It says the Dutch system is based on the British one, where typical jobs are things like graffiti cleaning, litter picking, cleaning other outdoor areas (e.g. derelict land), assisting in a care home or home for disabled people.
Some of these could be more social than Edwin would have wanted, and could also have been (relatively) physicially demanding.
[1] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.63...
These are all things that normal people volunteer to do, even spend hundreds of dollars of their own money to do (graffiti removal is not just time consuming but also expensive, particularly cleaning up trees/rocks in nature).
This is exactly the type of work that community service programs should target. We're not talking about for-profit chicken farms in the US or something.
> Some of these could be more social than Edwin would have wanted, and could also have been (relatively) physicially demanding.
Honestly? Good. He was clearly depressed and mentally unhealthy long before his run-in with the law. Forcing some socialization and physical exercise might've saved Edwin's life. And it's pretty clear to me that he was headed nowhere good even prior to his legal troubles.
Sure, agreed, but again... the narrative of a cold and uncaring family/milieu is just false. His mentors at school were deeply concerns. He went to rehab and they kicked him out as a lost cause. Etc. Other people cared about him, but he didn't care about him.
The idea that he just needed a bit more understanding and sympathy seems extremely misguided... if anything, he had too much "soft love". If I were the judge, in his case, I would've strongly insisted on community service. Would it have helped change his mindset or at least break his death spiral? Who knows. But it had a better chance than prison.
> Community hours are a punishment, albeit a socially useful one
It's also a personally useful one. Seeing other people pitching in and seeing the tangible positive effects of one's actions can help some people introspect and really come to terms with the tangible negative effects of their previous actions. Not always, but sometimes.
> There were countless visits to the doctor and to hospital. Each time there would be medical tests. “Honestly, I think it was psychological,” said José. “Edwin had a lot of anxiety, but the doctors focused on physical causes.”
Doesn't look to me like the answer was "tough love" or "go do some gardening", in particular when taking into account he eventually ends his own life. This really feels like a lack of psychological treatment that might have been needed very early, and just go way way worse as it went untreated.
Ask his lawyer. It is likely not a matter of which is better or worse punishment. It is a matter of risk, risk that one punishment will spin off into others. Someone out on community service, effectively parole, can get in trouble for all sorts of minor things (ie not showing up for work). A kid like this on community service will likely break some rule, resulting in further punishments. Jail time is not only shorter but places less responsibility on the individual. His lawyer might therefor have suggested, given the high likelihood of him breaking rules on community work, that jail time was the safer option.
> With his parents’ consent, in the summer of 2011 Edwin transferred to a computing course at Zadkine College in Rotterdam, where students were given more freedom and could work independently on projects.
And later on in the paragraph you trimmed:
> Edwin was delusional by this point, and took exception to everything. To his parents, the situation seemed hopeless. Even professionals at the rehabilitation clinic where he was admitted, De Bouman in Rotterdam, sent him packing after a week, saying his behaviour made him impossible.
More to the point, the kid needed discipline, not "guidance" or "encouragement". His parents, the school systems, tried being supportive for years. They tried being nice and letting him use his computer; a substance he relentlessly abused and became hopelessly addicted to. Perhaps the easiest, earliest intervention for that digital addiction was to cut him off the "drug" and maybe put him through psychiatric care.
Sadly, our modern society thinks "strict" means "abusive". To discourage an individual is seen as affront to common decency, an attack on the individual's sacred rights. So the kid never got the wake-up call he sorely needed; he just fell through the cracks of a modern, individualist ideology called hackerdom. Now we're here in the aftermath, in a forum dedicated to hackerdom, trying to ignore the same cracks in our own beliefs by pinning all the blame on his parents.
But suggestion with psychiatric care is likely right.
> They told each other he needed space, that surely there were some things that gave him pleasure, and that he had a knack for computers. But on days he never left his screen, it was hard not to despair. More than once they wondered: “Should we pull the plug?”
There was a lack of rules and enforcement in his home life. If you read the rest of the piece carefully, you'll see other moments where the parents failed to set boundaries before he was sent to Rehab.
Also, this is parents wondering about where the correct lines are. That does not proves general lack of discipline everywhere. Them wondering back then about what they should do is not proof of no one tried discipline either. They did seen gaming addiction as sign as him being interested in at least something. Plus, even in this discussion you have HN members horrified over parental suggestion that computer in his room might have been mistake. It is not some kind of obscure unusual line of thought.
Compare the discussions on the first two topics…
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1634536577&dateRange=custom&...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1634536625&dateRange=custom&...
… to the topics on "hacking addiction" or "hackers addiction" or "hackers addict":
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1634536625&dateRange=custom&...
As it turns out, only one article on HN is about hacking addiction and its description predicts the behavior of the young man described in the article: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Sv8IHkBtBEXjSW7WktEY...
The claims of the ex-hacker corresponds well with this article too: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37752800
http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
When people call us out on it, our first instinct is denial, to profess ignorance of outcomes and to assert our largely imaginary objectivity and skepticism.
GP said:
> Perhaps the easiest, earliest intervention for that digital addiction was to cut him off the "drug" and maybe put him through psychiatric care.
And that's absolutely backwards. Definitely get him psychiatric care, and maybe cut him off from computers entirely, if professionals concur that it seems likely to help more than hurt.
I'm assuming it wasn't USA prison. So doing involuntary labor might be worse than just being locked away. Netherlands has very civilized prisons.
Edwin was definitely clinically depressed even before his run-in with the law. When I go through bouts of depression, I also get introverted and have trouble forcing myself to interact with folks IRL. Volunteering at schools and in nature (trail work) forces social interaction and physical exercise, both of which help me break out of the depressive state. I sort of impose community service on myself when I feel my mental state slipping.
Everyone is different, of course, but forcing Edwin to do something physical and social outdoors for a few months might well have saved his life.
This guy lacked two things: love, understanding, and genuine interest from his parents, and two: a 'guide towards the light side of technology'. I did not have the latter (though I did have a moral compass), but I am blessed I got the former, I believe it helped with the moral compass. If he was born 20 years earlier, I am pretty sure he wouldn't have been caught with petty DDoS crimes. But his troubled relationship with his parents? It would've remained.
Sometimes, I am sure, but I this is not always true. I've run volunteer clean-up events and as the organizer I signed off on court-mandated community service. Most people helping out were volunteering their time for free. And then there were a few folks who had court-mandated community service.
It is tough and boring and thankless work, but plenty of people volunteer to their own time and money to do that work. Is it pleasant? No. Is it heinously inhumane? Jesus christ, no.
> It is never intellectually challenging.
Oof. It's court-mandated work, not a board game night.
> love, understanding, and genuine interest from his parents
If you read the article, there are tons of hints that his (adoptive) parents really did care and even put in a lot of effort to shape his social milieu to make it less "socially demanding". If anything, his parents' primary mistake was being too lenient when confronted with serious red flags. He switched schools and was later dismissed from a rehabilitation center as a lost cause, for christ's sake. This wasn't "normal troubled kid" stuff.
> I am pretty sure he wouldn't have been caught with petty DDoS crimes.
In the article it sounds like those crimes were ignored until he committed much more serious crimes. And he wasn't even punished for them, it's just that the bread crumbs were used to identify him.
To get useful labor from a slave, you need to either give them an incentive to do good work, or you need to be able to tell the difference between good work and bad work. A job at the tax department fails that second criterion, and the fact that the labor is conceived of as a punishment rather than a job we want somebody to do prevents an incentive from being offered.
1. "Doing time" in the US system and in the NL system are two vastly different propositions.
2. For some people, being isolated is a reward in and of itself.
> As Edwin stood on his doorstep, Ruud turned him away with a heavy heart.
> “Come on,” Edwin pleaded. But Ruud was at the end of his tether. “We can’t,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
> Edwin left with a backpack. His parents had no idea where he’d go.
I have heard of this multiple times, mostly in social conversations.
It's likely not great not being touched as a baby, but I wonder if there's is actual science around the topic?
For example, there's bound to be some nurture vs nature aspect to this.
This was a very long time ago but I can imagine nobody does want to repeat this experiment.
Wasn't thinking of experiments (obviously), but rather data collected in the population on unfortunate but existing cases to try and correlate lack of affection as a baby with specific behaviors as an adult.
[EDIT]: btw, thanks for the pointer, I had never heard of Frederick's experiment [1]
[1] https://signsofthetimes.org.au/2018/08/fredericks-experiment...
This is not a real thing that happens.
I volunteered in an orphanage in eastern europe. The staff did the best they could, but they were severely underfunded. It was the best they could do to feed, change diapers and take care of the most acute medical needs of the large number of infants in their care. Just holding them even for a brief amount of time often was not possible, though they did try the best they could.
The results were heartbreaking. Some children did not speak, others constantly cried, most seemed "OK" but had emotional problems that expressed as aggression or other developmental issues. Growing up in an orphanage is never easy, but you could usually instantly tell if a child was born in the orphanage or came there later (even as young as one year with parents made a huge difference).
It was one of the most heartbreaking things I've ever experienced in my life, and even more than a decade later thinking about that orphanage makes me want to cry.
So much potential in this young man. It's a shame he had these difficulties to deal with. It sounds like he had absolutely no guidance, no encouragement toward a positive way to use his skills. I see it as the equivalent of the school prankster falling in with the wrong crowd, and ending up doing something seriously harmful to try to gain respect.
> found guilty of hacking and given a suspended prison sentence of 240 days plus community service. He didn’t want to do community service, however, so did the time instead.
I wish they had dug into that a little bit more. What did the service entail? How could it be worse than doing time? I don't imagine it would have been a highly social or physically demanding job.
>Edwin asked Ruud if he could move back home, but his dad didn’t feel up to the task of taking in his now 22-year-old son.
That's heartbreaking. Having to turn away your son who is desperate need of care because you can't provide it, and then having him commit suicide a while later.
This story is depressing. I wish there was more about how people were trying to help him, because as it stands, it seems to me he was mostly abandoned.