This is a great piece, the deep reporting of the old New Yorker. Some highlights:
> A reporter from Absolute Return, a trade publication for the hedge-fund industry, asked Grant, “How do Wall Street skills usually translate in prison?” His reply: “These skills are not only in large degree useless, they are probably counterproductive.” As he told me recently, “Business rewards a certain type of attitude and assertiveness—all things that will get you killed in prison.”
....
> Before reporting to prison, he advised them, mail yourself the phone numbers of family members and friends on the visitors’ list, because “you’ll be too discombobulated to remember them once you’re inside.” And remind your wife never to touch paper money on the morning of a visit; almost every bill bears traces of drug residue, which will set off the scanners.
....
> He draws a distinction between his work and the industry of white-collar “prison coaches” who offer bespoke services for a price. Among them, Wall Street Prison Consultants promises to “ensure you serve the shortest sentence possible in the most favorable institution.” It sells consulting packages at the levels of Bronze, Silver, and Gold, the finest of which includes “Polygraph Manipulation Techniques,” “Prison Survival Orientation Coaching,” and an “Early Release Package” that helps clients apply for a drug-treatment program to reduce the length of a sentence.
>And remind your wife never to touch paper money on the morning of a visit; almost every bill bears traces of drug residue, which will set off the scanners.
so - America has an extremely large prison population. I've never heard this before though. I mean I've heard the money has trace amounts of drugs thing, but not when visiting family members in prison don't touch paper money.
You'd think it was a common problem, people touching paper money and setting off scanners and then getting stopped, searched and maybe questioned depending on a lot of stuff, like skin color. Being black and touching money on the day of visiting a relative in prison must be in some ways an extremely dangerous thing to do.
Unless of course this guy is full of shit. Or I just haven't heard of this problem which I guess is also a possibility, it's just - my sensors are going off here.
Agreed, prison guards are about the furthest thing possible from what you see on the CSI shows. It’s kind of a last resort job for people who can’t do anything else. When I visit people in prison I always bring my US Passport for identification because it just totally throws a wrench in the works, requires one or two supervisors to review my document, and 15-45 minutes to figure out how to enter it into the system since the passport number is twice as long as the driver’s license number and doesn’t fit in the usual entry screen. I’m sure it’s the most exciting thing to happen to them that day. Wait thirty days and everything old is new again. Once I ran into a super cop who wanted to know how I drove there and started to unholster his sidearm (obviously assuming that I was driving without a license and he was going to arrest me) but then I told him I took a cab and it just killed him and begrudgingly he waved me through to the next checkpoint. In reality I do drive myself, I just take out my license and leave it in the armrest of my car before I go in - that also blows away the myth of all cops being superhuman lie detectors with Black Widow level knowledge of body language and voice cues.
I've had problems getting into bars with a passport before too, I used one for a while when my ID card was expired and people at the door would just say "Sorry we don't take passports."
Then when you call the group of people you were meeting and say "They won't let me in, finish your drinks and let's head somewhere else" they somehow figure out how passports work.
They were set up for accepting passports, but had to fill out a little paper card instead of using their drivers license scanner. I’d get it if they were busy and had a line out the door but they just didn’t want to be bothered.
Maybe they thought I was pulling out my passport to be a nuisance like the parent comment and would try again with my drivers license when they said no.
Question! Do you do this just to difficult? I mean a passport is obviously a very valid piece of ID but you seem like you are doing this just to be a pain in the ass which says a lot about you as a person.
it's very difficult to inconvenience people in authority without at least some of that inconvenience flowing down to the people they are in authority over.
"This smells to me like a myth spread by prison staff to explain away false positives and/or discourage drug smuggling."
This. There are no super scanners that detect drug reside in prisons or jails. There are occasionally dogs though. Dogs will catch if you handled old school drugs (coke,heroin,etc). If a dog alerts on you - the guards know something is up. But that doesn't mean there is enough evidence on you for an arrest. Often jails/prisons will round up a shift of guards and let the dogs smell around - this catches a few bad guards occasionally. Recently, things have changed. Right now the big issue in jails/prisons is fentanyl - it is difficult to train k9s on fentanyl due to it's handling - and there are not enough k9s or departments that can do it (since it is so dangerous). Good luck finding 25 micrograms in mail or on visitors.
Highly doubt this kind of equipment is present at the majority of institutions, or that it’s sensitive enough to find the trace of a trace amount like this. Sounds cool for a movie, though
Why? Prison contracts are big business. I've seen even small prisons with giant x-ray body scanners (the kind that were removed from airports, actually not those but more serious ones where you stand on a conveyor belt and your exposure is a full 3-5 seconds).
A mass spectrometer of the type they use at airports for explosives, can be used for drugs and easily acquired by any prison.
It was a few years ago (2014, maybe), but I used to visit a medium-security prison about twice a week for volunteer teaching, and they had no such detector. I handled cash frequently.
Yeah I thought white collar criminals got sent to minimum security “resort” prisons where they’d be less stringent about this kind of thing and not be likely to have super sensitive scanners like these.
Separately, shout out to Richard Bronson, a founder who appears in this story, and whose YC startup Commissary Club tries to get former convicts to adjust to life after prison: https://www.commissary.club
I believe there's a lot of work to be done to help people re-integrate with society.
This is a theme with YC. Another cool startup they have backed is: Recidiviz https://www.recidiviz.org
Or how about ppl who don't go to jail. I am sure there are plenty of those who need help. So if going to jail for 2 years means I will get a more help and opportunity then I otherwise would get, maybe it is a good tradeoff.
Or how about we stop shaming people for contributing to causes they find worthwhile, even if they're not contributing to causes we're personally, individually invested in.
I think the reason you're talking about this in the hypothetical instead of doing it is because you know it isn't a good trade off and you're being incredibly glib.
Wall Street Prison Consultants promises to “ensure you serve the shortest sentence possible in the most favorable institution.” This is an actual business.[1]
I think getting killed is a serious risk in every prison in America. Even in the minimum security facilities where people serve sentences for non-violent crimes.
And given that there are ~ 1.8 million people in prison in the US, you have 1 in 15000 chances to be murdered in prison per year.
For context, your chances are 1 in 20000 in the general US population [1].
[1] From the reported 5 per 100,000 people murder rate, which includes the 0,5% of the population in prison (though the latter is such a small percentage that doesn't really change the general result).
That’s showing 120 murders across just sate prisons. “ 1,291,000 people were in state prison, 631,000 in local jails, 226,000 in federal prisons, 44,000 in youth correctional facilities, 42,000 in immigration detention camps, 22,000 in involuntary commitment, 11,000 in territorial prisons, 2,500 in Indian Country jails, and 1,300 in United States military prisons.[8]” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra...
So it’s 1 in 10,000 per year aka a 1 in 500 shot of being murdered in a 20 year prison sentence which seems dangerous but still unlikely.
Averages like that, including for the US population, are meaningless. Your chances if you live in Englewood (South Side Chicago) are dramatically higher, while if you're in rural Utah, somewhat less. Same for prisons.
Only for prisons (and jails) you don't get to pick where you'll end up.
And I wouldn't expect prisons/jails to have the same (or comparable) variety in murder rates as there is between say rural Utah and South Side Chicago.
> Averages like that, including for the US population, are meaningless. Your chances if you live in Englewood (South Side Chicago) are dramatically higher, while if you're in rural Utah, somewhat less. Same for prisons.
If you say so. That's not a compelling response. Any data other than "I say it's meaningless"?
A prison is a jail. While I would like to say deaths are less likely in say a city or county jail, the data is not differentiating. County "jails" are included in most prison data. One of the links is literally about "jails", so the pedantry is not useful.
>One of the links is literally about "jails", so the pedantry is not useful.
Both links are about jails, when the discussion was about prisons. Their pedantry was completely on point.
And while prisons and jails are similar enough that you can group data from them to get a view of the entire legally detained population, that doesn't make statements about one entirely transferable to the other. They're different institutions run by different people and housing different (though overlapping) populations.
1) Prisons and jails are horrible places, and inmates are not given enough protection against violence from other inmates, or the guards. Murder statistics are horrifying.
> Business rewards a certain type of attitude and assertiveness—all things that will get you killed in prison
This sounds like bullshit. Those sound like things that will get you challenged but not killed. Animal nature is to challenge the strong but prey on the weak.
Love this detail: "In 2001, following the accounting scandals at Enron and other companies, a publication called CFO Magazine quietly abandoned its annual Excellence Awards, because winners from each of the previous three years had gone to prison."
Reminds me of the Tour de France. Where you basically can’t find anybody to give a vacated title to because everybody else in line has been guilty of doping, too.
Yeah looking at the legs of pro cyclists and it’s clear they’re all doping. At this point idk why we don’t let pros dope and just accept it. Baseball went through this 20 years ago but was there another period as exciting as Bonds/Sosa/McGwire? We’ve had flashes of incredible players but doping made the game a more exciting game.
I think 2000-2003 was just an extreme outlier in corporate malfience. Nowadays ,with technology rise of high tech and big retail, there hardly seem to be any noteworthy arrests. Businesses these days are so successfull and profitable, such as ads or intellectual property, no need to cheat and steal. Rather than outright fraud vcs get burned by overinflated expectations like wework.
And Sarbox was put in place partly in response. I won't argue that 1.) stuff doesn't still happen and that 2.) Sarbox doesn't add quite a bit of compliance overhead, but outright financial fraud is probably reduced from ~2000 considerably.
Obviously 2008 brought many examples of risk not being properly accounted for but that's mostly something different.
"Since the turn of the millennium, the prosecution of white-collar crime has plummeted—but this should not imply a surge in moralism among our leading capitalists. After the attacks of September 11th, the F.B.I. began to shift resources toward counterterrorism. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers cut the budget of the Internal Revenue Service so sharply that it had the same number of special agents in 2017 as it had half a century earlier, even though the national population has grown by two-thirds."
To be fair, much of the IRS's work has been automated. Especially the submissions - the IRS no longer has to have people doing data entry. The computers automatically scan for red flags.
“I got eighteen months,” Tezna told the group, glumly. “Definitely not the number I had in mind.” He was sitting beside a window covered by venetian blinds; he wore white earbuds and several days’ growth of beard.
Are you kidding me. 18 months (of which he will likely only serve 12 at a prison camp) for stealing $350k seems very lenient. He should have put it in bitcoin would have made $1.8 million or about 10 years at NASA. People have gotten longer sentences back in the 2000s for fraud on ebay. I would say he got very very lucky to only get 18 months for such blatant and large fraud. He could have easily been handed a decade or longer.
Saving the article for a later read—this is a subject that I've always been curious about. Around a decade or so ago, there was some mid-level Apple executive who went to jail for some bribery thing (I think—it was a decade or so ago) and I set up a Google alert on his name, curious to see what would become of him when he got out of jail. It's been triggered once or twice since then and both times were stories that referenced the original conviction.
I always find myself looking at the uber successful and thinking: "society is discounting the possibility of them being frauds"
In the end only them know if they broke the laws or not, but for sure it's not the 0% which society implies.
Trump has been mentioned and the consensus around him is pretty high that he committed white collar crimes, but at the same time I think that the intelligencia pricing Obama's possibility of white collar crimes at 0% is too low.
Same goes for the elite of the elite in business:
Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin...only them know what they did, and if something about them emerges it should be received as a surprise ....but not that huge of a surprise if you get what I mean.
Musk we know that he has repeatedly violated securities laws, but for sure there is much more brewing below the surface that we don't know of.
> Musk we know that he has repeatedly violated securities laws
Fwiw, "insider trading" is not an actual law. It's a constantly-shifting regulation maintained by the SEC.
In the example you're citing, Musk tweeted financial information about Tesla. This would have been totally precedented and OK for the company to release as a PDF on their website, but there was no standing principle on whether a tweet counted as a public release of financial info. After deliberation and some caveats, the SEC said "Yes, this is fine" [1].
I don't think this counts as a "violation of security law". Would most CEOs have played it safe and asked their lawyers first, who could have consulted the SEC, and waited six months for a draft new regulation? Probably. But I don't think it makes the tweet illegal, or even especially wrong.
No, Musk said "a deal is done" while in reality the other side of the deal didn't agree to anything, and ultimately nothing happened. Would've been the same fraud if it was a press release on EDGAR, probably worse since you can always play cute and say "lol it's Twitter it's for shitposting". Nothing to do with insider trading (that we know of) and little to do with the form of the disclosure/lie. It was just a cacophonous stupidity.
