Max Security Prison's Debate Team Bests Harvard

[abaris]

Fun fact; the lunatic who founded conservapedia went there.

Which basically only says that his parents are loaded. Unsurprisingly so, given the nature of conservapedia.

[rexbeccarox]

When I was in school at SUNY New Paltz, I lived down the road (although, "down the road" in those boonies means at least a few miles) from that correctional center. As part of a certain curriculum I was building for myself, I performed (music major) there a couple of times, and I got to meet with some of the inmates who impressed the shit out of me. Some of them told me they were thankful to end up in the position they were in because the education they were being provided wouldn't have been available to them otherwise. The recidivism rate going down for these guys brings a tear to my eye. It's a broken system, but things like this bring awareness, and hopefully our country can make some serious changes in the PIC.

Thanks for posting, Rocket.

[abaris]

Some of them told me they were thankful to end up in the position they were in because the education they were being provided wouldn't have been available to them otherwise.

Paint's a sad picture of the education system, doesn't it. Go to prison to get a degree.

[MentalGiant]

I have more than one family member who has been/is currently in prison who have near-genius IQ's. Unfortunately, intelligence often comes paired with arrogance and an invincibility complex.

Meanwhile, college has become a total fucking joke/money making/social control scheme. I don't buy for one second that college students today are anywhere near as smart as in generations past.

[Edwardo Piet]

Intelligent people can come with arrogance... but there are a lot of highly stupid people who think they know it all too.

[TheRocketSurgeon]

I have more than one family member who has been/is currently in prison who have near-genius IQ's. Unfortunately, intelligence often comes paired with arrogance and an invincibility complex.

Meanwhile, college has become a total fucking joke/money making/social control scheme. I don't buy for one second that college students today are anywhere near as smart as in generations past.

Perhaps we have hit a slope-intercept point at which more and more people have been caught up in the Drug War and its consequences (even a smart guy in the 'hood is likely to get caught up in gang violence, when he has few other real options and the failing school isn't much help to him) end up in prison, raising the number of high-IQ prisoners, and the colleges have become more about money, lowering the IQ averages even at Ivy League schools.

There are a great many reasons smart people wind up committing crimes other than arrogance or a feeling of invincibility. One of the main failings, I think, of the American moral compass is that the average middle-class WASP cannot imagine a scenario wherein he can see himself doing the same thing as those poor, uneducated, "other people". Yet if they were in the other person's situation, they would very likely be. It is a lie we have been sold, to suggest that the only reason people go to prison is socio/psychopathy or other criminal "mindsets". They exist, but they are far from the majority of prisoners. The US prison industrial complex has seen to it that practically everything is now illegal, and it's not even necessary to actually commit a crime to go to prison on a false conviction, so rotten-to-the-core has our trial court system become. Finally, a person at 17 is not the same as a person at 25, let alone 35. Look back on your own life and ask yourself why you did the crazy things you did when you were 17...one of the luxuries of being a middle-class WASP is the ability to be crazy teenagers without a high risk of encountering Law Enforcement, or just getting slapped on the wrist if we do.

[Edwardo Piet]

I would have expected the intelligent people to rather want to be poor than a criminal that's how I feel!

[TheRocketSurgeon]

It's not about want, Evie. When you live in a hard place, among hardened people, you too become hardened. It's the thing that most of us white, relatively privileged middle-class types have trouble imagining. Nice as you are, I promise if you grew up in one of our "projects", you'd be a very different person with a very different set of outlooks on everything.

[MentalGiant]

I would have expected the intelligent people to rather want to be poor than a criminal that's how I feel!

When it comes down to, say, help your mother put food on the table for your younger siblings by selling some drugs or burglarize a house because your 13/14/15 and can't legally work, what would you do? That's the age many of these offenders get caught up in the system, and it's difficult for them to get out. And that's the reality for many low-income children growing up in bad areas. They get in the system young and the day they turn 18 (sometimes younger they're charged as adults here in the US), all their arrests become public record. Even if they want to turn their life around as adults, they have a lengthy history, possibly felonies that would be very negative to potential employers (like burglary, violent offenses, fraud ext...). Who wants to hire a burglar or a armed robber no matter how intelligent/talented they are?

[Edwardo Piet]

I wasn't thinking of extreme exceptions. I just meant generally.