In Maine, prisoners are thriving in remote jobs

https://www.mainepublic.org/2025-08-29/in-maine-prisoners-are-thriving-in-remote-jobs-and-other-states-are-taking-notice

by voxadam • 10 months ago

245 206 10 months ago

mainepublic.org

cl0ckt0wer• 10 months ago

On the one hand, prisoners being coerced to work is payment for their crimes. On the other hand, that job would have gone to someone else at market rates. This kind of thing drags down the market rates.

We really need to get rid of the exception in the 13th amendment.

_qua3• 10 months ago

The number of prisoners who are capable of this type of work are minuscule and unlikely to affect wages at large.

schaefer• 10 months ago

just wait...

faitswulff• 10 months ago

Ah, but the number of people who are capable of this type of work who could be imprisoned is quite large!

SuperShibe• 10 months ago

The obvious solution to this are harder sentences so you can imprison more people that are capable of this kind of work

lovich2• 10 months ago

The loss of rights should be the payment for their crimes. Having volunteer job opportunities for reform or having them maintain their own facilities is the max that should be mandated.

It’s just slavery with all the perverse incentives that come with it, and I think we’d all be better off if this was a lever that no one in society had access to pull on

malcolmgreaves3• 10 months ago

Sounds nice, until you're robbed, they catch and prosecute the guy successfully, and then you're unable to be made whole again because the criminal doesn't have any money to pay you back.

What then? If they're not forced to produce something of value to give to you, then how can you ever be made whole again? Does the state pay? If so, why do taxpayers who didn't commit a crime foot the bill? If it's insurance, then why do non-criminals paying insurance premiums foot the bill?

If there's nothing linking the action (_theft_) to the needed outcome (_restitution_), then there's this unmoored loop of perverse incentives wherein some folks can continue to commit crimes with very limited consequences.

Doesn't mean that everyone should be forced to work while in prison. But surely for any and all crimes that have a clearly defined dollar amount, shouldn't that criminal be forced to pay that amount back? Garnishing future wages can be circumvented (_just don't get a real job when you get out, keep stealing things to support yourself_). And even at best, it's very much _delayed_ restitution. Justice delayed is justice denied.

WaltPurvis2• 10 months ago

prisoners being coerced to work is payment for their crimes. On the other hand, that job would have gone to someone else at market rates. This kind of thing drags down the market rates.

That's a different problem, for different inmates -- the inmates covered in this story are paid market rates. It mentions the software developer has a six-figure salary.

charcircuit2• 10 months ago

This kind of thing drags down the market rates.

Why would the prison / prisoner charge below market rates for their labor?

toomuchtodo• 10 months ago

https://www.epi.org/publication/rooted-racism-prison-labor/

https://www.walkfree.org/news/2025/13th-amendment-loophole-f...

https://www.npr.org/2023/11/13/1210564359/slavery-prison-for...

https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/captive-labor-exploit...

jacobr14• 10 months ago

The prison could, for grift reasons. They can undercut competition because their costs are lower. If a union, or even a market-rate shop needs to pay, say, $20-hour for labor, and the prison can pay $1-hour (or day) they can charge much less, and then pocket the difference. Their advantage isn't a higher quality product just a cheaper one.

johnnyanmac5• 10 months ago

Because it's free money for them either way, and they can undercut the competition, even minimum wage workers, due to the 13th amendment excluding prisoners.

The prisoner doesn't really get too much choice in the matter other than taking/rejecting the offer.

charlieyu1• 10 months ago

It was not. Working in prisons started as part of rehabilitation, so the prisoners could learn life skills to survive. Now it devolved to power tripping and control.

tamimio3• 10 months ago

As intended, companies will do everything to lower wages and have borderline slaves work for them, either through immigrants, hiring mostly co-op workers, and now prisoners, and a lot of people are okay with it for some reason, so gullible! The "engineer" job in 2025 is like sewing in a prison a couple of decades ago, crazy.

lovich2• 10 months ago

Costa says he was also surprised to learn that Thorpe was eligible for remote work while he was in prison. He hired him in June. He figured Thorpe might have trouble clearing the company's background check and he says he prepared himself for that. But since it only searches back seven years and since Thorpe has been in prison for more than a decade, "He is actually our cleanest background check," Costa says.

This just makes me feel like the entire modern process of matching workers to employers is a kafkaesque hell that has negative value.

The boss doesn’t even care that the guy obviously violates the intention of his companies process. Stay in jail long enough and you’ll pass one of our arbitrary steps!

Apocryphon2• 10 months ago

Maybe it's a statute of limitations thing. It sounds like his crimes were non-violent.

JumpCrisscross5• 10 months ago

boss doesn’t even care that the guy obviously violates the intention of his companies process

What's the intent of the process?

I remember hiring a few years ago, where a deep background check uncovered an assault charge on a candidate I liked. The charges had been dropped. But they were violent in nature, and this spooked my team.

Fortunately, our GC once did family law. Between me pointing out this was a remote position and our GC showing that the facts of the case looked incredibly like domestic dispute in the midst of divorce, we wound up hiring her. And she was great!

potato37328422• 10 months ago

the facts of the case looked incredibly like domestic dispute in the midst of divorce,
we wound up hiring her. And she was great!

Did you try firing her just to be sure?

Within the default biases of the american law enforcement and court systems an assault charge on a woman in divorce dropped usually means almost the opposite of assault charges on a man in divorce being dropped.

throwmeaway2222• 10 months ago

Heck, we might as well just limit jail sentences to 7 years! That will solve a fuck ton of problems, right guys?

terminalshort3• 10 months ago

The crazy part to me is that people are in prison at all for crimes don't even rise to the level that employers consider a disqualifier.

taurath4• 10 months ago

If we get serious about actual rehabilitation in prisons instead of punishment there’s never been a better time to be able to learn just about anything on your own time. But we’d have to stop dehumanizing criminals. Dehumanization seems to be the trend that the US is leading on right now.

We can also be concerned about the incentives for prison labor - for profit prisons and all the many service providers that get paid a mint. Phone calls in many prisons are like $10. Labor gangs and the such. It’s just horrible how badly we treat people in the US for some middleman to make money.

coolestguy• 10 months ago

Dehumanization seems to be the trend that the US is leading on right now.

Criminals have to want to stop doing crime before they can be rehabilitated.

tomrod• 10 months ago

Les Mis is a great treatment of exactly this, even if fictional. It takes more than justice to reform the soul. It takes making room by society to forgive the repentant. We call this mercy, and it is the higher ideal.

JumpCrisscross5• 10 months ago

Criminals have to want to stop doing crime before they can be rehabilitated

This is literally what rehabiliation entails. Convincing criminals that they have better options than crime.

It doesn't work for everyone. There are absolutely bad people who will just violate social contracts, or who can't control their rage turning into violence. Those people need to be incapacitated. But for the vast majority of criminals, particularly non-violent criminals, crime is an economic cost-benefit exercise.

djohnston2• 10 months ago

That's not entirely fair - there are all walks of life in those prisons. Some are undoubtedly beyond help, but the ones we can actually rehabilitate, or at least give meaningful work to, are not an opportunity worth overlooking.

mwambua• 10 months ago

I'm not justifying the crimes and I think people should pay for the consequences of their actions, but I don't think it's that simple.

I think some people just haven't been exposed to the benefits of taking a path to life that doesn't involve crime. Some people also need to be convinced that there are viable alternatives to crime. And as someone else said, society needs to give them the chance to redeem themselves and pursue those alternate paths.

none2585• 10 months ago

This is an incredibly naive take and doesn't address what you quoted in your comment. We should not dehumanize anyone - criminal or otherwise.

avs733• 10 months ago

This is the result of the dehumanization effort. It highlights OPs point in attempting to refute it

themafia• 10 months ago

If you want rehabilitation then you should ensure that they're working for more than slave wages and that money is set aside to be available to them upon their release.

Ensuring they can communicate with their families at no charge would be a huge plus as well.

JumpCrisscross5• 10 months ago

Do we have high-quality studies on what facilitates rehabilitation?

gchamonlive• 10 months ago

Dehumanization seems to be the trend that the US is leading on right now.

Here in Brazil criminals are extremely dehumanized as well and used as electoral fodder. Leave them to rot in amounts proportional to the anger of the population against criminality as it rises again in the country, or at least the perception of it.

They are used to quickly let this social pressure out without actually solving anything and without making the population safer.

It would be really nice if remote work could serve as a viable vector for rehabilitation. Everyone involved would benefit from it, we just have to beware of the wrong kinds of incentives, so that people don't get thrown in jail only to serve as cheap remote labor later.

terminalshort3• 10 months ago

Not a fan of private prisons, but prisons (public or private) don't make money. They are a massive cost to the government. Incarceration is expensive (Google gives me a median of $65K per prisoner per year), and the percentage of prisoners that are able to earn more money through labor than the cost to lock them up is probably very low.

superb_dev2• 10 months ago

It might cost the government $65k to imprison someone, but that money isn’t disappearing. It’s going into the pockets of all the private businesses running the prisons who take a hefty profit

defrost2• 10 months ago

Top private prison companies see profits amid administration's immigration crackdown

~ https://abcnews.go.com/US/top-private-prison-companies-profi...

Prison Contracts: Profits & Politics

  Two corporations, GEO Group, Inc. and CoreCivic, Inc. (CCA), manage over half of the private prison contracts in the US.

  These contracts are extremely lucrative; in the 2017 fiscal year, GEO Group and CoreCivic earned a combined revenue of more than 4 billion dollars.

  Corporations like GEO Group and CoreCivic are invested in mass incarceration because incarceration is profitable for them.

  Such corporations ensure that correctional facilities are in demand through a variety of techniques, including minimum occupancy clauses and political lobbying efforts.

~ https://sites.tufts.edu/prisondivestment/prison-contracts/

httpsoverdns• 10 months ago

Prisons cost the taxpayers quite a lot of money, yes. But private prisons make enormous profits from the burden you and I shoulder. More than a quarter billion dollars every year, goes into the pockets of private prison operators. Many consider the way that they extract these profits to be cruel and inhumane to those that are supposed to be under their care.

https://legaljournal.princeton.edu/the-economic-impact-of-pr...

bryanrasmussen2• 10 months ago

Not a fan of private prisons, but prisons (public or private) don't make money.

private prisons make money for their corporations. Look up Wackenhut.

mullingitover• 10 months ago

There are also perverse electoral incentives to having a prison in your voting district. Generally the prisoners count toward your population numbers but they can’t vote. No pesky three fifths compromise.

NooneAtAll3• 10 months ago

how would non-voters affect voting results?

Terr_7• 10 months ago

If I had my 'druthers, disenfranchisement for felonies is anti-democratic nonsense, so people in prison should retain voting rights.

The only ethically-hard problem is which jurisdiction their vote should count in, since they cannot demonstrate it by choosing where to live. Perhaps a choice between:

1. The location of the prison, if their main interest is the conditions of their detention rather than anything outside.

2. The location of their property or close family, because they're still paying property-taxes or school levies etc. and they will be returning there later.

someothherguyy• 10 months ago

In some states, until they are off parole or never again even. Maine doesn't disenfranchise their prisoners at all though

https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/2023-03/20...

helle253• 10 months ago

TIL - this seems supremely messed up. If anything, they should count towards the place of their original residence.

thephyber• 10 months ago

Yeah, I think the if at the beginning of your comment is doing some very heavy lifting.

I don’t think many people in the US care about rehab. They seem viscerally invested in the concept of a prison as a place to store/segregate violent people, but have no interest in either helping those people learn to live safely in society or to have any advantages that the poorest non-prisoner gets.

Before we can jump straight to pointing to successful prison labor programs, I think we need to figure out how to message to those voters that it matters how we treat prisoners.

taurath4• 10 months ago

I don’t think many people in the US care about rehab

I think they exist quite widely among the population. Old, white republicans want more people in jail. Young, non-white democrats think we jail too many people.

50% of the country thinks we jail too many

s) https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/45975-what-americ...

tyingq• 10 months ago

What a criminal record does to your ability to get a job these days, as compared to the past is pretty harsh. Back in the 80's and prior, you could work at a smaller place that didn't have the capability to do background checks. Now, it's $20 or less and ANY employer can do it. You have to specifically find some place that has deliberately chosen to take the risk.

Compare to Australia, where the employer doesn't see detail. They file the background check, but only get a "yes" or "no", based on that specific job and past offenses (if any).

uncletscollie• 10 months ago

If you read the article, you'll notice what a joke the corporate world is. They are hiring someone sitting in prison, they did the interview through video in prison. His address is a prison, but....

"He figured Thorpe might have trouble clearing the company's background check and he says he prepared himself for that. But since it only searches back seven years and since Thorpe has been in prison for more than a decade, "He is actually our cleanest background check," Costa says."

"He doesn't have a parking ticket." What does a parking ticket, let alone a criminal conviction have to do with programming?

Let's just go ahead and get to the exploitation, the corporate scum offered him minimum wage and are taking advantage of his situation.

colechristensen• 10 months ago

One of the overlooked purposes of imprisonment isn't revenge or rehabilitation, it's just letting the rest of us be away from that person for a while, removing them from society.

mcmoor• 10 months ago

Yeah the conclusion from here [1] is that the biggest reason a prison can reduce crime is not because of rehabilitation or deterrence (even in places that try to do either) but because of incapacitation. It holds people in their prime age of doing crime (15-30) and spits them back out when they're too old to do those anymore. The obvious conclusion is that exile will have the same effect, but we don't have place to exile people to anymore.

1. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prison-and-crime-much-more-...

Apocryphon2• 10 months ago

Preston Thorpe is only 32, but he says he's already landed his dream job as a senior software engineer and bought a modest house with his six-figure salary. It was all accomplished by putting in long days from his cell at the Mountain View Correctional Center in Charleston.

Gives new meaning to working in Mountain View.

bluefirebrand• 10 months ago

Oh cool so all I have to do in order to keep my job fully remote in the future is go to jail.

Awesome. So so so awesome

citizenpaul6• 10 months ago

Wow. Just wow. The US really is on a trajectory back towards slavery between this and re-legalizing child labor in some states.

This stuff truly is a disturbing view of the future of the US.

earn above a certain amount, 10% goes to the Department of Corrections for room and board

Yep. There it is. Sounds nice now right? Until in 5 years they decide, well it really needs to be 20%. Then it 5 more years. Well they are in prison so 30% should be resonable. Then as tax deficits grow .....weeeellllll maybe 70%..... Then it will be well prisoners shouldn't really be getting rich in prison so we take 100% but when they get out they will still have that job to fall back on. Just wait and see.

To be clear I'm not against giving people a chance to reform. This is not that. If a person is reformed enough or behaved enough at a chance for reform then they should be on probation at worst. Not propping up a industrial prison complex for nonviolent crimes like 20+ year sentence selling drugs.

tantalor• 10 months ago

"trajectory back towards"?

Simpler explanation: "slavery" never ended, it's just called something else now

citizenpaul6• 10 months ago

I know. You know. Tried to avoid the downvotes but to no avail lol. HN is a bit naive.

potato37328422• 10 months ago

There was state run prison slavery before the institution of chattel slavery in North America, there was state slavery after it. Why wouldn't there be? The government always exempts itself from laws of that sort.

What was gross margin per average (because the cook picks no cotton) of your typical plantation?

I'd bet it's a whole lot less than the federal .gov's margin on someone in one of the 20+% brackets. State .govs are probably all over the place.

Hard to account for because the .gov "doesn't show a profit" in the same way that "we're totally a nonprofit <wink>" hospitals don't but should be a doable calculation.

throwmeaway2222• 10 months ago

well maybe don't rape people. I get that the TV camera is able to visit the jail and tell a story and make people cry. But maybe they should witness the crime first hand before they put on the story.

citizenpaul6• 10 months ago

What are you on about? The guy the article focuses on is in jail 15-30y for "intent" to distribute opioids.

Also "intent" is cop for we didn't like your face.

rammer• 10 months ago

For profit prisons are the worst, it should be a state responsibility not a for profit company.

Especially with all the race issues in imprisonment.

voxadam• 10 months ago

All prisons in Maine are state or federally operated, none are private or operated for profit.

citizenpaul6• 10 months ago

Wages are garnished for child support, victim restitution and other fees. And for those who earn above a certain amount, 10% goes to the Department of Corrections for room and board.

So they take a cut of your pay. Totally not profit? They deserve it? Why not 20% why not 95%.

nickff3• 10 months ago

From what I understand, Maine has no private prisons; why are you bringing them up in this topic?

ckemere• 10 months ago

I interpreted it as a potential explainer for why this sort of result is unlikely to spread broadly.

Do you have knowledge of, eg of New Hampshire (which is mentioned as a counter example in the article?)

umvi• 10 months ago

This... seems like it has the makings of a really great idea. So often prisoners are repeat offenders because they have no skills, no support system after getting out of prison so they revert to their old ways. Imagine already having a job and a large nest egg in your savings account because you got a remote job in prison. Or imagine going to prison as an 18-year-old, learning some skills through a prison educational system, and then getting a remote job and actually start contributing back to society. I'm not sure about Maine's implementation specifically, but something about this idea resonates strongly with me.

terminalshort3• 10 months ago

Yeah, I guess it's a good idea given the state of our current system. But it seems like prisoners fall into two basic categories - 1. people who very few employers would hire for remote work due to their criminal history. 2. people who really shouldn't be in prison at all.

boston_clone2• 10 months ago

Where do you get that idea? The article paints a pleasantly different picture:

"We had 87 assaults on staff in 2017. Last year, we had seven assaults on staff [...] the officers that go to work everyday and don't feel like their life is at risk."

indrora• 10 months ago

The kinds of folks I've worked with who have served time vary from place to place, but I'll give you a good rundown of some of the flavors I worked with when I did daylabor work in college and high school...

* People charged with something stupid (e.g. shoplifting) that turned into a larger problem (e.g. crossing state lines) which became an even larger problem (e.g. nonviolent, passive drug charges). One guy I worked with had lived on one side of the river in St. Lois but worked on the other side. Walmart decided that he'd "shoplifted" a $2 bottle of soda, legally he fled the state by going home, and his kid had hid a gram of weed in the shoebox by the door that nobody opened except of course the cops that flooded the house. He served 10 years after a plea deal that sunk his kid into juvie for 5 years.

* People who "did a crime" to prevent a crime. Another person I worked with shot his son 5 times in the chest after his son attempted to murder the wife. Because the only testimony they had was an asian woman who didn't speak great english and the court denied an interpreter for her native language (laoatian) because she "speaks good enough english", her description of the events was murky (having been asleep) and so he landed murder charges and a stint in prison.

* People who got racism'd into prison: Same work as the previous, the older latino guy in this group was framed for the death of a woman he spent the evening with; he had left after they hooked up and she ended up falling off the balcony of her apartment later on, but because time of death is like, +/- a few hours when it snows on top of you, he was the last one to see her. He spent 4 years in prison before he was released on a mistrial.

* Drug users of the nonviolent variety. Nose candy, heroin, weed, usually white collar or upper blue collar. Several folks like this, all who just wanted their past to be shoveled behind them.

* People who legitimately did a crime, did the time, and now they're out: Plenty of situations where legit crimes happened... Theft, assault, even a case of money laundering on occasion. They went in, did their time, and came out, and day labor was the one thing that didn't ask too many questions and paid regularly.

A fair number had degrees -- from associates and bachelor's degrees to even a PhD who was nailed for what the state called a "gambling ring" (some informal betting around the office that ended up snowballing into a massive pot). many of them could do remote work of some kind, be it customer support roles or tech work. The MBA that did nose candy? He stayed on the board of directors for a local nonprofit _while serving_ and would relay his comments through his lawyer, being entirely upfront as to why he was incarcerated, then ended up doing accounting for the day labor company after a while.

All this to say: our system is fucked up and needs rehabilitation systems for the murky area between those two extremes.

danaris3• 10 months ago

1. people who very few employers would hire for remote work due to their criminal history.

Putting aside the widespread reflexive discrimination against "criminals", I would think that most people in prison who someone might think twice about hiring due to their criminal history would get a second look if it was for a remote job.

Someone working remotely can't rob or murder you, nor can they try to sell you drugs without a much more elaborate setup.

Seems to me the only kinds of people in prison that most employers might justly hesitate to hire for a remote job are white-collar criminals.

lawlessone• 10 months ago

blockchain gang?

As long as they're paid fair rates i think it should be allowed.

and my definition of a fair rate for them is what people outside the prison are paid, assuming they're paid a fair rate of course.

gpi• 10 months ago

A wild Glove80 appears

RickJWagner• 10 months ago

Wow, that’s fantastic. I bet recidivism rates plummet when the cons exit after having a good job.

atlgator• 10 months ago

So they work remote jobs and keep the money while tax payers foot the bill for their housing, food, medical, and utilities? Is that right?

Why aren't we all doing this?

prawn• 10 months ago

Give it a shot and report back. You could try this tactic:

"Lopez admitted that she waited in front of the county jail for hours, intent on assaulting an officer. She reportedly explained that her goal was to get arrested and be put in jail so she would be forced to stop smoking cigarettes."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/calif-woman-allegedly-slaps-cop...

tolerance• 10 months ago

Meanwhile on the outside…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45340442

cwoolfe• 10 months ago

When I visited a local prison through the https://www.douglassproject.org/ I had this exact thought: why not allow remote work? I'm glad it is being done somewhere! I hope it becomes more commonplace.

jholdn• 10 months ago

This program sounds great and I think we should incentivize it. Unfortunately, I think it requires a constitutional amendment to work. We can’t rely on well meaning administrators to overlook the slave labor exemption for criminal punishment; these things will be exploited.

I guess with knowledge work there is some protection because it’s hard to force. Though, it would be desirable to extend such programs into other forms of work.

deadbabe• 10 months ago

I always wonder why didn’t we ever do something like this with something like Amazon Mechanical Turk? Use prisoners for small frequent human cognition tasks. I guess with AI that ship has sailed though…

Perhaps high trust prisoners could be used for things like controlling delivery bots. Or maybe for content moderation!

aogaili• 10 months ago

Because remote job for corporation is a form of prison..

amiga3863• 10 months ago

Remember when Pennsylvania judges took kickbacks to send teenagers to for-profit detention centers? They ruined thousands of people's entire lives, but hey they made a quick buck!

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

How many others are profiting from keeping prison populations topped up? Perverse incentives, ensuring the US has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, with only the People's Republic of China rivalling it for prison population. Make slavery legal again with this one weird trick called the 13th amendment's "except as punishment for a crime"

I am OK with prisoners being rehabilitated, this includes them working. I am not OK with their jailers profiting. Nor am I OK with employers profiting by having unfair power over pay and conditions they wouldn't have with free citizens.

jihadjihad• 10 months ago

Remember when Pennsylvania judges took kickbacks to send teenagers to for-profit detention centers? They ruined thousands of people's entire lives, but hey they made a quick buck!

And one of the judges [0] in the “kids for cash” scandal had the remainder of his federal sentence commuted by President Biden before he left office.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Conahan

zzrrt3• 10 months ago

Dang, TIL. Not that it really excuses it, but for more information: that convict was one of many given clemency who were already on home release due to COVID and had behaved well. Seems he had about 2 years left.

downrightmike2• 10 months ago

It wasn't a quick buck, it was a slow and methodical many year effort of corruption. Everyone should sue that judge for everything he's worth and send him to jail for the rest of his life.

twobitshifter• 10 months ago

This reminded me of a more extreme version of the primeagen’s story, which made me wonder if there are any prisoners running coding youtube channels.

So I searched and THEN I found the blog of the inmate from the article! https://pthorpe92.dev/

downrightmike2• 10 months ago

This is still slavery. Not chattel slavery, but the same thing that came up in reconstruction where minorities and poor whites become indentured servants

cyanydeez• 10 months ago

Remote slavery?

tamimio3• 10 months ago

senior software engineer

There we go again, and then people wonder why they can't find engineering jobs anymore, or low wage/no job security if any, when anyone and everyone can be an "engineer" when they get bored and have some time on their hands. I still don't understand why there is no collective engineering committee and effort to gatekeep the profession like literally all other professions out there, because companies will NEVER initiate that since it's in their interest to keep it as is. Why would someone spend time and money to become an engineer when he or she is competing with the whole world and prisoners now? The reward is just not worth the effort anymore, this is what will kill engineering innovation on the long term for short term gains.

Nasrudith• 10 months ago

A title isn't what causes engineering innovations, nor is gatekeeping a source of them (just the opposite really). So how would that kill engineering innovations long-term?

tamimio3• 10 months ago

how would that kill engineering innovations long-term?

Bright brains are no longer interested in investing time and money to become engineers when the reward isn't worth it anymore, even immigrants by the way. They are okay with the low wages until they get permanent residency or citizenship, then after that they would need higher wages to simply live a comfortable life with family and such, but they won't even have that, and they get to taste the outcome they caused even if they are not realizing it.

jalapenos• 10 months ago

I like the wording here:

is a certified recovery coach, a scholar and a teaching assistant who's serving a 40-year sentence for the murder of her husband.

I feel like "husband murderer" probably ought to come first in your little list of titles there.

This system is a joke. If someone's committed a real crime (with a victim), and you allow this, you're forgetting prison is supposed to be a punishment.

I guess it'd be fair if the government kept half of what they make though.... Oh wait...

1970-01-01• 10 months ago

Apparently software eats everything including recidivism; It's the antithesis of "crime doesn't pay"

In Maine, prisoners are thriving in remote jobs

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