen will rat your ass out in 5 minutes.
I believe this to be true and some of my former schoolmates who were brilliant IQ wise and got high marks on math and physics still ended up in jails. Some were later able to recover and lead more productive life
I have no comment on whether C-suite types commit more crimes than prisoners, but I'd wager they don't.
Not everyone in jail got busted for benign stuff like selling a joint. There are lots and lots of incarcerated murderers, rapists, fraudsters, drunk drivers, etc.
Consider who is doing the "establishing" and what criminality they ignore because those doing it do not even go to prison or jail 99% of time.
My parents often pointed out a very tall bearded homeless man who would stand in the intersection and shout at cars. They called him “Bigfoot”. Mom explained that he had multiple college degrees, such as physics, and indicated that he was a waste of a life.
In US federal prisons, drug offenders make up over 40% of the total population, by very far the largest group. The next largest tracked category, "Weapons, Explosives, and Arson" is 23%. [0]
Granted, these are almost entirely US federal offenses, which have of course been flux throughout US history with respect to proper authority, and drug offenses have tended to grease the wheels of jurisprudence so as to be regarded constitutional (albeit with a very inconsistent set of underlying principles). Murder for example is not generally a violation of federal law absent (a fairly long list of) special circumstances.
I do not believe there is any state where the number of people incarcerated for fraud convictions is in the same order of magnitude as drug convictions. In Ohio, where this story takes place, drug offenders are about 14% of the population while "fraudsters" are about 1%.
I think it's pretty reasonable to assert that a significant portion of prisons in the USA are convicted of offenses that are not easy to understand as a moral affront to society or an infringement on the rights of anyone else.
https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...
On behalf / or covered by corporations they openly do things for which any normal person would be criminally charged and put behind bars. Wake me up when people who for example were involved in Bradley development scandal are punished. Or ones involved in DuPont PFOA contamination case etc. etc. So they do have criminal mind. They just know they would personally get away with it and in a worst case the corporations get fined.
You guys just can't let go
There's a guy by the name of Michael Lacey who is popular in Tiktok under the name Comrade Sinque [1]. He spent 21 years in prison. It was a much longer sentence. I'm not sure what happened to get him out much earlier.
What was his crime? Felony murder. Sounds bad, right? So what were the details. At age 19 he and a friend burgled a house. The homeowner killed his friend. That was it.
Many Americans don't realize how this works and how insanely unjust it is. It's called the felony murder doctrine and it is unique to the US. It means that if a felony is being commited and if anyone dies then you, as the felon, can be charged with murder regardless of how they died. In states like Alabama, all burglaries are felonies. So if you and a friend break into a house, the police respond and kill your friend, you can get convicted of murder and sentenced to 30-years in prison.
Not a made up example [2].
Anyway, Comrade Sinque is better read than probably at least 95% of Americans. He is thoughtful and intelligent. He wasn't born a criminal (that's 18th century thinking). He's certainly not low IQ (as some would have you believe criminals all are). No, the issue is material conditions. Poverty and a lack of opportunity.
We probably spent about $1 million convicting and incarcerating him for 21 years. This doesn't really seem like a good investment.
[1]: https://www.tiktok.com/@comrade_sinque
[2]: https://apnews.com/article/felony-murder-officer-shooting-al...
That one being: don't rob a house in a state with a castle doctrine where the owner is allowed to fucking kill you. If you first hand help someone get killed, you're at fault. Sounds reasonable.
But, I also wish we had far far more deterrents, and far more deaths, when it comes to robbers.
If deterrants worked, why do these incidents keep happening? Why isn't this the safest country on Earth?
Poverty costs all of us but rather than lifting people out of poverty, we'd rather spend way more on the prison-industrial complex, slavery 2.0 (ie convict leasing) and law enforcement.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
some simply wanna be Pablo Escobar and become a reggaeton poster child. they don't do it for other reason than become their mental image of a gangster.
yes, they are intelligent but they insist and insist into do what they consider cool, and that coolness come to be a "hacker" or a criminal
so far from top of my mind I remember a serial corporate scammer, a social media middle man who constantly sell access to people working in meta (unlocking/locking accounts), a drug precursor middlewoman, a money laundering mule/scammer/errand boy. every time it was the same. they wanted to show a gangster luxury life in ig. the middlewoman was something else, never got to understand her. 60 years. probably she was just for the thrill of it.
had they opportunities to do something else? repeatedly. specially after prison or with family help. but they refuse, the next business will be the one. they will become millionaires for sure. jail again.
Investigation finds inmates built computers and hid them in prison ceiling - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14093970 - April 2017 (188 comments)
Or just give them long gamebooks -not necesarily fantasy themed- a la CYOA but with pencils and erasers (and, yes, they can be turned into a weapon, but inmates will use for paperwork or prison classes anyway).
Some of them allow you to roam under a whole city and solve enigmas/puzzles and fight.
I mean… yes, obviously, if you look on a computer you're gonna find software.
What is with this BS idea of medieval jail conditions...
I found the C# compiler that is hidden several levels deep by default in the Windows directory and decided to teach the other prisoners how to code. I needed some reference materials as it's really hard when you have no docs and literally just the compiler. They don't allow computer books in most places "for security reasons", but a very elderly nun took pity on me and asked me what I wanted. I told her "C# Weekend Crash Course" (I wasn't a C# dev at the time and it was the only title I could think of) and she bought it off Amazon and smuggled in not only the book but the CD-ROM that came with it, bless her. I managed to teach the guys how to write text adventures which they enjoyed. I couldn't think of what else fun I could get them to do with only console text in/out.
maybe specialized calculators that ask some parameters (like "how many days" etc) and run some formulas
could even be useful for something
Of course, this makes no sense, as most criminals have low impulse control and don't think about the consequences of their actions in terms of risk/reward calculations. We should use prison time to re-educate these people and try to make them better instead of psychologically torturing them, but here we are, and it's very unlikely things can change within the current political system (too many "checks and balances" for meaningful reforms)
https://epic.org/free-prison-tablets-in-promise-and-in-pract...