I’m at work (I work in a prison for those who don’t know) and I’m walking by a group of inmates watching a movie on TV. They’re watching a video of Shottas, a movie about Jamaican gangsters. As I’m walking by there’s a scene where these four guys, who appear to be the main characters, are shaking down this store owner for protection money. He apparently hasn’t paid in three weeks and says he can’t pay yet. So the boss gangster casually tells one of his men, “shoot him” and the guy does. The store clerk, who’s been sitting nearby, starts screaming so the same guy turns his gun on her and kills her as well.
And I overhear the following exchnage between two of the inmates watching this scene:
“Damn, he shot the bitch.”
“That’s the way you got to do it. You can’t go leaving no witnesses.”
This advice was delivered very casually, the same way you or I would tell somebody not to leave their car windows down because we heard it was going to rain later.
Guess you’d really be freaked out if you saw me cheering when Steve McQueen cold cocks Sally Struthers in The Getaway. Frankly, I admire the gangsters logic about the situation, nothing annoys me more in a movie when you have a character doing something really stupid that could get everyone killed at a moment’s notice and nobody tries to kill him. (The scene where the alchol merchant flakes out in Pitch Black is a perfect example of this.)
Hey, I agree with Tuckerfan. Any time I watch a horror movie, it’s the same thing. “Oh yeah, split up and search the dark house, that’ll go well. Sure the psychopathic killer looks pretty dead after that fall, but don’t bother filling him with bullets from the gun you’re carrying to make sure.” Crime movies go pretty much the same way. “Don’t waste the bank teller for no reason, you mope, you just added murder two to your inevitable rap sheet. Why didn’t you invest in a silencer, jackass?”
I mean, in context, it’d weird me out too, but I say the same things with my friends. All of whom are upstanding citizens.
If making meaningless observations on the seemingly apparent inherent differences between you and the men that you encounter in your line of work helps you to maintain a mentality that you could never end up like them and that you’re a mo’ better person than all of them, more power to ya.
Personally, I don’t think the comment proved anything. My teenage boys have said the same things while watching tv and movies a thousand times.
Wouldn’t that be Murder One in some jurisdictions?
Anyway, when I watch a flick, sometimes I find myself not only questioning “What was the rest of your plan?” in regards to the criminals’ plan but also trying to work out the plan. It’s just an exercise in plot logic, if you will. Come on, you’re not accusing the guy who wrote the movie of being subhuman, are you?
Ok, to head off the inevitable shit, yeah, I think most people in prison deserve to be there, unless they were falsely convicted for something. Now the length of time is a different issue, as are draconian drug sentencing laws. And I have done some drugs in my time, but never carried around an amount that would get me locked up in the pen. County maybe, but I guess I got lucky.
I think weed should be legal, but if you want to carry weight that will get you locked up in the penitentiary, yep you are an idiot. I have no sympathy for thieves, robbers, con artists, or anybody that fucks with another person.
Sentencing guidelines for a lot of shit are fucked up. So what, judges have to go by the law, if we want the law changed, it’s up to us as voters.
Yeah. Funny about that. Turns out that the proportion of learning disorders in prisoners is much greater than in the regular population.
Of course, people’s heads would explode were they, instead of thinking ‘oh, yay me, I’m so much better than those scum’, would consider that life is really much more ‘there, but for the grace of Og, go I’.
I don’t care, I am not responsible for the mental health of other people. I don’t like people that murder, rape, rob, steal, and generally hurt other people, and those that do should be locked up for whatever length of time deemed by the law of the land.
I am all for treatment for mental illness in the criminal justice system. I know it is sadly lacking but I personally have no control over that.
I AM better than a lot of these scum because I don’t hurt people. Why do you have a problem with this?
Fuck this QG, I am done here. I won’t be party to another multi-page trainwreck just because you found another “cause”. I don’t really give a shit about the plight of inmates in prisons.
Frankly, I’d be much more worried if the exchange quoted in the OP was spoken by educated middle-class professionals.
Prison culture is profoundly different from our regular one. People are expected to talk tough and are punished for showing any sort of compassion or empathy - acting as mean as the next guy is a survival trait. Even if they didn’t believe what they were saying, their overriding societal norms would force them to say it. I probably would have said the same thing myself if I had found myself in prison, even if I wasn’t a criminal.
Now, a civilian saying that sort of thing - that would freak me out.
You mean like the two accountants I once heard laughing over all the money they would make being drivers for people who have overindulged during the holidays? The organization is run by volunteers and is supposed to be free but apparently these accountants whose firm, I gather, offered their services as volunteers, would take advantage of the drunken state of their ‘customers’ and bilk them for bucks.
I guess I am either too dumb, or not dumb enough to be a criminal. If I were shaking down a store owner for cash (or some similar crime) my intention would be to make sure that I did NOT kill anyone even if they COULD identify me. My reasoning is that if I simply extort a shop owner to give me cash, or I rob a guy on the street at gunpoint, etc., then the chance of me getting caught is slim (so long as I didn’t screw it all up) because with all the other crime going on, the police can’t devote that much manpower to trying to find me.
However, if I KILL someone, the crime is much more serious and the police will try a lot harder to find me. And if I am caught, the penalty for murder is much worse then the penalty for an armed mugging.
I read the OP as: here is a way that prison inmates think, which is not like outsiders think. shrug. I would expect a cattle farmer to think differently about business than a fish farmer, so I’m not so surprised to see that burgulars think differently than I do. From the brevity of the OP I can’t parse out what Nemo’s point is, so I’ll stop there.
