That's some fine problem solving, albeit not the problems the prison wanted to be solved.
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've seen claims that the average IQ in prisons is roughly equivalent to the average IQ of the general population. The line most commonly mentioned after that fact is "and those are the ones that got caught."
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).
Some people really activate their brains once they get locked up. The things I've seen people construct from literal garbage in prison. Tattoo guns are a popular one. Obviously half the population has a way of making some sort of device analogous to a car cigarette lighter in prison by finding staples, bits of wire, foil etc that they can stick in a 110V outlet to heat up and light their drugs from. Necessity really is the mother of invention.
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.
Yes, especially when it is civil rights litigation, e.g. facility conditions. They will do everything within their disposal to interfere with litigation. A lot of county facilities in the USA will retain private counsel, not government lawyers, for these kinds of cases, and it is enormously expensive. I can remember one case where they took a newspaper from a prisoner and he sued, and the jail took it to trial and lost and had to pay not only damages of $15K, but also their legal fees, which were somewhere around $1.5m, but also the plaintiff's counsel, which was another $900K IIRC.
Don't forget if an inmate starts to look like they are winning all they have to do is change that one inmates conditions and the inmate no longer has standing and the case is dismissed (unless they have permeant damages and they are suing for damages), yet the system is designed for those lawsuits to be the check/balances. It seems like a good system, but in actuality the check/balance is easily negated by those in power.
And the 'change' of the condition is often the inmate getting shipped to a different prison, with the transfer/shipping process having the nick name 'diesel therapy'. So if you do are challenge, you are going to get punished, your safety is going to be put at VERY high risk (you are going to have to fight, and who knows who they lock you up with at night and what might get pulled on you), and you are going to be VERY hungry (meal times/shipping times often accidentally don't work out) you don't stay anywhere long enough to purchase commissary to make up for them not feeding you, etc.
Look at how upset immigration people are now that the Fed loopholes I point out are being made very public in immigration stuff (all the movement between facilities to limit court access). These are things that have happened forever, just no one cared when it was normal inmates.
I'm aware of a businessman who did high profile pro se case, regarding some alleged white collar business license violations . They moved him to different jails 300 times in a year to sabotage his defense (SDNY, so they had unlimited amount of money to fuck with him). He miraculously still won the case.
The United States has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, with approximately 541 to 614 people imprisoned per 100,000 residents as of 2022–2026. While representing only 5% of the global population, the US holds roughly 20% of the world's prisoners, totalling over 1.8 million people.
For many crimes, the U.S. loves giving eye watering long sentences for offences that would result in a tenth of the prison time in other countries.
I read ‘helping the litigation’ to mean they both may have been involved in the same crime, and they mean to stop collusion after the fact, before trial concludes?
Both ways. Mostly it is just helping with the legal process. Rarely is it a multi-plaintiff case as the courts don't like those from prisoners. It causes too many logistical nightmares. How are two plaintiffs to communicate their wishes to each other on how to proceed? How will they both appear in court together if they are in different buildings or even different institutions?
I remember being on one join-plaintiff civil rights case and the government lawyer told the judge they were going to criminally charge me with impersonating a lawyer as I "must have given legal advice to the other plaintiff." The judge asked how they thought the complaint was written. "As I see it, one plaintiff must have pressed one key, then the other plaintiff pressed the next key on the keyboard. That is our belief."
The feds used to allow you to appeal your sentence forever. I mean if there are problems with a sentence, the government should want to fix it, right?
But then they decided it was too expensive giving convicts access to the courts. So they changed it to I think 7 days. But they decided that was too short.
So the compromise between forever and 7 days? 14 days. If you don't appeal within 14 days you can only appeal on a very narrow scope. Now realize, those 14 days after sentencing you are being transferred from a federal detention center (fed jail) to a prison, either via con-air or prison bus, cross country, staying in various country jails with minimal access to your lawyer or a legal library if you can't afford a lawyer.
The American Justice System is designed to appear like a justice system but to in actuality be non-navigable unless you have expensive paid lawyers working for you. It is very much a multi-teared system. Have you ever tried canceling the WSJ? Imagine if every single step of a Justice system was designed to be as frustrating/stiffling/delaying (when every day counts) as the WSJ canceling process. Oh, you are being transported, and you want access to the law library? Well we can only get you that during lunch hours, so chose if you want to eat. And oh yeah sorry that the morning transfer to the bus was messed up and you happened to miss breakfast. Sure you want to skip lunch? We might ship you again any time and you might miss dinner if we do.
Also, certainly for state cases, a lot of appeal routes are not available unless you are actively in prison. Post-conviction relief, and federal habeas corpus are basically only available while you are locked in prison. If you do all your time in pre-trial detention, or your sentence is too short to fully complete your appeal then your conviction is stuck forever, even if you have meritorious claims. For instance, if your lawyer was drunk, high or not a real lawyer, there is no way to appeal that after you're released, you just have to live with the conviction for the rest of your life and all the collateral reduction in civil rights that comes with that until you die.
Incarcerated people have the right to sue, right? They have right to appeal. Prisons shouldn't be able to interfere with prisoner's rights, specially when it's about suing the prison itself.
There is the appearance of this, but the reality isn't quite so clear.
The USAs gives you a 14 day window to appeal. After that you are blocked from the majority of appeal options. It used to be unlimited time but the Feds decided that was too expensive so the right to appeal was limited to accommodate Federal financial considerations. Limiting what was a unlimited RIGHT was found to be acceptably replaced with a 14 day right (14 days in which the person is being processed into the system, shipped to prison, etc).
If you sue due to conditions, should those conditions be changed, you no longer have standing and your case is dropped. If ABC facility is unfit for habitation, the check is supposed to be inmates sueing. But if you just ship any inmate who looks like they are starting to win in court to facility XYZ, their lawsuit is dropped for lack of standing (the aren't housed at ABC facility).
If you make the transfer from ABC to XYZ as painful as possible, you limit the number of inmates willing to sue and get to keep things as bad as you want at ABC facility. You can't have the main check on the Feds be inmates when if the inmates exercise the check the Feds can punish them. That system is not fair and does not work.
Look at how upset immigration people are now that the Fed loopholes I point out are being made very public in immigration stuff (all the movement between facilities to limit court access). These are things that have happened forever, just no one cared when it was normal inmates.
>"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"
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
Crime is also just more accepted in "disadvantaged locales."
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.
Sort of yeah, but in this case "broken windows" are used to determine the culture of an area, even if you fixed the "broken windows" I would use some other clues. I think the broken window theory relies on the idea if you fixed the broken windows crime would change, which I don't think is necessarily true.
The extra line supposes that being smart reduces the chances of getting caught.
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.
And 80-90% of the adherence to 80-90% of those laws are self-imposed.
Once upon a time I used to buy tamales from a guy on the street corner. He was probably breaking half a dozen business licensing and preparation laws by doing his little street corner business.
HN dwellers would mostly debate for days about getting the right license or some other silly nonsense. Meanwhile tamale man is cooking, tamale man is selling, tamale man is doing his thing. Is he paying his taxes? Who knows. No one ever bothered to find out and from what I can tell nothing ever happened to him.
There's also probably the majority of the US who just make up laws that don't exist and then enforce it against themselves. Most people think they have to give an ID to a cop if he asks for it on the street.
They assume everything is illegal and self police because that's what the tyrant programmed them to do.
Same effect in HN comments also. Many people hold back from expressing their real views here because they are afraid to run afoul of the Flag Police.
They actually did change that law. Citizens of the Great Empire are now required to identify themselves to any cop who asks their name. For the childrens.
The "show him your government ID which you are now required to keep on you" part hasn't yet been instated, but it's coming. That will be introduced along with a whole heap of other big anti-freedom changes (like Central Bank Digital Currency) during the coming World War.
No, crime does not mean violation of morality. It only means violation of the law.
Now some people, say, look at a pair of expensive shoes and comically blurt out "these prices are criminal!"
That type of usage is a linguistic device known as "exaggeration", but these types of comical exaggerations don't actually change the meaning of words. Like when someone says "You're robbing me!" when a seller proposes a high price, they are not actually changing the meaning of the verb "to rob" and this does not mean that the definition of "to rob" involves charging high prices. That, too, is just an exaggeration.
You don't get to decree whatever it is that you like and then call it "law". If a "law" is un-Constitutional, as most US "laws" are--or in violation of the highest laws of the Universe (the Laws of Nature), as the most US "laws" are--then it is not law. It's the scribblings of a tyrant.
There just might be an entire army of goons ready to enforce that so-called "law." With an Empire, there always is. But any so-called "law" enacted without permission of the The People are in fact the workings of a tyrant and deserve no serious consideration among free individuals, except whatever minimum is necessary to protect oneself from the tyrant while awaiting (and planning for) his inevitable downfall.
This is called a "strawman" argument. I am not decreeing anything and calling it a law, so you must be responding to some interlocutor that lives only in your imagination, and then pointing out flaws in this imaginary conversation makes you feel better I guess. Or it gives you some kind of virtuous thrill. Why would you do this? Imagine yourself winning verbal victories with imaginary debaters in the shower, don't do it in public in social media.
And now you are going off on some laws being unconstitutional and that "most US laws are", when the point I made had nothing to do with a particular jurisdiction or nation, but when laws are deemed unconstitutional they are struck down and are no longer laws, so by definition you have now positioned yourself as a one man supreme court, voiding most US law, when the actual supreme court does not do this. Wow, what an active imagination you have. How you glorify yourself. But please do all that stuff in the privacy of your own home, no need to do it online. Here, e.g. outside of your imagination, people make arguments and you can if you want respond to that argument. Think about it.
"I am not decreeing anything," he said, as he attempts to argue me into the grave concerning the definition of the words "crime" and "law." As if the tyrant's definition should be the only definition and God's (or Nature's, if you prefer) can just be ignored.
It's going to surprise the shit out of you one day when you wake up to find that this entity called the "US Supreme Court" no longer exists, and has been replaced with some other entity which has vastly different ideas about things.
This will likely be accompanied by many people being put on public trial and convicted of various crimes that you and they will vehemently insist weren't against this "law" that you believe you understand the definition of. Yet despite your protestations they will be tried and convicted nonetheless, and in many cases executed.
On that day you will finally understand the definition of Law.
It's probably a better system for what to live by. The government can and will imprison anyone they want by a variety of methods they have for putting anyone they want away at any time. If you follow "god's / natural law" as they put it, it is a better guide to whether you will anger some victim who will call the police on you. Most of the rest of the law are just the excuse the powers that be will use for putting you away if the powers that be find you threaten their order. The vast majority of victimless crime laws are selectively chosen to be "enforced" for the actual reason that you've done something to challenge the ruling class, trying to adhere to them as if they are applied as 'rule of law' is probably irrational.
I make it a point to keep a healthy distance between myself and Imperial Officials.
During any unavoidable interaction with Imperial Officials, I always pretend subservience and submission. I am aware that many others do also.
The result is a large and growing body of people who secretly despise Imperial Officials, while said officials are under the increasingly detached from reality impression that everyone loves them. It usually doesn't end well for them.
Or being disliked by a DoJ who can pressure a judge (who's other legal experience is being a career prosecutor for the feds as well) to not allow many forms of defense, while expending millions upon millions of their own money and "expert witnesses" to tell lies that you can't afford to defend against, and if you will only sign on the dotted line you will only get 3 years instead of a gazillion.
This is how they got Samourai Wallet guy to admit to "operating an unlicensed money transmitter" business despite FINCen saying he wasn't even a money transmitter which means how would he even get a license?
Likewise a lot of crime isn’t “crime” at all. Kill someone by putting lead in their lungs by means of a firearm and we call it murder and you go to prison. Do it by dumping lead into the air from your factory smokestack and we call it business and you get rich.
Murder some foreigner at the behest of your empire and they'll call you a hero and pin shiny medals to your chest. Kill the guy who ordered you to murder the foreigner and they'll call you a murderer and feel self-righteous when they murder you.
Prison IQ is a very different distribution. As I recall, the top 2% IQ of the general population makes up something like 20% of the prison population. You also have quite a few at the other end.
The gifted are more over represented in prison then black males, however, most of those gifted are themselves minorities.
I’ll have to see some evidence on that, in my search it’s basically a normal bell curve shifted 8 pts down. The idea that 130+ IQ individuals make up 1/5th of the prison population does not pass the sniff test, that would be a crazy statistical aberration. In my search I found reports that 130+ IQ individuals only represent less than 0.4% of the prison population.
Roughly yes, it is declining. The Flynn effect was just smart people having kids later which has now normalized and reversed (with smart people having fewer kids).
I wonder if there are any benefits of the adaptations made by those with higher ACE scores. Surely the adaptations we've evolved to make can't be entirely maladaptive.
Here's one
Emotional abuse: verbal threats, swearing at, insulting, or humiliating a child.[1][3]
I'm trying to imagine what someone would be like if they reached 18 without ever having been "sworn at, insulted, or humiliated." Given this is one of the gentlest ways of correcting anti-social behavior, I can only imagine such person would be a maladapted nightmare.
there are strategies that can be taught to increase resilience, and sometimes that may include some tough love.
but there are differences between some tough love to build character vs. years of emotional and verbal abuse. one of the big kids calling you a loser on the playground is not ACE; your mom telling you're worthless and she hates you and you should have never been born for most of your childhood is.
put another way, 8 weeks of military boot camp teaches you to handle some of the stresses you might encounter; it builds resilience. but 18 years of it would create someone deeply screwed up.
I've seen claims that the average IQ in prisons is roughly equivalent to the average IQ of the general population. The line most commonly mentioned after that fact is "and those are the ones that got caught."
This includes white collar crime and all kinds of non-violent crimes though.
IQ is negatively correlated with reactive violence, but positively correlated with premeditated violence, per the evolution of our species. Despite our greater emotional regulation and lack of reasonable contextual circumstances to support the need for violence, we're still killing people all the time just like our ancestors.
Hmm, what would make you assume perpetrators of violent crimes would have a different IQ level than other crimes?
For starters there's the lead exposure relation to violent crime, that is accepted as a factor, and which is also known to lower IQ.
That lead-affected criminal population would drive average violent criminal IQ down, even if the lead exposure worked through a different causual mechanism and lower IQ was just an orthogonal effect.
Besides several studies have found the general correlation.
>My initial instinct would be that violent crimes are often committed out of passion, and are unrelated to intelligence.
Choice of outlet for the outburst, impulse control and other factors however are related to intelligence.
Besides you're just covering "crimes of passion" here. There are career criminals doing homicides, gang shootings, etc, plus physical violence unrelated to passion, but related to intimidation, theft, etc.
Higher IQ would correlate with an increased ability to predict the consequences of one’s actions. “If I stab this person I will go to prison” versus “if I stab this person everyone will think I’m great because that person sucks.”
This is the other side of the coin of Uber violating state and local regulations for the better part of a decade to get their business off the ground or HSBC laundering money for the cartels.
Of course they would. A criminal is just a person. And with such an extraordinary percentage of the US population in prison, you can expect the full spectrum of ability, intelligence, passion, compassion, and everything else. Our prison system is an extreme tragedy that most people are numb to because it's been that way forever.
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.
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.
Free roam games in a prison would be highly praised, even if they were dumb Pokémon roms or really old GTA releases.
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 fear that "opportunities for offenders to participate in meaningful and rehabilitative programming" probably does not mean programming. It's the prisoners who get programmed.
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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.
> A friend and I got split up into different cell blocks because we were helping each other with litigation.
Are they legally able to prevent inmates from helping the litigation of another? That's insane
The US is not a free society
And the 'change' of the condition is often the inmate getting shipped to a different prison, with the transfer/shipping process having the nick name 'diesel therapy'. So if you do are challenge, you are going to get punished, your safety is going to be put at VERY high risk (you are going to have to fight, and who knows who they lock you up with at night and what might get pulled on you), and you are going to be VERY hungry (meal times/shipping times often accidentally don't work out) you don't stay anywhere long enough to purchase commissary to make up for them not feeding you, etc.
Look at how upset immigration people are now that the Fed loopholes I point out are being made very public in immigration stuff (all the movement between facilities to limit court access). These are things that have happened forever, just no one cared when it was normal inmates.
For many crimes, the U.S. loves giving eye watering long sentences for offences that would result in a tenth of the prison time in other countries.
I remember being on one join-plaintiff civil rights case and the government lawyer told the judge they were going to criminally charge me with impersonating a lawyer as I "must have given legal advice to the other plaintiff." The judge asked how they thought the complaint was written. "As I see it, one plaintiff must have pressed one key, then the other plaintiff pressed the next key on the keyboard. That is our belief."
But then they decided it was too expensive giving convicts access to the courts. So they changed it to I think 7 days. But they decided that was too short.
So the compromise between forever and 7 days? 14 days. If you don't appeal within 14 days you can only appeal on a very narrow scope. Now realize, those 14 days after sentencing you are being transferred from a federal detention center (fed jail) to a prison, either via con-air or prison bus, cross country, staying in various country jails with minimal access to your lawyer or a legal library if you can't afford a lawyer.
The American Justice System is designed to appear like a justice system but to in actuality be non-navigable unless you have expensive paid lawyers working for you. It is very much a multi-teared system. Have you ever tried canceling the WSJ? Imagine if every single step of a Justice system was designed to be as frustrating/stiffling/delaying (when every day counts) as the WSJ canceling process. Oh, you are being transported, and you want access to the law library? Well we can only get you that during lunch hours, so chose if you want to eat. And oh yeah sorry that the morning transfer to the bus was messed up and you happened to miss breakfast. Sure you want to skip lunch? We might ship you again any time and you might miss dinner if we do.
The USAs gives you a 14 day window to appeal. After that you are blocked from the majority of appeal options. It used to be unlimited time but the Feds decided that was too expensive so the right to appeal was limited to accommodate Federal financial considerations. Limiting what was a unlimited RIGHT was found to be acceptably replaced with a 14 day right (14 days in which the person is being processed into the system, shipped to prison, etc).
https://federal-lawyer.com/what-is-the-time-limit-on-federal...
If you sue due to conditions, should those conditions be changed, you no longer have standing and your case is dropped. If ABC facility is unfit for habitation, the check is supposed to be inmates sueing. But if you just ship any inmate who looks like they are starting to win in court to facility XYZ, their lawsuit is dropped for lack of standing (the aren't housed at ABC facility).
If you make the transfer from ABC to XYZ as painful as possible, you limit the number of inmates willing to sue and get to keep things as bad as you want at ABC facility. You can't have the main check on the Feds be inmates when if the inmates exercise the check the Feds can punish them. That system is not fair and does not work.
Look at how upset immigration people are now that the Fed loopholes I point out are being made very public in immigration stuff (all the movement between facilities to limit court access). These are things that have happened forever, just no one cared when it was normal inmates.
>"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"
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
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.
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.
> it's just exercising freedom in a way that the system and its adherents don't like.
Yes, that is what the law is, by definition. A reduction in freedom. Most times, for very good reason.
Furthermore, any secular law that is in conflict with the laws of God (laws of Nature) is immoral, and therefore null and void.
So the War on Drugs for example and all of the "laws" connected with it, are not actually law. It's the scribblings of tyrants.
Once upon a time I used to buy tamales from a guy on the street corner. He was probably breaking half a dozen business licensing and preparation laws by doing his little street corner business.
HN dwellers would mostly debate for days about getting the right license or some other silly nonsense. Meanwhile tamale man is cooking, tamale man is selling, tamale man is doing his thing. Is he paying his taxes? Who knows. No one ever bothered to find out and from what I can tell nothing ever happened to him.
There's also probably the majority of the US who just make up laws that don't exist and then enforce it against themselves. Most people think they have to give an ID to a cop if he asks for it on the street.
Same effect in HN comments also. Many people hold back from expressing their real views here because they are afraid to run afoul of the Flag Police.
They actually did change that law. Citizens of the Great Empire are now required to identify themselves to any cop who asks their name. For the childrens.
The "show him your government ID which you are now required to keep on you" part hasn't yet been instated, but it's coming. That will be introduced along with a whole heap of other big anti-freedom changes (like Central Bank Digital Currency) during the coming World War.
Now some people, say, look at a pair of expensive shoes and comically blurt out "these prices are criminal!"
That type of usage is a linguistic device known as "exaggeration", but these types of comical exaggerations don't actually change the meaning of words. Like when someone says "You're robbing me!" when a seller proposes a high price, they are not actually changing the meaning of the verb "to rob" and this does not mean that the definition of "to rob" involves charging high prices. That, too, is just an exaggeration.
Incidentally it appears that the meaning of sin or breaking God's laws came before the meaning of breaking secular law.
There just might be an entire army of goons ready to enforce that so-called "law." With an Empire, there always is. But any so-called "law" enacted without permission of the The People are in fact the workings of a tyrant and deserve no serious consideration among free individuals, except whatever minimum is necessary to protect oneself from the tyrant while awaiting (and planning for) his inevitable downfall.
And now you are going off on some laws being unconstitutional and that "most US laws are", when the point I made had nothing to do with a particular jurisdiction or nation, but when laws are deemed unconstitutional they are struck down and are no longer laws, so by definition you have now positioned yourself as a one man supreme court, voiding most US law, when the actual supreme court does not do this. Wow, what an active imagination you have. How you glorify yourself. But please do all that stuff in the privacy of your own home, no need to do it online. Here, e.g. outside of your imagination, people make arguments and you can if you want respond to that argument. Think about it.
It's going to surprise the shit out of you one day when you wake up to find that this entity called the "US Supreme Court" no longer exists, and has been replaced with some other entity which has vastly different ideas about things.
This will likely be accompanied by many people being put on public trial and convicted of various crimes that you and they will vehemently insist weren't against this "law" that you believe you understand the definition of. Yet despite your protestations they will be tried and convicted nonetheless, and in many cases executed.
On that day you will finally understand the definition of Law.
remember: this is the loud bot, so that you think you've found all of the agit-prop; it's a distraction. the real shill-botting is far more subtle
During any unavoidable interaction with Imperial Officials, I always pretend subservience and submission. I am aware that many others do also.
The result is a large and growing body of people who secretly despise Imperial Officials, while said officials are under the increasingly detached from reality impression that everyone loves them. It usually doesn't end well for them.
This is how they got Samourai Wallet guy to admit to "operating an unlicensed money transmitter" business despite FINCen saying he wasn't even a money transmitter which means how would he even get a license?
The gifted are more over represented in prison then black males, however, most of those gifted are themselves minorities.
each ACE you experience ups the likelihood of all sorts of negative outcomes, with crime and addiction being very common.
strong linkages to bad health outcomes, too.
Here's one
I'm trying to imagine what someone would be like if they reached 18 without ever having been "sworn at, insulted, or humiliated." Given this is one of the gentlest ways of correcting anti-social behavior, I can only imagine such person would be a maladapted nightmare.there are strategies that can be taught to increase resilience, and sometimes that may include some tough love.
but there are differences between some tough love to build character vs. years of emotional and verbal abuse. one of the big kids calling you a loser on the playground is not ACE; your mom telling you're worthless and she hates you and you should have never been born for most of your childhood is.
put another way, 8 weeks of military boot camp teaches you to handle some of the stresses you might encounter; it builds resilience. but 18 years of it would create someone deeply screwed up.
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I've seen claims that the average IQ in prisons is roughly equivalent to the average IQ of the general population. The line most commonly mentioned after that fact is "and those are the ones that got caught."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.
Example: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...
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Hmm, what would make you assume perpetrators of violent crimes would have a different IQ level than other crimes?For starters there's the lead exposure relation to violent crime, that is accepted as a factor, and which is also known to lower IQ.
That lead-affected criminal population would drive average violent criminal IQ down, even if the lead exposure worked through a different causual mechanism and lower IQ was just an orthogonal effect.
Besides several studies have found the general correlation.
>My initial instinct would be that violent crimes are often committed out of passion, and are unrelated to intelligence.
Choice of outlet for the outburst, impulse control and other factors however are related to intelligence.
Besides you're just covering "crimes of passion" here. There are career criminals doing homicides, gang shootings, etc, plus physical violence unrelated to passion, but related to intimidation, theft, etc.
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...
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.
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.
What is with this BS idea of medieval jail conditions...
I mean… yes, obviously, if you look on a computer you're gonna find software.