Eh, they do the same thing to homeless people. (Or women.)

In my experience, it helps to focus on the "I need a job" part (or other specific, constructive assistance) and not so much on the "my life is a shit show" part. I have some sites I can link you to that might be useful to you.

Gig Works: http://gigworks.blogspot.com/

Write Pay: http://writepay.blogspot.com/

San Diego Homeless Survival Guide: http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/

Sorry, I can't do more for you. I do sympathize, but I'm basically broke at the moment myself and I absolutely am not in some kind of position to hire anyone. I just scrape by myself every month, but I do write and try to put out useful information for people in need.

Best.

With all due respect I would never hire someone who has been arrested for meth and heroin because it screams potential problems. Regardless of why you may take them they still affect you in the same way they affect a recreational user. All the meth users I have known have become erratic, depressed and eventually stopped and recovered or spiralled out of control. Heroin less so depending on the consistency and quality of supply, consumption methods and ability to service the addiction. The cost of a bad hire is too much. Business is hard enough when you have the perfect team so any signal that an employee may be difficult is enough to turn employers off. This isn't about your technical abilities.

My advice, given your considerable experience, would be to start your own business or if you can't validate any solid ideas start a consultancy. It's highly unlikely your consultancy clients will look up your record.

>With all due respect I would never hire someone who has been arrested for meth and heroin because it screams potential problems.

Is there a term of limitations on that? What if it was 7 years ago? 10? 20? I understand your point of view and it's rational, but as time goes by, do you think it becomes irrational?

Possibly. 7 years or longer I would probably give it much less weight though you can't un-know something like this so it's hard to say it wouldn't affect my decision at all. I guess it depends what the interim 7 years look like.

Non-violent drug offenders being sent to prison is closer to a human rights abuse than a just outcome.

Edit - to be more concise: It's just amazing to me the number of people willing to listen to and preach high and mighty politics while still the world has people willing to work, not do anything to hurt anybody else, and yet they can have such a hard time in a world with so much.

What can be done for this?

I'll be the first to support the full legalisation and regulation of the recreational drugs market. Abuse of recreational drugs needs to be treated as an illness. I believe happy, healthy and fulfilled individuals don't abuse drugs. Drug abuse is a symptom of a deeper malaise in society as well as in the individual. We, as individuals, reflect our environments in our patterns and behaviours. I am also a big fan of universal basic income as it provides a buffer when needed. On top of this we need educational programs that promote upward mobility, self-reliance and adaptability in a ever changing world. IMO we should be doing the opposite of what we are in so many areas of government and policy. It's hard to know where to start. Thankfully, though it may not seem like it, we are moving in the right direction. Public awareness and consciousness is improving with each generation.

> I'll be the first to support the full legalisation and regulation of the recreational drugs market. Abuse of recreational drugs needs to be treated as an illness.

Catch is, a person having an arrest record for drug possession isn't at all evidence of drug abuse, past or present. That's precisely why I believe criminal records shouldn't be publicly available except in certain cases.

Many should actually be, but non-violent drug offences definitely should not even be offences in the first place.

I doubt my record shows this but I've almost been arrested once for carrying an open container. I was driving a friend's car home for him. The officer made me take the breathalyzer test several times. I was not drunk.

In the end I paid the fine because it wasn't worth hiring a lawyer over (and I did have an open container in the car even if it wasn't mine).

What I fear about decriminalization is that it will become a cash cow for local governments (I have much disdain for local and state governments in general but particularly in this case because anything that boosts revenue without increasing taxes is usually seem as a good thing).

> Prisons not only make the convicts inside them worse, but from my experience and POV, it makes the people observing and interacting with them worse as well.

I'm afraid you are spot on. The fact prison most of the time makes people worse (truth be said it does act positively for some people sometimes, albeit rarely) is almost irrelevant here. I think the real problem is how the society at large clusters ex-convicts in a certain moral bucket, ad vitam eternal, when they are out. The idea that they have paid their debt to the society is ... just an idea in reality, and sadly, when they are released, the real punishment begins and makes them pay in all kinds of senses.

Firstly, I know it's not an easy subject with no perfect solution, and perhaps I'm a bit radical, but I think the very concept of rehabilitation will always just be a total joke as long as there is a culture of 'public records'. Especially in this google age. Nowadays, discriminations is getting less and less popular in this country, except towards ex-convicts, that's an open bar right there.

Secondly, disproportionate punishments. I mean, your case is such a perfect illustration. Ninety days in jail for possession of small quantities of drugs for personal use. And as you said with quotes, it was a "deal". Honestly, being an immigrant to this country myself, I'm probably not very well placed to criticize or comment that kind of realities of the justice system but to be honest, I often wonder whether or not people actually realize it's totally out of this world insane, and that very few others places on this planet would have justice systems inflicting such crazy punishments. I kind of suspect most people are in favor of those punishments actually, sometimes just culturally with a moral compass still a bit reminiscent of puritanism, and sometimes based on the belief that harsh sanctions can provide deterrence. One candidate in the last presidential election attempted to pitch the fact that 1.5% of Americans are behind bars as one issue to talk about, but it didn't seem to tackle much interest.

PS: post your paypal donation URL

I largely agree but this whole issue needs to be looked at through eyes of compassion first and foremost. Jesus stood by a woman who was about to be stoned for adultery and told her would-be killers that he who was without sin should cast the first stone. Then he began to write in the sand, it doesn't say what he wrote, but it was probably some of the sins of the would be stoners and they fled quickly, realizing they were no better than she was. I think most americans who would applaud a 90 day sentence for a small quantity of drugs for personal use would feel guilty reading that story in the Bible in that context.

People forget that those who turn to hard drugs don't tend to do so because they're simply rebels spoiling for a fight with the justice system. They do so because they're people and people have problems, every single one of us. There needs to be a return to compassion but as long as drug users are vilified in every possible way on every possible television show, that won't change. Hollywood could lead the return to compassion if it wanted to by raising awareness of what is actually happening in people's lives, how drugs are seen as a (usually bad) solution or an escape and give concrete workable examples of how that can change. In the end, it's a problem of ignorance, i.e. people believe and act one way when they would be best off doing something entirely different were they armed with more information about their problems. Rather than 90 days in jail, it could be 9 weeks of counseling for one or two hours while the person remains a productive member of society.

So I just don't think attacking this as a problem with long sentences is going to do anything to help anyone. You might get sentences greatly reduced, but have you actually helped the root problem?

> writing on the sand

My take on it is somewhat similar with the difference being that since the scene involved invoking a Mosaic law we should look that up and there we find that the 'justification' for capital punishment is that 'lest' the rest of the (presumably holy) community gets infected as in "one bad apple" process. That would make writing on the sand an analog for the /futility/ of keeping /records/ of judgment for an un-Holy people who are (spiritually) as sands in a dune subject to careless winds of material existence.

> So I just don't think attacking this as a problem with long sentences is going to do anything to help anyone. You might get sentences greatly reduced, but have you actually helped the root problem?

The justice system isn't supposed to deal with root problems, but it is supposed to punish crime with a sentence that is both guaranteed, proportional, and rapidly executed. In this case, the very fact this guy goes to jail for drug possession is just completely insane.

a good (compassionate) justice system is supposed to deal with:

- safety, for society (removing direct threats)

- deterrence, for other would-be criminals in society

- rehabilitation, providing the opportunity to "be better" for the convicted

- providing a minimal "lightning rod" to address and quell the (human/societal) instinctual/primal urge for vengeance

Note that the latter is no more than a smokescreen to distract ourselves when we're not being aware of what this lust for vengeance basically is. On the animal level (present in all primates and certain mammals), there is a very fundamental desire for "fairness". It's a very rudimentary "moral" system, evolved to deal with a fundamentally amoral universe. It kind of works but it's not very optimal. Humans are smarter than that now, and we can observe this desire and figure out better systems. It's called "ethics", we've been puzzling over it for thousands of years, it's not solved but we have figured out a thing or two.

Vengeance is the opposite of forgiveness. If you know about forgiveness, if you ever had to forgive something that was somewhat hard to forgive, and did the necessary introspection to succeed, you've learned this: You do the forgiving for yourself, not for the other person. It's a change in your perception of their guilt, you're not clearing a "guilt flag" in them, they still did what they did, you don't need to forget, you don't need to offer them anything, you don't even need to let them know you've forgiven them. Forgiveness is the decision to let go of this primal lust for vengeance. And that can be a hard decision if the thing the other did is very bad. And that's good because it should not be a light decision. Enacting the vengeance can temper this lust, but if you've already found better ways that deal with the first three points above, that is its only function left.

So we can find better, more compassionate ways to deal with that, too. Which is why some form of punishment must be part of a justice system; It doesn't feel fair otherwise and you can't expect the whole of society to just get over that. Because we're still monkeys and in large numbers, on average, even more so. But just like we've subverted so many of our other primal urges in ways that are more useful in a modern society, we can really make this punishment as symbolic as our primal instincts allow for. If we've taken care of those first three points, that's really all there's left to do.

And you don't need a lot, at all. It needs to be cemented in culture, but it can be done. Proof is, assuming that US humans are sufficiently similar to humans everywhere (which I like to believe, don't you? :) ), all those societies on this earth that have way less harsh punishments, shorter sentences and less awful prisons (US prisons are a bit on the... ehm.. medieval side of the spectrum). They don't get up in arms or feel that justice isn't "fair" enough any more than that nameless, shifting part of society that will always complain punishment isn't harsh enough. Which doesn't actually get any less than it is in the US with harsher punishments. Neither are these societies being overrun by criminals.

I think I agree with you, though vengeance is related to crimes against someone. Drug usage or possession is not of that kind. It's often seen as harm done to yourself, maybe.

> - deterrence, for other would-be criminals in society

In fact, the whole concept of criminal deterrence could be seen as an equation with several variables: the outcome of the crime, the probability of being caught, and how harsh the punishment will be. The idea that sentencing a micro-sample of (very unlucky) people with extreme punishment will detere others from transgressing the law is arguable, I personally believe it's incorrect, now even if I'm wrong it'd be deterrence based on fear of unfair punishment, instead of fear of punishment. A model with certainty of fair punishment seams more performant to achieve deterrence (it also probably costs way more money!). It also has the benefit of not ruining the lives of the unlucky members of the micro-sample :P

> And you don't need a lot, at all. It needs to be cemented in culture, but it can be done. Proof is, assuming that US humans are sufficiently similar to humans everywhere (which I like to believe, don't you? :) ), all those societies on this earth that have way less harsh punishments, shorter sentences and less awful prisons (US prisons are a bit on the... ehm.. medieval side of the spectrum). They don't get up in arms or feel that justice isn't "fair" enough any more than that nameless, shifting part of society that will always complain punishment isn't harsh enough. Which doesn't actually get any less than it is in the US with harsher punishments. Neither are these societies being overrun by criminals.

Of course they are! Humans are the same everywhere! And by the way, the very concept of 'penitentiary' was invented in this country at the end of the 19th century. Europeans were somehow curious about this new word, all they new about was a 'prison', a place where criminals were put for punishment, period. And at this time, on the other side of the Atlantic, this new nation was experiment with a new approach: the 'penitentiary' would be a prison, where convicts are given a chance to repel, improve themselves (learn new skills, study, etc). Delegations of diplomates were sent to study the American penitentiary system and ended up as a model for improvements. My apologies if I awkwardly made it look like I believe the current insanity of the system is just a cultural outcome, I obviously don't. Historical incarceration stats seem to show it's a rather recent trend:

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

> Which doesn't actually get any less than it is in the US with harsher punishments. Neither are these societies being overrun by criminals.

They aren't overrun by criminals for sure. Now, truth be said, there's considerably less crime (especially petty) in the US than in western Europe. Harsher sentences are probably a factor to some extent, probably not as important as efficacy of law enforcement, or certain cultural traits (e.g: Americans aren't kidding with private property). I'd personally trade a bit more crime in exchange of fair sentences :)

May I ask you a question about your story in [0]? You said that you could not call anyone because you did not remember any numbers. Is that how it works? When they let you make a phone call after arrest, you can only call numbers you know by heart? You can't look them up? That sounds insane, who commits phone numbers to memory nowadays?

The story seems to confirm my criticism of the "never talk to police" mantra. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14345776) If you're going to take that to heart, you need a step 2: "Ok I got arrested, maybe for BS like annoying the cop by not talking, maybe not, but now I need a way to procure a good lawyer and let someone on the outside know, probably giving them power of attorney so they can make certain arrangements." (Edit: Though it's probably a good idea to have most of that step 2 planned out regardless of if you talk to cops or not.)

You don't get to keep your phone once arrested and booked. If the person processing your items is nice, they will look up a number for you in your phone and write it down on some scratch paper which you can take into holding.

That's ridiculous. What if the person isn't nice? What if you didn't have your phone with you in the first place? Or it got damaged or lost? How did this even work before mobile phones that stored contact lists, which really isn't that long ago?

What should any of that matter as to whether you get justice or not?

I swear, with this stuff, the plea bargaining, juries, "expensive lawyers", sometimes I get the idea that the US justice system is designed to provide plot devices for TV series of police/justice procedurals, and everything else is an afterthought. How often do people say, after dealing with police/justice, "I felt like I was in a bad movie"?

If the person isn't nice you are SOL. I got arrested once during a commute for an unpaid parking ticket from college, cue cop placing cuffs on me tightly, slamming me against the squad car, searching the vehicle, then hauling me off to county for booking. They refused to let me look up numbers on my phone and I was left to call my parents 3 hours away to come pay the cash only bond.

It was a pretty eye opening experience. Especially on the arresting officer's part because they get no clue as to why they are arresting you beyond "FAILURE TO APPEAR" that shows on their screen, so they assume the worst.

Failure to Appear is failure to comply with a court summons, not failure to pay a parking ticket. There is definitely more to this story.

Get a ticket, you get a choice between paying the fine and appearing in court to contest it. Guess what happens when you do neither.

In the US? You get a court summons delivered by mail. Then you should probably go to court.

Problem there is now they're in your phone.

I'm also confused by how things went down. Can't you ask your lawyer to contact someone for you? And why did you lose your things - can't your son collect the items that were in your apartment and arrange for storage? Did you not have any savings put aside? I'm willing to believe the story told, but I'm curious about these points.

Maybe there were no relatives living in the same city. Maybe living relatives are all estranged. Maybe they have their own catastrophic troubles which make it infeasible to help.

If not for this individual, then for others. Statistically, going to jail will cause severe dislocation and disruption at least some of the time. Fragile circumstance are fragile.

I own a LAMP stack web agency with 85 employees. If you aren't just blowing hot air, visit coalitiontechnologies.com/jobs and apply. If you pass my skills tests and want a reasonable salary, I will hire you.

This is one of the things I'm frightened of. I'm a successful software engineer, you've probably heard me speak at various conferences, I contribute to popular open source projects, but ... I have a twenty-year heroin habit. So, any minor interaction with law enforcement has the potential to spiral into a drug related cluster fuck, just as happened in your case. I'm fortunate that my employer is aware of my situation, and I'm working my way towards being clean long-term, but if I was in the US I think my situation would be far more precarious. I wish you luck getting yourself back together, and you have my utmost respect and congratulations for kicking the heroin cold turkey - nobody who has not been there themselves can ever properly realise what an achievement that is - keep up the good work, I know it will be a struggle every day from now on. I hope you get the rest of the help you need.

I want to be one person to offer to help me in any meaningful way I can. I'm deeply familiar with being in a situation where everyone says someone ought to do something about it, often followed with "but that's just the way things are." It's especially frustrating coming from people who objectively can help and choose not to.

I've been in the same boat as you: frustrated, scared, and broke. I'm also guessing you're feeling a bit lonely & desperate?

I'm still broke and looking for work. I also have my own ideas I'm pursuing and would love help with. I think some of my stuff could be relatively easy to get funding for, too. If you're interested in talking to me about them or anything else you'd like to be heard on, my contact info is in my profile.

With respect to why these systemic problems go addressed and why people who say there needs to be change aren't stepping up, I think it boils down to how complex the general situation is and how difficult compassion can specifically be when it involves talking action. The general problem requires the ability to think in a way that at least includes:

- Seeing past notions of good & evil - Designing a system using nonviolent principles - Accounting for 1st-7th person perspectives (hierarchical levels of humanity's dynamic system)

The problem of helping you specifically is society teaches us to want to help without really teaching us how to. I'd say we're pretty much taught to do the opposite, most of the time. Behaviors are like beliefs: they can't be removed without having something to replace them with. I've had to learn to very specifically request things I want from others without expecting them to provide it. This is definitely a skill and it takes potentially painful work to develop. It's also worth the effort.

I hope you find what you need and will reach out to me, even if simply for mutual support.

Steal. It's your only way out for convicts in this system. You too don't need to be compassionate and can freely ignore anyone's desire for safety, as you have been labeled as not deserving of either.

Your Paypal Donation URL is missing from the article.

Are you still looking for that laptop?

This is why everyone needs a liquid emergency fund (or at least a credit card), so you don't have to settle for a public defender.

Check out some of the companies here. They hire based on trial projects (mostly unpaid).

https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards

> not one person here has offered to help me in any meaningful way

Part of the issue is that most - maybe practically all - people calling for compassion for convicts are workers rather than managers, and not in a position to employ anyone.

Have you tried freelancing remote? What do you need?

To be honest, the biggest red flag is that you don't have any friends who could provide you a temporary place to stay. That implies some things.

often people just leave you when you go to prison.

A friend of mine had a boyfriend who was in prison and she was the only one visiting. None of his friends came and he was just in for a few weeks because he doged the train fare too often.

Well dodging the train fare is pretty nasty thing to do.

But jail time??? Wow.