Prison Is For Dangerous Criminals, Not Hacktivists

In late 2011, defense contractor Stratfor suffered a cybersecurity breach that resulted in a leak of millions of internal emails. A few months later, the FBI arrested hacktivist Jeremy Hammond and several others for actions related to the breach. Hammond pleaded guilty to one count of violating the CFAA, and today his sentence was handed down: 10 years in prison followed by three years of supervised release. He said, [The prosecutors] have made it clear they are trying to send a message to others who come after me. A lot of it is because they got slapped around, they were embarrassed by Anonymous and they feel that they need to save face." Reader DavidGilbert99 adds, "Former LulzSec and Anonymous member Jake Davis argues that U.S. lawmakers need to take a leaf out of the U.K.'s legal system and not put Jeremy Hammond behind bars for his part in the hack of Stratfor. 'Jeremy Hammond has a lot to give society too. Prisons are for dangerous people that need to be segmented from the general population. Hackers are not dangerous, they are misunderstood, and while disciplinary action is of course necessary, there is nothing disciplined about locking the door on a young man's life for 10 years.'"

Comments

Sorry, but not here

[i kan reed]

Here we have prison to punish people. It doesn't exist as a means to control risk by controlling dangerous people. We've collectively decided that we should put people in cells(and let them be raped) like it's telling 5 year olds to stand in the corner.

Re:Sorry, but not here

[Joce640k]

Worse: The really, really bad people in prison enjoy having all these non-violent young men in there to torture and rape. It's like handing them lollipops.

Re:Sorry, but not here

[Anonymous Coward]

Here where I live, prisons are privatized, with an extremely strong lobby. If a DA doesn't throw the book at defendants, they get replaced next election by one that will. If a judge doesn't rubber-stamp maximum sentences and keep a high conviction ratio, they also get voted out. Even the local police have "quotas" where they have to slap cuffs on x amount of people per outing or they end up being passed up for promotions by people with better arrest tallies.

So, prisons are not for punishment; they are for profit. If you look at the two private prison companies, they actually have Apple-like growth in the past few years, with no upper bound in sight.

Ironic this... even China is getting rid of its work/re-education camps, while we are getting them here in the US.

Re:Sorry, but not here

[Anonymous Coward]

The worse criminal you are, the less punishment prison actually is. In the words of Richard Speck: "If they knew what a good time I was having, they'd turn me loose."

Re:Sorry, but not here

[Anonymous Coward]

Prison serves multiple purposes. You can look at it as a place to try to institutionalize people, so they won't do whatever they did when they get out, because they, in theory, won't want to go back. You can look at it as punishment.

However it become blindingly obvious it does not work except in a few small cases. Some stats show nearly 63% of prison inmates cannot read. That would be crippling in our society. If they cannot read they probably cannot do simple math (also crippling). With little other choices in jobs they turn to crime. Because most jobs require at least that. All but the most menial of jobs require that and those will be replaced soon.

Yeah we want to make it so they do not want to go back. But lets also make it so they do not *need* to go back. I want an ROI for the billions we are spending.

Re:Sorry, but not here

[Anonymous Coward]

Here we have prison to punish people. It doesn't exist as a means to control risk by controlling dangerous people. We've collectively decided that we should put people in cells(and let them be raped) like it's telling 5 year olds to stand in the corner.

Officially, there are five reasons for incarceration (the five theories of punishment)...

1. 
      
2. Incapacitation. For as long as you're locked up, you're generally unable to commit new offenses against society. (This is obviously not entirely true, as inmate-on-inmate violence, and less frequently inmate-on-corrections-staff violence, etc., can lead to "new charges," but even then, generally, the extent of the damage is almost always constrained to within the institution.) No Internet access. What electronics are available, are extremely limited. (Inmates now have, in several states, tablet computers, but they receive email, purchase MP3s, etc, through kiosks...) Incoming and outgoing non-legal mail is searched and read. Phone calls are monitored. Visitors go through metal detectors (and often backscatter X-ray machines, etc), and inmates are stripsearched coming back from visits. Etc. (It's not perfect -- cell phones are regularly smuggled in, for instance -- but incarceration severely curtails most inmates' ability to F with society.)

3.    

4. Specific deterrence. Prison is designed to convince you not to do that shit again.

5.    

6. General deterrence. Prison sentences are supposed to communicate to society, "this is what you risk if you do the same shit that guy did."

7.    

8. Rehabilitation. It's fashionable to be, like, "what rehabilitation?!" But programs are available for those who want to participate. Many in California are getting, e.g., GEDs, degrees from Chaffey College and other programs, etc. (that they -- or more likely their loved ones -- pay for; it's not at taxpayer expense, they eliminated that in the 80s). Hell, even Manson girl Leslie Van Houten got her masters in prison, in 2012... Recidivism numbers show that inmates who take advantage of the programs available tend to come back through the revolving door at a statistically significant lower rate...

9.    

10. Retribution. Yeah, punishment is actually one of the goals of imprisonment. Whodathunk.

Most, if not all, of those goals are met by incarcerating even 'hacktivists,' though I personally think a 10 year sentence is way overboard (especially if it's federal, where there's no "parole board" and the most "good time" credit that can be earned is 15% -- the same California allows "serious" or "violent" first strikers (non-serious, non-violent offenders can serve as little as 50% of their sentence with "good time," 1/3 of the sentence if they're accepted into a fire camp and bust their ass fighting wildfires for at least a year of their sentence...)

Re:Sorry, but not here

[Anonymous Coward]

One can tell a lot about a country in how they treat the people that they can't stand, be it prisoners or "terrorists".

As a US citizen, it is just shameful. However, the lobby of "why spend money on a convicted murderer, he should be punished" is very strong here.

The problem is that there is a point when punishment turns into an attack, similar to the difference between a spanking versus flaying skin off with barbed wire. A punishment creates respect. An attack creates contempt, fear, and anger which has a blowback effect.

If for some reason I had the ability to rework the penal system here in the US, it would be along the lines of what even Eastern Europe has done:

1: Most prisons are warehouses. This would change to factories and farms. Before the 1980s, most prisons had their own farms and were fairly self-sufficient. Now, food has to be imported in [1]. Great for sub-contractors, destroys the purpose of the prison. Instead, there needs to be something for prisoners to do other than gas COs or flood tiers.

2: Make it "un-cool" to act up. US prisons, it is viewed as an achievement to get the four-point bed or the restraint chair. In Europe, the same behavior is looked upon as pure idiocy by other inmates.

3: Give something to work for, be it a university, or a GED, or heck, just the basic ability to read and write at the level of a sixth-grader.

4: Some real-world job training. A prison intranet perhaps with no access to the outside world and some sites mirrored.

5: Arrests and trivial convictions would be private. Only felonies would be public record. This way, some guy who gets drunk and is slurped up for PI by the local popo doesn't have a rap sheet.

6: Jails would be relegated to two functions. One is a place to house (not punish) defendants waiting for their trial date, the second is to deal with the convicted. Some jails punish all inside, and that should not be the case unless the US wants to go Italy's route of "guilty until proven innocent."

7: The punishment would fit the crime. Killing someone's career means that the person is a ward of the state for the rest of their lives, and so is their family. Keeping them earning money means more revenue from taxes.

8: Private prisons will not go away anytime soon. Instead, the companies would be given contracts to build schools and libraries, so their bread and butter does not depend on how many beds are filled. This way, there is no pressure on judges to convict or else be removed from office next election.

9: Actual mental health care. Right now, if someone is mentally ill, there are no hospitals for that. They end up in the psycho cellblock in the local jail.

[1]: In Texas, this seemed to be deliberate. Look up Vita-Pro for example.

Prisons need to be fixed before patents

[metrix007]

There are so many problems with prisons in this country it's not funny.

Lets see...

• Non dangerous criminals go to prison and become hardened criminals, instead of being punished in a suitable way and giving back to the community
• Those scary hackers and pirates get more prison time than rapists and in some caes murderers
• You can go to prison for teaching someone how to beat a lie detector test. That is essentially a travesty because of what it indicates
• Prison is used a a deterrent, so far too often the punishment does not fit the crime or anywhere near it. Justice indeed.
• Prison is meant to be about rehabilitation, in part. If someone is released back into society, they are considered rehabilitated. Yet, they lose the right to vote.

I'm sure there's more....

Re:Fuck off

[aeranvar]

I don't see anyone saying that hackers aren't criminals or that Jeremy Hammond didn't deserve to go to prison. What they're saying is that criminals and dangerous people are sets that overlap, but that don't totally overlap. Or, another way to put it: Criminals aren't dangerous. Dangerous criminals are dangerous. Some hackers might be dangerous. Some hackers might not be dangerous. For hackers that are dangerous, 10 years in prison might be appropriate. For hackers that aren't dangerous, like those engaged in political protest, 10 years in prison is overkill.

No, you fuck off

[deanklear]

You steal my personal data, sell it to someone else who uses that data to commit crimes, you are a dangerous person.

When Google and Facebook do this for a profit, hide the data collection behind an EULA, and then sell your personal data to third parties, they are called geniuses and made billionaires.

Furthermore, the individual in question did not seek to make a profit. You can disagree with his methods, but back when the scales of justice were still capable of measuring anything at all, these sort of considerations were commonly implemented.

Stop trying to make excuses when people commit crimes. They're a criminal, pure and simple.

In 1750: "Stop making excuses for those who commit treason against the King. They are criminals, pure and simple."

In 1850: "Stop making excuses for those people who steal slaves under the guise of making them free. They are criminals, pure and simple."

In 1950: "Stop making excuses for those people who participate in race riots. They are criminals, pure and simple."

Legitimate power and systems of law do not justify themselves without some reasoning. So can you tell me why people who commit physical assaults, armed robberies, and sexual assaults should see less jail time that someone who made a copy of an email archive to try and expose overreach of our privatized military economy?

How is putting this individual in prison going to

1) repair the damage they are accused of
2) improve society at large
3) cost effectively return them to society

Questions 1-3 are routinely ignored because the American incarceration system is not designed to help American society. It causes more harm than good, has shoved millions of people into a cycle of poverty and violence that few escape from, and the costs (upwards of 60-100k per prisoner per year) to perpetuate the broken system are far more than simpler, more humane justice systems found throughout the industrialized world.

This is not 1600. America is not a puritan state. Keep your dead ideas about corporal punishment in the distant past where they belong.

Jeremy Hammond is a repeat offender.

[Chas]

Okay, I happen to be VERY familiar with Jeremy Hammond (for someone who isn't part of his butt-kissing crew). I associated with him for a couple years in hacking circles in the mid-2000's. My opinion of him isn't very high. And I can't tell you what I think of his ethics, as he has none. He's someone who's constantly looking for an enemy to somehow oppress him and fight against.

This argument MIGHT hold water if this was Hammond's first offense. It isn't.

He was expelled from college for a hacking incident. Not for the hack itself, but for installing back doors into the systems and then failing to disclose them when he came forward to "teach the admins" about the methods he'd used to get into the systems in the first place.

He assaulted a Chicago city cop during a gay pride parade in 2004 while trying to confront a heckler.

He was fired from his job at a Mac consultancy in the Chicago area after teaching people how to hack into systems using the consultancy's servers as guinea pigs (machines that held LIVE CUSTOMER DATA).

He and a cohort looted the coffers of the Chicago Communist Party after a failed attempt to take control.

He's had multiple arrests as a public nuisance.

He and a group of his erstwhile friends hacked a site called Protest Warrior and stole credit cards. And he left such a bad taste in these friends' mouths that one of them rolled on him to the FBI. He was caught, prosecuted and sent to jail for 3 years (got out after 2 on good behavior).

After getting out he was busted for assaulting a holocaust denier in a public establishment.

He was busted for theft and destruction of property during the Chicago bid to host the Olympics.

And, what did he do? He hacked Stratfor and stole credit card numbers (with intent to use) AGAIN.

So what are we supposed to do? Impose a "no computers, no cell phones" sentence on him? In this day and age it's practically impossible to enforce.
There's also the fact that he's a repeat offender.

Is he really and truly PHYSICALLY dangerous? No. But prison isn't about simply physical protection of society. It's also about deterring those who abuse society on a constant basis.

And Jeremy Hammond is one such abusive element. He's a thug with a martyr complex. He wants to feel important, authoritative and in control. He wants to be seen as a "rebel". The fact is, he's a script kiddie, using the work of others and trying to make it appear as if he's some vastly knowledgeable authority. He has only a thin veneer of social skills to get by on, and basically defaults to "smash and grab" when he doesn't get his way.

In short, he's a boil on the butt of society. And prison is about the only place for him.

I personally know Jeremy...

[g0bshiTe]

How about posting the real reason he was given such a stiff penalty!

This isn't his first hacking charge nor his first run in with police.

His rap sheet is as long as my arm, with charges ranging from hacking and using stolen credit cards to assault. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Hammond#Arrests_and_criminal_history

My guess is this harsh sentence stems from the Stratfor hack as well.