I sometimes wonder if these sorts of people who "succeed" in these odd ways on the wrong side of the criminal fence, would have had rather successful careers had just a couple of things gone differently towards the start of their life.
I'm not sure how true that is but what I do believe is that the following is 100% true:
- smart people - who grow up in disadvantaged locales - and have emotional trauma due to the above - may end up in a life of crime and then prison
How do I know this? I've worked with a couple people like this. Some ended up in prison, others almost went to prison and later on went to work in corporate America (no sarcasm intended here).
A friend and I got split up into different cell blocks because we were helping each other with litigation. Knowing this would happen we'd come up with a way to communicate across the facility. We had these 5x5 grids of letters, no "K", where 11 on the grid was A, 15 was E, 55 was Z etc. They had these touchscreen commissary kiosks where you could order food. The quantity of each item allowed up to 4 digits, e.g. 9999. So that gives you two letters. 1121 = AF for instance. We'd start at the top, Beef Noodles, 1121. Chicken Noodles, 2412 etc and work through the menu. We shared our login IDs with each other. We'd place these huge orders into the cart but never checkout. Then we'd log in to each other's accts from our separate cell blocks multiple times a day, read our messages and write our replies. Got caught eventually, 10 days in the Hole. I FOIA'd their investigation and it was very amusing seeing the report from the facility "Intelligence Dept" trying to decode all the messages.
Which from what I gather isn't very true - being smart can often lead to over confidence and making mistakes, and also a lot of crime is not premeditated.
This is how they got Samourai Wallet guy to admit to "operating an unlicensed money transmitter" business despite FINCen saying he wasn't even a money transmitter which means how would he even get a license?
This includes white collar crime and all kinds of non-violent crimes though.
Is it the same for the violent crime subset?
My initial instinct would be that violent crimes are often committed out of passion, and are unrelated to intelligence.
Example: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...
For starters there's the lead exposure relation to violent crime, that is accepted as a factor, and which is also known to lower IQ.
That lead-affected criminal population would drive average violent criminal IQ down, even if the lead exposure worked through a different causual mechanism and lower IQ was just an orthogonal effect.
Besides several studies have found the general correlation.
>My initial instinct would be that violent crimes are often committed out of passion, and are unrelated to intelligence.
Choice of outlet for the outburst, impulse control and other factors however are related to intelligence.
Besides you're just covering "crimes of passion" here. There are career criminals doing homicides, gang shootings, etc, plus physical violence unrelated to passion, but related to intimidation, theft, etc.
I believe this to be true and some of my former schoolmates who were brilliant IQ wise and got high marks on math and physics still ended up in jails. Some were later able to recover and lead more productive life
Drinking openly is illegal in most of Mexico and the USA. If the area is run down and the shops are broken I will crack open a beer on the street without a second thought. I wouldn't think of doing it openly in some yuppie neighborhood where some Karen will rat your ass out in 5 minutes.
I have no comment on whether C-suite types commit more crimes than prisoners, but I'd wager they don't.
Not everyone in jail got busted for benign stuff like selling a joint. There are lots and lots of incarcerated murderers, rapists, fraudsters, drunk drivers, etc.
Consider who is doing the "establishing" and what criminality they ignore because those doing it do not even go to prison or jail 99% of time.
Ah yes, I'm sure it's just a conspiracy to keep brilliant people in prison, and let stupid CEOs off the hook.
Look, a quick jaunt through my comment history will show you I'm no corporate bootlicker but this is ridiculous.
My parents often pointed out a very tall bearded homeless man who would stand in the intersection and shout at cars. They called him “Bigfoot”. Mom explained that he had multiple college degrees, such as physics, and indicated that he was a waste of a life.
In US federal prisons, drug offenders make up over 40% of the total population, by very far the largest group. The next largest tracked category, "Weapons, Explosives, and Arson" is 23%. [0]
Granted, these are almost entirely US federal offenses, which have of course been flux throughout US history with respect to proper authority, and drug offenses have tended to grease the wheels of jurisprudence so as to be regarded constitutional (albeit with a very inconsistent set of underlying principles). Murder for example is not generally a violation of federal law absent (a fairly long list of) special circumstances.
I do not believe there is any state where the number of people incarcerated for fraud convictions is in the same order of magnitude as drug convictions. In Ohio, where this story takes place, drug offenders are about 14% of the population while "fraudsters" are about 1%.
I think it's pretty reasonable to assert that a significant portion of prisons in the USA are convicted of offenses that are not easy to understand as a moral affront to society or an infringement on the rights of anyone else.
https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...
You could probably wipe out over half the federal prisons without any real change to greater society.
Drug crimes are still crimes, irrespective of public opinion.
You guys just can't let go
On behalf / or covered by corporations they openly do things for which any normal person would be criminally charged and put behind bars. Wake me up when people who for example were involved in Bradley development scandal are punished. Or ones involved in DuPont PFOA contamination case etc. etc. So they do have criminal mind. They just know they would personally get away with it and in a worst case the corporations get fined.
From "The Emperor Jones", quoted from memory.
some simply wanna be Pablo Escobar and become a reggaeton poster child. they don't do it for other reason than become their mental image of a gangster.
yes, they are intelligent but they insist and insist into do what they consider cool, and that coolness come to be a "hacker" or a criminal
so far from top of my mind I remember a serial corporate scammer, a social media middle man who constantly sell access to people working in meta (unlocking/locking accounts), a drug precursor middlewoman, a money laundering mule/scammer/errand boy. every time it was the same. they wanted to show a gangster luxury life in ig. the middlewoman was something else, never got to understand her. 60 years. probably she was just for the thrill of it.
had they opportunities to do something else? repeatedly. specially after prison or with family help. but they refuse, the next business will be the one. they will become millionaires for sure. jail again.
You're too domesticated to understand.
At least you outed yourself in your original post
These are the "winners" you are championing btw. And that's after whatever heinous crime landed them in prison in the first place, and after they stole computers from a program designed to assist them with training and reintegration.
But the soy-faced bleeding hearts of HN can't see past the sheer ingenuity of throwing a PC in the ceiling and plugging in an ethernet cable...
I mean… yes, obviously, if you look on a computer you're gonna find software.
What is with this BS idea of medieval jail conditions...
I found the C# compiler that is hidden several levels deep by default in the Windows directory and decided to teach the other prisoners how to code. I needed some reference materials as it's really hard when you have no docs and literally just the compiler. They don't allow computer books in most places "for security reasons", but a very elderly nun took pity on me and asked me what I wanted. I told her "C# Weekend Crash Course" (I wasn't a C# dev at the time and it was the only title I could think of) and she bought it off Amazon and smuggled in not only the book but the CD-ROM that came with it, bless her. I managed to teach the guys how to write text adventures which they enjoyed. I couldn't think of what else fun I could get them to do with only console text in/out.
Of course, this makes no sense, as most criminals have low impulse control and don't think about the consequences of their actions in terms of risk/reward calculations. We should use prison time to re-educate these people and try to make them better instead of psychologically torturing them, but here we are, and it's very unlikely things can change within the current political system (too many "checks and balances" for meaningful reforms)