I think the point of the story was to inform the reader what a jail experience is actually like, with the added benefit that the author was a cartoonist.

I don't know HN's policies, but I think you should re-consider your post, and edit/delete it.

If posting a back story on how the author got into the situation that the article is about is against the rules, I will gladly remove my comment.

I wrote my suggestion to you not based on the "rules", so much as good taste. The author of that piece never wrote of anything that would have been affected by why she landed in jail. What value does it add?

Down voted twice for suggesting you don't try and publicly invade someone's privacy just for the hell of it? When did HN become 4chan?

Court documents are public record. As in, everyone has a right to view court documents as long as they've not been legally suppressed.

Whether people have the right to look at the records or not is a separate question from whether it is polite or appropriate to direct attention at them.

Its the aggregation of information for no purpose. Plenty of info in "doxs" is public, doesn't make it any more seedy to do it.

I think if the author were concerned about her privacy she would not have written an article for LA Weekly about the experience.

Perhaps the downvotes were because your comment had little to do with the article in particular, or the larger issue of prison reform in general.

What does this all matter besides a desire to pry into a random person's life? It adds nothing.

I was interested in why she was there, given that most of her self-referential imagery has her depicted as an innocent toddler, and most other inmates have unflattering depictions. Was she in for something that would generally be seen as 'not a crime' by the wider public? That was my curiosity.

And it's not exactly a 'random person' - the author is specifically announcing an article on her personal experiences. She's trying to draw attention and in this context is a public figure. It's not like this question came out of the blue for someone trying to keep their time inside on the quiet.

That is my point, it was out of pure curiosity. The equivalent of rubber necking. Her article is on prison conditions, are you going to believe her more based on her crime or something? It has no relevance.

Indeed. How dare I be curious about the background to an experience someone is writing about, given her disconcordant self-depiction in that experience. How dare I have a question about an article that is not directly related to the primary point.

I must remember to be less curious.

Yes. The nature of her crime does in fact shade the credibility of her reports.

How? Are murders more likely to lie about bad prison conditions?

If she'd done something relatively minor and ended up in jail because the system just grinded along, she'd have more credibility.

The fact that she repeatedly broke laws and intentionally disregarded court orders and never seemed to really acknowledge the reality of her situation does reduce her credibility.

Would you really judge someone in each of those situations as equally trustworthy? Really?

> If she'd done something relatively minor and ended up in jail because the system just grinded along, she'd have more credibility.

Human rights are called human rights because they're universal and apply to every human being, no matter the circumstances.

And I personally don't care about how exactly one landed in prison - for minor offences or major, that inmates do not have the right to shower daily is just fucked up. Or that sexual violence or drug dealing in prison seems to be widespread.

This isn't about the conditions, it's about her credibility in reporting the conditions.

So it's about ethics in cartoon journalism?

And what exactly does the credibility of her reporting the conditions have to do with the conditions themselves?

In my opinion, zero. Facts are facts, and it's not exactly new that prisons in the US tend to be shitholes.

You've generated something of a catch-22. If her information is already well-known, she doesn't need credibility - in which case, why bother with the article in the first place? But 'facts are facts', and if she had new information, then she would need credibility in order for it to be considered 'fact'.

In any case, my curiosity had nothing to do with her credibility. I was curious about how she drew herself versus how she drew others. Why she was in jail speaks to some extent as to who she is, and fills in a little more of the mental picture of her.

As a general rule, credibility is needed to figure out the facts.

As a general rule, any fact you derive from a person's credibility is not a fact. Humans are unreliable and relying on their authority/credibility/good looks to establish the truth value of a proposition is a logical error.

We accept this error when we have to do some fast thinking and the consequences of being wrong are small, but the moment you make this flawed logic the general rule is the moment you lose any chance at establishing the facts.

'fact' generally excludes unreasonable uncertainty. Otherwise you've wandered into an area of philosophy where nothing is a fact. And that is not the general meaning of the word.

And credibility is a measure of how close their assertions are to the truth, how is that a logical error?

> Otherwise you've wandered into an area of philosophy where nothing is a fact.

Or, rather, the area of philosophy where only the class of facts which can be certainly described as such are the facts of having particular present sensations (whether the kind that present as sense-data or the kind that present as memories) is a fact, and all other ideas about the world are either axioms or conclusions supported on the basis of either axioms, sensations, or a combination of the two.

Of course, when you leave that area of philosophy, you are in the area of fuzzy and imprecise thinking, so its not a bad area of philosophy to be in.

I admit to secretly wondering why she was incarcerated. She described herself as 'landing in jail' as if she fell out of the sky and whoops! in jail. No idea that maybe she deserved it, or did something that precipitated it - just 'landed' there.

I understood her depiction as "helpless" rather than "innocent" toddler. There is nothing in her writing that indicates that she sees herself as innocent.

She didn't draw the other inmates as infants, only herself.

Apparently she had a restraining order against her. She had been stalking Ren & Stimpy creator John K.