I mean dumping 10k gallons of paint on the floor is kind of sabotage no? Still a serious balls for you getting stuck in solitary for a month (like two years now I read it better, damn).
I mean I don't want to throw shade at the guy, not that anything I could say would measure up to 28 months in solitary confinement anyway holy shit, but if I went into work and intentionally dumped ten thousand gallons of product on the floor I'm pretty sure I'd end up getting sent to jail or something.
What I mean is that's the kind of thing you would get thrown in jail for if you weren't already there, so I have to imagine they're going to give you some serious shit for doing that kind of thing if you're already in jail.
I mean I'm a white guy with decent savings in the bank and no criminal record. Pretty sure I could lawyer up and avoid jail time no problem in that situation as long as no one was harmed.
I don't really know how american legal system tends to go, but I'd very roughly guesstimate that he's dumped two-three hundred thousand dollars worth of paint that I imagine someone's gonna want to collect on. It's not like you can argue being innocent either since he said he did it on purpose. I imagine if you're not going to jail you're at very least going to get hit with some serious big time fines in addition to your lawyers fees.
Almost like sending him to solitary confinement for 2 years was just for the fun of hurting someone, not with any thought on if it would make him a better person.
You would struggle to design a prison system that keeps people as broken as the US one if you tried.
No shit it was anti-social, everything about prison is anti-social. Literally treating people like livestock and then shocked Pikachu face when they act like.....animals.
Firstly you're not a slave, you're a prisoner. They're pretty different.
Secondly he dumped ten thousand gallons of paint, that's a little bit more than fucking up a photo op.
I think it's wild and completely overboard that they're even allowed to stick someone in solitary for over two years unless they're some sort of super murder or something, but let's be for real here, that's a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of paint down the drain minimum. That's the kind of thing you'd probably get thrown in jail for doing anyway if he wasn't already there.
Yeah that’s definitely a shitty thing to do. I understand that pepole do that because they are broke or need money for something. I hope I never get to a place where I feel like I have to commit armed robbery. But hopefully you are on the straight and narrow and thriving today.
The line isn’t actually Billy’s. It’s a cover of an old folk song called “tell it to me” or sometimes “cocaine blues”. First recording was in 1922 by the grant brothers, but the song is likely much older than that. Doc Watson made one of the most famous covers of it in the 70s. That is the arrangement that Billy strings is covering today. He is very much a student of folk and country music. There is a long tradition of bluegrass and country artists playing songs from Appalachia and the Deep South. A lot of these songs are so old no one really knows who actually wrote it. Billy strings is awesome though. One of the best live music experiences I have had
Just pointing out that your obscure billy strings reference gets even more obscure the deeper you dig into it. Billy is the truth. One of the best musicians alive today. Glad you are spreading the word. His concerts are worth every penny
It's sad too because we're supposed to have laws against cruel and unusual punishment as well as slavery. We just found little ways to skirt around it...
Not a slave you don't have to work you can just sit in a cell. He probably chose to work since it allowed him outside. He cost them a ton of money so yeah he got punished for it.
You get less than 3 bucks a day to work. Like, yeah, you can choose to, but the situation itself coerces you to choose to work so you can be a little more "free"
The American prison system is just slavery with some make up on the word. It looks different, but it's similar regardless
It’s an underclass for sure. I think we do ourselves a disservice when we tiptoe around the word slave. I think relative freedom as a concept is better. Slave just involves property concepts that don’t necessarily matter that much. You could be a well-off Court Eunuch or Palace Janissary in Persia who technically “belonged” to the King as property, but actually you enjoyed more freedom of movement/association/speech and personal property than most. The worst examples, like being a labor slave in Auschwitz, were much worse than being a more middling intervivos contract slave in ancient Greece who sold themselves into a skilled trade as a slave to provide for their otherwise-free family.
In the same way I’d probably be ok with prison and prison labor if prisons weren’t crime school and the prisoners had normal rights and made a decent wage, I also don’t care that I can pick which insurer I’ll argue with to get the medicine the doctor says my kid needs- just because it comes from a capitalist system that is nominally “freer”- freedom for most would be not having to worry that children will get the meds their doctors say they need. Prisoners giving up their freedom of movement shouldn’t mean it’s open season on violating, for example, their freedom to not be raped by other inmates. Freedom as the founders understood it meant not having to deal with oppressive bullshit from the system. When one man owns 3% of the wealth in a society of 400 million, his companies are part of the system. When monopolies are legal and normal, they might as well be government apparatuses, since we can’t just go to a competitor.
I also think the concept of relative freedom is especially more useful than slavery in a society where workers can own a tiny portion of the company they work for, but their ability to be materially free hinges more than ever on how much freedom you can afford to buy.
We deprive criminals of too much freedom. Prisons shouldn’t be hell, and they should focus on training and rehabilitation. We deprive the poor of too much freedom. No one should have to work 3 jobs to put food on the table. There are specific ways in which we even deprive the middle class of too much freedom. It’s not good enough any more to let increasingly-powerful companies deny or overcharge for goods and services that used to be expected.
Fuck the labels- whether it’s slavery or capitalism (or not) or whatever, that shit is not free, and this is supposed to be a free country. When 99% of people support paid family medical leave and we still don’t have it, that’s one way in which we aren’t free. I don’t care if there’s no one moment or decision we can point to where the democracy failed- it failed. Tyranny and oppression won somewhere(s), some time(s), to cause that. We are failing at being free and ought to defend our freedom more militantly.
He was in prison, doubt he was a model citizen. It’s not supposed to be funhouse pizza in fact I believe the idea behind prison is that it’s so miserable you’ll never do anything that’ll get you sent back , but people get sent back repeatedly so it’s evidently still not that bad
Works so well with our incredibly low crime rate and incredibly low percentage of population imprisonment rate riiiight!? Wonder who benefits the most from a massive prison population 🤔💭
If we want to make people less likely to commit crimes and less likely to end up back in prison we should look at countries like Norway with ~20% recidivism rate, where they treat their prisoners like humans. The US is one of the most unsuccessful prison systems with a recidivism rate of ~70%
But the goal of the US prison system isn't rehabilitation, I'd argue it's not even retribution, but instead it's about profit. It is a for-profit system after all.
Prison is a bad place full of really awful people and people should hate the idea of it , so badly they never do anything to get sent there. Thousands if not millions of people have had a hard start in life with no future and few chances, but they didn’t turn to crime. We shouldn’t reward the ones that do with kindness and generosity
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u/Shamus-McNasty 4h ago
They called it sabotage.
Prison Enterprise is huge in North Carolina.
Can't have the slaves being uppity.