When it comes to torrents, one of the most commonly asked questions is “Is downloading torrents legal or illegal?” Torrent clients, such as uTorrent Vuze and the official BitTorrent client, are used to download immense amounts of data on the Web, and there’s no question that much of it is illegal. Here we’ll talk about how torrent downloads work, when they’re illegal, and how to protect your privacy when you’re using them. So What Is Legal and What Is Illegal? The short answer: as long as the item is copyrighted and you don’t own it, then downloading it (for free) via torrent is illegal. Using a torrent client and downloading torrents in itself isn’t illegal, as you could be downloading things that aren’t protected by copyright. The long answer: This varies from case to case.
Most countries have basic common laws against intellectual property theft. If a piece of music is copyrighted and you don’t own it, you can’t download it legally. The same goes for a movie, a game, or anything else you may want (unless the copyright-holder decides to make it free either temporarily or permanently, as is often the case with video games). The line gets kind of fuzzy here, since people ask themselves many different questions about their own country’s laws. In general, a copyright is registered to an individual or organization that creates something. This copyright has a time limit, usually equivalent to the lifetime of the creator and a.
Some copyrights are for life plus fifty years. Others are for life plus seventy years.
Look up your country in the previous link if you’re unsure of your laws. Of course, your mileage may vary, as some things may not be protected by the law where you live, or copyright law may not be enforced at all. Nino rota amarcord rarest.
So if you’re downloading a free Linux distribution through your torrent client, you don’t need to worry. But if you’re getting John Lennon’s “Imagine” from The Pirate Bay, you’re doing something that in all likelihood is breaking a law. Related: Torrent Privacy Whatever it is you’re doing is not any of my business. But it is my business to make sure you know just how “anonymous” you are in the torrent network. The short answer is: you totally aren’t!
It’s handy to have a basic knowledge of how the works. Theoretically you should have some level of privacy since you’re not downloading any data from one particular server (in contrast to downloading something from a central server like you’d find on Microsoft’s website, where they’ll know exactly who it is that’s downloading their products). But through the torrent system you download directions to a file.
That means that the torrent file is actually just a list of trackers and some hash codes. It doesn’t really prove that you downloaded the torrent file. What you do inside your torrent client is more important, and that’s all managed by a decentralized list of servers. Once you start the download of the actual file you want to get to, you end up downloading little pieces of the file from a bunch of people. Can You Get Caught?
Government agents and copyright trolls tend to snoop around the Torrent networks, and some of the more popular sites hosting Torrent files, downloading files and listing all the IP addresses they find under the Peers (downloaders) and Seeders (uploaders) lists. This will, of course, compromise your address eventually. The actual number of people who get caught is miniscule, but if you want to secure yourself and don’t care much to contribute to the Torrent community, then you can disable seeding which stops your PC uploading files to the torrent network. Avid torrenters would call this selfish, and maybe they’re right, but you’re also covering yourself. Another good option is to use a proxy or VPN, then set your torrent client to connect to peers through that.
This essentially makes you anonymous by routing your connection through a different IP address. Then there’s the (Tor) that you can configure as a proxy for your torrent client.
However, since the Snowden revelations it’s become known that even Tor has been targeted by the NSA and GCHQ for illegal activity. While the network is mostly secure, there have been incidents of these spy bodies attacking individual computers, so it’s not as anonymous as it once was. Torrent sites are next to impossible to shut down. Governments have raided and seized all the computers and stuff at a location where the website was.
The torrent website was thus shutdown, and it was open once again in less than 48hrs. These sites do a lot of backups of their systems and can get a new location for their servers quickly, but they still have to buy new computers and get everything setup on them, before the website can be up and running again. Some sites have been shut down several times, but it keeps coming back. Whereas others, such as Mininova.org have gone legit. The site is hosted in the Netherlands, and decided to comply with their law that was passed (They were shutdown and moved several times before this).
If you don’t have an anti-virus that blocks the sites that are known to have viruses, then you should get one. I’d recommend Webroot or a well-known anti-virus. Now, I hope you are aware that downloading games is also illegal. But if you insist. I’ve read that torrenting has less viruses, if you download the files with the most downloads. For example, if there are two identical files, but one has a million downloads and the other has a thousand, then maybe you should go with the one with the millions.
Hope this helped.:). I got one warning via a letter from my cable provider, I then switched to Verizon FiOS as my provider.
I then got a nother warning: however it was a phone call. Three years later I got a guy in a suit and tie knocking on my door with a list of all the downloads I had done in an amount for me to pay as a lovely fine! So I would recommend not downloading too many because they are looking for those people downloading and selling them and in my case they thought I was selling them, I was not and they did not have proved so they close the case but it scared the shit out of me!
I have been getting warning emails from my ISP (Comcast) for about 10 years because of my torrent downloads. I have yet to see them take any action against me.
Friends uncle is an FBI agent that investigates internet crimes. He said that they are not going after the average citizen who downloads from torrents, but more going after those supplying the illegal content to the torrent sites and those bootlegging and trying to sell the stuff on the street, etc.
I said to him, in light of this new information. I wish to confess to downloading illegal content via torrents, and clapped my writs together in prep. For handcuffs. He laughed and told me that even if he did, it would get thrown out before it made it to court. It would cost the court system over a million dollars to prosecute me and such, even if I said I was guilty and made a written statement to the fact. It costs too much for NOTHING. Just so that everyone is clear.
Downloading copyrighted material is in fact NOT illegal. It is not you responsibility as a downloader to determine if a distributor has a legal right to distribute a copyrighted work. If it was, then you would have to request a copy of Itunes’s contract with every artist, movie company, video game maker, etc before shopping at the site. What IS illegal when bit-torrenting, is the distribution a copyrighted product without license to do so.
By default when downloading in a swarm you are uploading, hence distributing the copyrighted product. Aviod identification by this by using an open VPN.
Let S Go To Prison Trailer
A quick google search and 60 minutes of reading up and learning how to use tools such as this will keep you anonymous and keep the torrent market booming. I am an expat who lives in China. Over the past few years I have torrented about one terabyte of movies, music, and TV shows which I then copied onto a removable hard drive upon download completion. I plan to return to the U.S. For University in a little over six months with this hard drive, but not with the computer that I did all the torrenting on. My question is, is there a way for the government to track my torrents to my removable hard drive? And Is this something I need to be worried about?
My landlord just contacted me to let me know the internet provider (the landlord provides it) had contacted them to tell that someone on the account was downloading “from an illegal website.” I freaked a little bit thinking it was something really crazy, but turns out it was a popular television series. And yes, I did. But this whole “illegal website” business sounded like scare tactics. Of course, now I’m afraid to download anything else, and I’ve deleted whatever I might’ve had on my computer. I feel spied on. I guess that’s the downside to being on the wrong side of the law. I received a “warning” email from my ISP showing just a few of the movies/shows I’ve downloaded.
Their obligation was to tell me that they received complaints from someone representing the copyright holder. I was like “f.ck these b.tches”. I don’t agree with DMCA. When a show is aired for free on TV (regular over-the-air channels like NBC, CBS, FOX, etc.) and is downloaded the next night, who cares. If you pay to see a movie in theaters, or purchase the DVD or download a torrent of the DVD, who cares? We can all thank f.cking Metallica for this BS ever since their suit against Napster ages ago. No it wasn’t an email.
It was a document that appeared after my computer suddenly, “without warning,” restarted and I couldn’t gain access to my account anymore. And yes it had a time frame which was counting down from 48 hours. They had my IP address and they even knew my location and the user name of my computer.
And plus they stated if you want to gain access to your computer you have to pay $250,000 within 48 hours, which was on a countdown that I could clearly see. So I immediately disconnected my internet on all accounts and went into safe mode, using system restore to get my computer working again So getting to a conclusion this is possibly, maybe, just someone trying to scare me? Well when I first started using torrents, I truly felt that that biggest part I needed to worry about was redistribution; We’re all familiar with the F.B.I. As silly as that might sound, I thought I’d be okay since I NEVER plan to redistribute anything I downloadCertainly never for financial gain.
I do know better now and have decided to stop fooling myself, because messing with the Federal Government is something I have BEYOND ZERO interest in. My real question is what should I do now? I’m at the point where I’ve download a few hundred items nowdo I just STOP and hope it all works out?
Or should I also get rid of any and all items, maybe even the hard drive I was using? I’ve only used uTorrent, but HOW is it possible that website go undetected? Seems to me like the F.B.I. Might just set them up and let people come to them. Either way, just thought I’d ask to what level you’d recommend “purging”; I’m then going to figure out the best way to grovel to my country. Torrents aren’t bad perhaps the porn though is the only exception I find.
While downloading copyrighted material via a torrent from is illegal, think for a moment: Gee, alot of people just want that game or just REALLY want that song Look at minecraft for instance! Getting a minecraft torrent isn’t much different than getting a cracked launcher to download it from their own host server amazon!!! I MEAN WTF!!! Here is my reasoning: I’m just too poor to buy it right now and I am not even 15 (yet, but will be soon). I will just get this game for free and then when I work for Mojang AB (Gosh, how Ironic; I download a cracked MC and work for them:P) and then I buy the game! Makes up for being illegal no? ITS ONLY LOGICAL!!!
WHAT WOULD SPOCK SAY!? “That is the logical choice” I think the Vulcan would agree.:3. Hi, In some countries its very difficult to buy Original DVDs of movies, games and music etc.
All you find in the shops everywhere are the pirated DVDs and Not the Originals. These DVDs would cost you not more than 1USD. So, living in a country where the original content is not available in the shops, what do you recommend people should do? Pay 1USD for the pirated content available in the markets. Or Download content freely from the internet using torrents. I have not heard of any law that stops pirated content to be sold in the shops (in the country im talking about). Or may be there is a law but im not aware of it.
Your country most likely has a law against piracy, but doesn’t enforce it. Also, even if it’s not illegal to pirate copyrighted content in your country, you can still be legally sued in the nation where the content was produced.
To be totally honest, given your situation, you may not be risking a lot, but I’m just telling you all of the possible circumstances you can encounter. And A site hosted in your country still must adhere to DMCA takedown requests from Google’s SERPs or from the host server if the host server is in a country that must comply with DMCA or a similar law. Just food for thought. I’d say you get a notification that such files are suspected on your machine.
If they can’t access your machine, they don’t have evidence that you still hold the files. However, they can get clear evidence that you downloaded them, and that could be enough for a lawsuit. Usually, cases of piracy are tried in civil court, although I have heard of countries in which it was moved or initiated through the penal system.
Very few people get caught, but I recommend not risking it if you are afraid. Hellow sir/mam/friendz, i’ve got a question that there is this website i know with which im a registered member of and download whole lota apps for music production and samples from companies.
A am i really a big “D-bag”? I mean my inside tells me that i’m a theif but on the other side im not selling or making any money of it just hobbiest, so is this badi mean i feel that its messedup inside but i do like to do my music. But when i tell my self that “ok when i’ll make money with it, i’ll buy it legitmatly”.
But the guilt still doesn’t go away. Also i feel that i am addicted to downloading torrents. Please respond. I hope i have’t.i meant what the hellli dn’t know what im saying.
Any way i think what im dong is effdup!:(. Hello, I live in Bangladesh. I know torrent is legal here since everybody download via torrent and nothing happens. I downloaded over 2 TB of movies and tv shows and copied everything in a hard drive.
I will go to california for university within a couple of months and take the hard drive full of movies with me. Will I get caught if I watched theses torrent downloaded videos from the hard drive over there in my pc. Another thing is are streaming websites for tv shows available in usa such as watchseries.it? The internet, the final frontier, these are the downloads from those bold enough to share what no man has shared before. What is any law enforcement group going to do really.spend rediculous money and time going to court claiming that someone illegally downloaded half a mb of a product from someone.
Let Go
They cant say you did it, only that it was done using your internet connection. You could claim a virus did it on your computer. Basically i couldnt imagine any court deciding that based on your ownership of an internet service policy that you are responsible for things downloaded (without knowing that you were the one to download it). That would be like saying that you are responsible for a car crash when your car was stolen just because you owned it, this shit wont ever make it through the system based on expense and the fact that they cant pick and choose who they want the prosecute (they cant ignore part of the list and send different parts of it to gaol, that would be discrimination) If you are concerned with the ethics behind it then consider that you basically still pay the full amount to see the movie at the cinemas. Paying the full price to watch the movie once and then paying the full price to get the movie to watch again is a scam anyway.
I’ve been using torrent for downloading for about 2 years in a country, where any movie, TV series or music is nearly impossible to get legally (What you get in stores, are illegally recorded on CDs). It’s been a month, I came to USA & I used torrent to download 3-4 TV series & a movie.
When I informed my husband, he warned me to do that anymore, as it may fine him million of dollars (that’s what he said). So, I googled & found this post I understand, I’ve done something illegal, (& probably wont do that again!), but do I have to delete my files, or even uninstall torrent software (I’ve deleted the download record to stop from seeding, though)?!
& If I want to watch movies or series, what can be the best or cheapest option? Does NETFLIX show everything or just some limited shows?
& well, I am 80% satisfied with Youtube for music!:). I think you’ll find that Netflix has a very wide selection of film entertainment. As for the torrent software, you do not have to delete it. There are cases when downloading certain things through Torrent is either legal or permissibly decriminalized. I can tell you more details if you want to know. The files that were downloaded must be deleted in order for you to clear yourself of any probable cause for infringement.
It’s not like SWAT is going to knock down your door. Most likely, nothing will happen. But if you want to completely clear yourself of any wrongdoing, eliminate anything that may show signs you still possess the copyrighted material. Works of art that are either in the public domain (music, movies, etc.) or have a Creative Commons license can be downloaded and distributed for free under copyright law. There are different public domain requirements depending on the country you’re living in. I think that for the US, the author has to have been dead for at least 70 years. Some of Disney’s work is reaching public domain.
As for software, anything with a GNU license can be distributed freely. This very much limits what you can do with torrents legally, but it’s not nothing:D. Hi there; I learn some tricks (from experts) for the ppz that have problems with downloading from torrents. If you can, get a 2nd laptop. Go to coffeeshops, bars, cafes that have good wifi connection. Download from there and change your location every day. (eg; monday bar 1, wed coffeeshop 2, etc etc).
So you can get away withit for long time, once you get the file or music or video you need, pass it on hhd or other laptop. After 4 a 6 month, change the laptop, get a 2nd new one;) Go.od luck & Remember ” I didn’t told you nothing”;P.
John Lyshitski, a young man who has been in prison more often than he has not over the entire course of his life, has just been released from what was his third prison sentence. In all three cases, he was sentenced by Judge Nelson Biederman III. As such, John makes it his mission to destroy the judge's life. Unable to do so, John does the next best thing: destroy the life of the judge's privileged thirty year old son, Nelson Biederman IV. In that new mission, John ends up not having to do anything as certain people are out to get Nelson IV, who in the process receives a 3 to 5 year prison sentence. Nelson IV's incarceration should be enough for John, who knows that someone like Nelson IV, ill-equipped mentally for a life behind bars, is easy prey to get beaten, raped and/or killed in prison. But John wants to witness and be at least a small part in Nelson IV's suffering.
John's plan is to get busted, charged, and convicted for some crime, and end up in the same prison as Nelson IV's. Let's Go To Prison was a sleeper hit for the 2006 movie season.
It came out in November of that year and really didn't start to air previews or TV spots until late October, so a lot of people really didn't expect it. It starred Dax Shepard and Will Arnett. This was the first big gig for Will Arnett and it really scored for him. This movie really is entertaining in the since that it always has something going on. The whole plot was put together very well and had a great form around the prison lifestyle. Dax Shepard does extremely well as John Lyshitski and Will Arnett gives a Grade A performance as Nelson Biederman IV. I have to say that this is a must see for all comedy genre fans.
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Two men were sitting in a parked car, waiting to pick someone up. Carlos Cervantes was in the driver’s seat. He was 30, with glassy green eyes — quiet by nature, but with a loaded, restrained intensity about him. He had picked up Roby So at home in Los Angeles around 3 o’clock that morning, and they’d made it here, to this empty parking lot in front of the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility, on the outskirts of San Diego, just after 6. Now, the sun was rising over the bare, brown mountains in the windshield. A hummingbird zipped around an air-conditioning unit outside.
Already, they’d been waiting close to an hour. Roby was three years older than Carlos but carried himself like a large and joyful child. He was hungry. He wanted biscuits and gravy and was still laughing about how, earlier, he caught himself telling Carlos that, unfortunately, he’d have to wait until tomorrow for biscuits and gravy, because today was Monday, and Monday was pancakes day. Part of his brain still tracked his old prison breakfast menu.
‘‘Why do I still know these things, man?’’ Roby said. ‘‘It’s been four years. I was supposed to. ’’ His voice trailed off, so Carlos finished his sentence: ‘‘Delete.’’ Roby started reciting the weekly prison menu, to see if he could still do it. When he got to Thursday — peanut butter and jelly, four slices of bread, Kool-Aid — Carlos, without turning to look at him, chimed in with ‘‘sugar-free gum.’’ Roby went on.
(Roby tends to do most of the talking.) The trick, he said, is to save those packets of peanut butter and spread it on your pancakes, the next time there are pancakes. It sounds gross, but it’s not. ‘‘The only way I eat my pancakes now is with peanut butter — because that’s the way I ate them in there,’’ Roby explained. And you can put it in your oatmeal!’’ ‘‘Oatmeal is real good with peanut butter,’’ Carlos said. ‘‘I still do that, too!’’ Roby blurted. He continued with the menu.
After Sunday — eggs, ham, hash browns — he looked at Carlos and said, ‘‘You put it all together?’’ to make sure Carlos knew to heap the whole thing between two slices of toast and squeeze jelly over it. ‘‘That’s a pretty fat sandwich, right?’’ Roby said. ‘‘Yeah,’’ Carlos said emphatically. Roby still puts jelly on his egg sandwiches, too, he explained. Strawberry, grape — he doesn’t care. ‘‘People look at me like I’m crazy!’’ ‘‘People don’t even know,’’ Carlos said.
They were laughing at themselves now. Carlos had done almost 11 years; Roby, close to 12. Now they were free men, sitting outside a prison, waxing nostalgic about prison food. They waited some more.
Waiting came easily to them; incarceration makes you patient. Finally, after three and a half hours, a white corrections-department van pulled into the parking lot. It was going backward, fairly fast, then made a wide turn — still in reverse — to roll in beside Carlos and Roby, who jumped out of their car to meet it.
As the van turned, the prison guard driving it leaned his head through the window and hollered, ‘‘I’m doing it on a dare!’’ He sprang out of the van, grinning and chuckling — he seemed overstimulated, as if he couldn’t believe they were letting him drive the van today — and went to open the back door. But then he stopped short: All the backward driving had confused him about which side his passenger was on. Eventually, Dale Hammock appeared. Hammock was 65, white, his head shaved completely bald, both arms wrapped in black tattoos. He wore sweat shorts, a white T-shirt, canvas slip-ons and white socks pulled up near his knees. All his clothes were bright and brand-new.
As he approached Carlos and Roby, he thrust his chest toward them as far as it would go. Inside, this might have signaled strength and authority, but out here, it looked bizarre, as if he had some kind of back deformity.
Carlos shouted, ‘‘Welcome home, Mr. Hammock!’’ Roby shouted, ‘‘How are you feeling, Mr. Hammock?’’ They introduced themselves and hurried to collect his few possessions — a brown paper bag and a pair of work boots — moving as if they’d done this exchange dozens of times, which they had, while Hammock stood between them, looking stunned. Advertisement Carlos handed Hammock the key and asked if he wanted to pop the trunk. But the key wasn’t a key; it was a button. After squinting at it for a second, Hammock handed it back and said, ‘‘I wouldn’t know what to do with that.’’ He’d been in prison for 21 years. Hammock was sent away in 1994, at a time when stiff sentencing reforms around the country were piling more people into prison for longer amounts of time.
These included California’s ‘‘three-strikes law,’’ which took effect just months before Hammock was arrested. The law imposed life sentences for almost any crime if the offender had two previous ‘‘serious’’ or ‘‘violent’’ convictions. (The definitions of ‘‘serious’’ and ‘‘violent’’ in California’s penal code are broad; attempting to steal a bicycle from someone’s garage is ‘‘serious.’’) Similar laws proliferated in other states and in the 1994 federal crime bill, becoming signatures of that decade’s tough-on-crime policies and helping to catapult the country into the modern era of mass incarceration.
But as the criminologist Jeremy Travis, then head of the Justice Department’s research agency, later pointed out, America had failed to recognize the ‘‘iron law of imprisonment’’: Each of the 2.4 million people we’ve locked up, if he or she doesn’t die in prison, will one day come out. It wasn’t until the mid-2000s that this looming ‘‘prisoner re-entry crisis’’ became a fixation of sociologists and policy makers, generating a torrent of research, government programs, task forces, nonprofit initiatives and conferences now known as the ‘‘re-entry movement.’’ The movement tends to focus on solving structural problems, like providing housing, job training or drug treatment, but easily loses sight of the profound disorientation of the actual people being released. Often, the psychological turbulence of those first days or weeks is so debilitating that recently incarcerated people can’t even navigate public transportation; they’re too frightened of crowds, too intimidated or mystified by the transit cards that have replaced cash and tokens. In a recent study, the Harvard sociologist Bruce Western describes a woman who ‘‘frequently forgot to eat breakfast or lunch for several months because she was used to being called to meals in prison.’’ I met one man who explained that, after serving 15 years, he found himself convinced that parked cars would somehow switch on and run him over. So many years inside can leave people vulnerable in almost incomprehensibly idiosyncratic ways, sometimes bordering on helplessness: ‘‘Like that little bird, getting his wings’’ is how one man described himself on Day 1.
Many spill out of prison in no condition to take advantage of the helpful bureaucracies the re-entry movement has been busily putting in place. This became clear in 2012, after California voted to overhaul its three-strikes law and a criminal-justice group at Stanford Law School, the Stanford Three Strikes Project, started filing petitions to have roughly 3,000 prisoners serving life sentences set free with time served. (So far, close to 2,300 have been released.) Many were serial offenders who were sent away for life after one last witless screwup, like Lester Wallace, who was caught trying to steal a car radio on the first morning the law went into effect, or Curtis Wilkerson, who did 16 years of his life sentence after shoplifting a pair of socks from a department store called Mervyn’s. When Wilkerson got out, he sounded as if he couldn’t believe the whole thing: ‘‘Ordinary white socks,’’ he told Rolling Stone. ‘‘Didn’t even have any stripes.’’ Unlike typical parolees, third-strikers are often notified of their release just before it happens, sometimes only a day in advance. (It can take months for a judge to rule after papers are filed.) They’re usually sent out the door with $200, a not-insubstantial share of which they often pay back to the prison for a lift to the nearest Greyhound station: An inmate might be released from a prison outside Sacramento and expected to find his way to a parole officer in San Diego, 500 miles away, within 48 hours. Stanford’s Three Strikes Project was setting up transitional housing for its clients, but initially, a lot of the third-strikers weren’t making it there — they were just blowing away in the wind.
Then, Carlos and Roby started driving around the state and waiting outside to catch them. The job started as a simple delivery service, to carry some of these discombobulated bodies from one place to another. In late 2013, the director of the Three Strikes Project, Michael Romano, contacted a nonprofit called the Anti-Recidivism Coalition, which has built up a close community of formerly incarcerated people in Los Angeles. (Romano, who is also an A.R.C. Board member, is a friend of mine.) Romano asked if A.R.C. Could dispatch one of its members to pick up third-strikers and drive them to their housing near the Staples Center in Los Angeles. Recommended Carlos, a dependable young man just three years out of prison himself, who — most important — also had his own car and a credit card to front money for gas.
Carlos was hired, for $12 an hour, to fetch an old man named Terry Critton from a prison in Chino. On the way back, Critton asked if Carlos wouldn’t mind stopping at Amoeba Records, so he could look at jazz LPs — he’d been a big collector. They wound up spending almost two hours in the store, just looking. Then, Critton wanted a patty melt, so Carlos found a place called Flooky’s, where they ordered two and caught the end of a Dodgers game. It was extraordinary: All day, Carlos could see this man coming back to life. He wanted to do more pickups, and he wanted to get his friend Roby involved.
He told his bosses he needed a partner. By now, Carlos and Roby — officially, A.R.C.’s Ride Home Program — have done about three dozen pickups, either together or individually, waking up long before dawn and driving for hours toward prison towns deep in the desert or up the coast. Then they spend all day with the guy (so far they’ve picked up only men), taking him to eat, buying him some clothes, advising him, swapping stories, dialing his family on their cellphones or astonishing him by magically calling up Facebook pictures of nieces and nephews he’s never met — or just sitting quietly, to let him depressurize. The conversation with those shellshocked total strangers doesn’t always flow, Roby told me. It helps to have a wingman.
‘‘The first day is everything,’’ Carlos says — a barrage of insignificant-seeming experiences with potentially big consequences. Consider, for example, a friend of his and Roby’s: Julio Acosta, who was paroled in 2013 after 23 years inside. Acosta describes stopping for breakfast near the prison that first morning as if it were a horrifying fever dream: He kept looking around the restaurant for a sniper, as in the chow hall in prison, and couldn’t stop gawking at the metal knives and forks, ‘‘like an Aztec looking at Cortez’s helmet,’’ he says.
It wasn’t until he got up from the booth and walked to the men’s room, and a man came out the door and said, ‘‘How you doin’?’’ and Acosta said, ‘‘Fine,’’ that Acosta began to feel, even slightly, like a legitimate part of the environment around him. He’d accomplished something. He’d made a treacherous trip across an International House of Pancakes. But what if Acosta had accidentally bumped into a waitress, knocking over her tray and shattering dishes?
What if that man had glared at him, instead of greeting him, or snapped at him to get the hell out of the way? Ann Jacobs, director of the Prisoner Re-entry Institute at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told me that even the smallest bungled interactions on the outside leave recently incarcerated people feeling ‘‘like they’re being exposed, like they’re incompetent. It’s feeding into their worst fear, their perception of themselves as an impostor who’s incapable of living a normal life.’’ Carlos and Roby have learned to steer their guys through that perilous newness — and to be nonchalant about it, to make the sudden enormity of life feel unthreatening, even fun. On one ride home earlier this year, I watched a third-striker venture inside a convenience store, alone, to buy a candy bar while Roby pumped gas. The man seemed emboldened after a few hours of freedom, actually hopping a bit as he walked. But then he tripped over the curb and tumbled forward, arms thrashing, nearly face-planting in front of the door. Roby just shrugged and said, ‘‘Well, you’ve got to get that one out of the way.’’.
Advertisement ‘‘Been a long time since I looked at a menu,’’ Dale Hammock said. He was sheltered in a corner of a booth at a Denny’s near the prison. The restaurant was overcrowded, loud and full of the kind of hyperdifferentiated nonsense that ordinary Americans swim through every day, never assuming it can or should be fully understood. But Hammock was having trouble sorting the breakfast menu from the lunch menu, and the regular Denny’s menu from the Denny’s Skillets Across America limited-time menu. There were two kinds of hot sauce and four different sweeteners on the table. On the Heinz ketchup bottle, it said: ‘‘Up for a Game? Trivial Pursuit Tomato Ketchup.’’ The first meal after a long prison sentence is an ostensible celebration laced with stress.
The food tastes incredible. (Roby gained 60 pounds after his release, desperate to try the Outback Steakhouse Bloomin’ Onion and other fast-casual delicacies he’d seen commercials for on TV.) But ordering — making any choice — can be unnerving. Waiters are intimidating; waitresses, especially pretty ones, can be petrifying.
So at Denny’s, Roby started things off, ordering a chocolate milk. Hammock ordered a chocolate milk, too.
Then he reconsidered and said: ‘‘I want a milkshake! I’ll just have that!’’ He ordered a Grand Slam. Then he changed it to a Lumberjack Slam.
And when the waiter shot back with ‘‘Toast: white, wheat or sourdough?’’ Hammock went stiff momentarily, then answered: ‘‘Toast, I guess.’’ One morning 21 years ago, Hammock was pulled over for not wearing a seatbelt, and the cop found a half-pound of methamphetamine under the passenger seat. (Hammock was driving a friend’s car and claims he didn’t know the drugs were there, but the police report also notes that he had a small amount of meth in his pocket and was carrying close to $1,000.) He’d been an addict most of his life, flying in and out of prison with some 30 arrests and a dozen other drug or drug-related charges behind him. In 1973, he shot and injured a man while trying to rob him, and in 1978 he snatched a 19-year-old woman’s purse. (There was $2 inside.) Those two charges both counted as ‘‘strikes.’’ The meth in the car was Hammock’s third. He was given a sentence of 31 years to life. He moved through 10 different prisons and watched firsthand as the age of mass incarceration took hold. In the 42 years between his first strike and his release, the state’s prison population quintupled.
Facilities started running at 135 percent capacity, gyms were converted into dorms, all kinds of privileges were discontinued (some prisons even outlawed fresh fruit, to crack down on homemade alcohol) and everyone, Hammock said — the inmates and the guards — started walking around with more abrasive attitudes. Hammock, meanwhile, had mellowed somewhat, become an old man. For the last five or six years, he’d been the prison barber, which required him to shuttle among the different housing units and stay on good terms with everyone; a supervisor’s report praised him as an ‘‘asset’’ who mentored younger, more volatile inmates. He was too worn out to be menacing anymore. Gabbing with Carlos and Roby while they waited for their table, he explained wearily that, years ago, ‘‘I stabbed two guys in Soledad.
But you know how that goes, those situations arise sometimes’’ — either them or you. Freedom hadn’t instantly re-energized him. From the moment he hopped into Carlos and Roby’s car that morning, he’d seemed less gung-ho than accepting — a good sport. ‘‘Oh, boy, it’s going to be different,’’ he kept saying, or, ‘‘It’s going to be an experience, brother, I swear to God.’’ Several times, he told them: ‘‘I was thinking about trying to get into barber college,’’ latching onto that phrase like a handrail on a shaky train. This was the one thing Dale Hammock knew right now: ‘‘I’ve been thinking about barber college, if I could get enrolled in barber college.’’ His milkshake came. He took a tentative sip, then removed the straw and started gulping.
Roby took a picture on his phone, showed it to Hammock, then zapped it off to the team at Stanford. Hammock was amazed. ‘‘Everything now, you just touch it, and it shows you things?’’ he asked. It was like having breakfast with a time traveler. Was he correct in noticing that men didn’t wear their hair long anymore? Was it true that everyone had stopped using cash?
Later, in the restroom, he wrenched the front of the automatic soap dispenser off its base instead of waving his hand under it. Carlos and Roby had been careful so far not to overwhelm Hammock, but with his milkshake in place, they eased into discussing some practicalities. They talked about cellphone plans and how to get two forms of ID, so Hammock could register for welfare and other assistance. This was the beginning of Carlos and Roby’s signature re-entry crash course, rooted in their own experiences coming home, which they casually threaded through the duration of every ride.
Hammock seemed determined to figure it all out. He didn’t see an alternative. ‘‘I’m too tired of prison,’’ he told them. ‘‘I know that.’’. Advertisement If he was serious about cutting hair, Carlos said, there was a government rehabilitation program that might pay for his licensure classes. Roby offered to buy him a set of clippers so he could get a little business going right away, giving haircuts to the other third-strikers at the housing facility where they were heading.
In fact, Carlos added, he commuted past there every day. ‘‘I was thinking you could hook me up, and I’ll pay you to cut my hair.’’ ‘‘No problem, no problem at all,’’ Hammock said, tilting his head to size up Carlos’s fade. ‘‘You keep it short like that?’’ He sounded just like a barber. Dale Hammock at the Amity Foundation in Los Angeles. Credit Damon Casarez for The New York Times Carlos encouraged him: He’d have to hustle and find a niche, just as prisoners are accustomed to doing inside. ‘‘You already have the tools,’’ Carlos explained.
‘‘It’s just about applying them now to a different environment. You know how to dictate how people treat you. You know how to tell who’s going to scam you and who’s not. Using that same psychology, you’re going to be all right.’’ Hammock nodded. This seemed to make sense to him in a way that nothing else had so far. ‘‘I’ll be all right — it’s just going to take a minute, that’s all,’’ he said.
‘‘Looks like it’s time to eat.’’ His breakfast took up three separate plates. He ate inelegantly and quickly, working the food over with his half-set of dentures and toothless lower gums. When he was done, he bellowed, ‘‘Well, I’m not hungry no more!’’ Then, with that out of the way, he looked across the table at Carlos and asked, ‘‘How long you been out?’’. The first ride home Carlos and Roby did together was in February 2014. They were dispatched for an early-morning pickup at San Quentin, seven hours from Los Angeles in Marin County, and Michael Romano, the director of the Three Strikes Project, suggested they drive up the day before and stay at his house in San Francisco.
He expected to take them out to dinner — get to know them, spoil them a bit. Instead, Carlos and Roby rolled in after midnight and unceremoniously bedded down on a couple of couches. Lying there, it hit them how unusual this was: They were both still on parole at the time, but here they were, welcomed into this white lawyer’s home in the middle of the night, while his wife and two little children slept upstairs. ‘‘That really changed everything,’’ Carlos remembers. ‘‘It changed our perspective of how people actually viewed us.’’ He and Roby had been locked up so young that they’d never lived as regular, trustworthy adults. This, they told each other before falling asleep, must be what it feels like.
Carlos grew up in the San Gabriel Valley, east of downtown L.A. His father walked out on his mother while she was still pregnant with him, and Carlos had the misfortune of reminding her of his dad, he says, which made her resentful and abusive. Soon she remarried, but while her new husband bought his own two sons new clothes and Super Nintendos, Carlos and his older brother got none of that.
Once, when Carlos was 11, his father mailed him $50 — $100 actually, but his mother took a cut — and Carlos immediately picked up the phone and ordered a medium pizza. When the doorbell rang, he paid the delivery guy, took the pizza inside and ate it out of the box, very methodically, in front of his family. He remembers the scene clearly — how shocked everyone was that he had something of his own and wasn’t giving any of it to them. ‘‘And I was like: ‘Yeah, but it’s my pizza.
I’m going to sit here and enjoy this pizza.’ ’’ He liked the feeling of satisfaction money brought. So he started stealing bikes and breaking into houses. ‘‘After that, my life was thieving,’’ Carlos says. ‘‘I was a thief, for sure.’’ His childhood turned even more formless and reckless. He had started smoking pot at 9, and by 15 he was a heavy meth user who spent all day in the street. His mother warned him he would end up in jail — sort of.
‘‘She said, ‘I hope you expletive end up in jail,’ ’’ Carlos remembers. ‘‘And in Spanish, trust me, it sounds even worse. Two weeks later, I was arrested.’’. Advertisement One afternoon, some older gang members jumped Carlos, knocking him off his bike and beating him, and Carlos enlisted two friends to drive around with him, looking to retaliate. One of them wound up shooting at a young man from the car, Carlos explained, injuring him; Carlos was the only one arrested. After waiting in a county jail for nearly two years, he says, he was finally offered a deal: He could plead guilty to attempted murder and be sentenced as an adult to 12 years, or he could fight the charge and get 35 to life if he lost. Carlos took the deal.
Carlos floundered in prison but found a mentor after a few years — an older cellmate, also named Carlos. Under the older Carlos’s influence, he began willing his way into adulthood: studying, reading, examining his anger. A girl from his neighborhood started driving out to see him, and they eventually married. After a few conjugal visits, they had a baby, a daughter Carlos met one Saturday morning in the prison visiting room. Over the years, Carlos saw inmates go home and then wind up back inside; the system seemed to offer little preparation for release, setting them up for failure. He started mailing away for details about advocacy groups, housing, Social Security, driver’s licenses — not just in Los Angeles, where he’d be living when he got out, but in counties around California, so he could share what he learned with other inmates.
He made packets of information and put a notice on the prison bulletin board, next to the day’s menu: If you’re getting out and need any ‘‘resources,’’ as he called them, come talk to Carlos in Bunk 28 Low. The prison’s chaplain told me, ‘‘He was basically a social worker behind bars.’’ By that point, Carlos was housed at the California Rehabilitation Center, not far outside L.A. He was part of a small circle of more mature inmates who, having done time at high-security prisons, were taking college classes, looking for calm in the last years of their sentences.
Among them was a wisecracking Asian guy whom everyone knew as Big Head. His real name was Roby So. Advertisement ‘‘No,’’ Hammock said. ‘‘That’s called ‘free-man problems,’ ’’ Roby said. They fought through the congestion to their next stop, a Target in downtown L.A., where Roby put Hammock in charge of the big red shopping cart. ‘‘There you go, pushing a cart!’’ he shouted as they set off into the aisles.
‘‘Who would’ve thunk it!’’ Every ride home includes a stop to get the third-striker out of his sweats and buy him some real clothes and basic toiletries. It’s typically the last thing Carlos and Roby do; walking into a crowded big-box store asks a lot of these guys. Roby was released on Presidents’ Day weekend, and his father and cousins took him straight to an outlet mall. The swarm of bargain-seeking humanity overwhelmed him. In prison, people move slowly, drag their feet and keep their distance; all of a sudden, Roby was being jostled and bumped. And after 12 years in the same state-issued clothing, he had no idea what to buy.
When his father asked him what size he was, Roby told him: ‘‘I don’t have a size.’’ Now, Roby tends to take the lead at Target, working as a kind of unflappable personal shopper for the third-strikers, like a kid eager to do tricks on a piece of playground equipment that once scared him. ‘‘You look like a 34,’’ he told Hammock. He led him to a dismayingly large wall of jeans: several different brands; slim, boot cut, carpenter. When Hammock finally reached for a pair, Roby told him to gauge the waistline by stretching it around his neck. ‘‘Around my neck?’’ Hammock asked. ‘‘Yeah,’’ Roby told him. ‘‘I learned it from Oprah.’’ Soon, they moved on to shirts.
Then underwear. It was like marching Hammock through the stations of some consumerist cross. He peered into the racks of razors with names like military fighter jets: Schick Xtreme, BIC Hybrid Advance 3. He confronted the toothbrushes: Colgate 2X Whitening Action, Colgate 360 Degree Whole Mouth Clean, Oral-B Indicator Contour Clean. In the deodorant aisle, there was an entire section of Old Spices named after wild animals. Carlos always likes to recommend AXE — he believes in the company’s products — and this time, he gasped slightly when he noticed the apparently rare AXE White Label antiperspirant on a high shelf. He took off the cap to smell it — Forest Scent — then extended it to Hammock.
‘‘Are you an AXE man?’’ Carlos asked. When Hammock decided to go another way, Carlos seemed hurt.
Carlos Cervantes with his wife, Gabrielle, and his daughter, Clarissa, on the Fourth of July. Credit Damon Casarez for The New York Times They got toothpaste. They got soap.
Roby upsold Hammock on a reversible belt. Often, as they arrived in front of the next expanse of products, Roby and Carlos would shoot each other side-eyed glances, eager to see what Hammock would do.
Their policy was to throw the third-strikers into these challenges, rather than coddle them. This was ordinary life. It was safe; it was fun. ‘‘Take this and slide it,’’ Roby now told Hammock, handing him his credit card at the register. Hammock dragged the card through the slot methodically, formally, turning to face Roby’s camera, as though at a ribbon-cutting ceremony. But it didn’t catch. ‘‘I think you gotta go faster,’’ Roby said.
And so Hammock slid it again. The machine gave off a satisfying beep: success.
There was one more thing, though. Carlos was already in line at the Starbucks kiosk near the entrance, ordering Hammock what he described to him as a ‘‘Cadillac’’ — prison slang for sweet, milky coffee.
Soon came the announcement: ‘‘Grande caramel macchiato for Dale!’’ Hammock took a sip. He looked nearly as stunned as he had the moment they met him that morning, when he was driven out of prison backward after 21 years. ‘‘Wow,’’ he said. Carlos and Roby burst out laughing. But Hammock was not laughing. He was very serious.
‘‘Wow,’’ he said again. ‘‘Coffee’s come a long way! This here’s the Rolls-Royce of Cadillacs!’’.
Advertisement He took another sip. He shook his head and peered down, through the sip hole in the lid, trying to understand what this stuff was and how it came to be his. Someone had even written his name, ‘‘Dale,’’ on the side of cup. It was a short drive through downtown from Target to their final destination.
Everyone seemed drained. Carlos said almost nothing, while Roby crammed a few last bits of acclimating information into the conversation, seemingly as they occurred to him. (Some parking spots downtown cost $192 a month. ‘‘There’s this thing called a Keurig.’’) He turned to Hammock and asked, ‘‘How you feel so far?’’ Hammock didn’t know what to say, so Roby rephrased the question: ‘‘Are you free yet?’’ ‘‘I’m getting there,’’ Hammock told him. Soon they were all climbing out of the car in front of the Amity Foundation, the housing and rehabilitation center where Carlos and Roby have been delivering most of their third-strikers for the last year and a half. One of them, Stanley Bailey, was meeting them downstairs to help Hammock get settled. All day, Carlos and Roby had been slipping inspirational details about Bailey into their conversations with Hammock.
He was a solid role model: a 53-year-old longtime heroin addict who had been locked up for 25 years. Carlos had picked him up at Ironwood State Prison in October. Now, five months later, he was doing public speaking at criminal-justice nonprofits and universities and working doggedly to get his truck driver’s license. Recently, he’d run the Los Angeles Marathon.
‘‘He’s the story I always tell,’’ Carlos said. Bailey met them at Amity’s registration desk, dispensing big, wholehearted bro hugs. ‘‘Hey, Running Man!’’ Roby shouted. Like Hammock, Bailey had zero hair on his head and a full, black sleeve of indecipherable tattoos on each arm. But he was slimmer, healthier-looking — glowing, comparatively, in a light blue polo shirt. When he introduced himself to Hammock, it was like watching him shake hands with some wrinkled and diminished alternate self.
The two third-strikers sidled into an easy back and forth, comparing which prisons they’d been in, finding some overlap. Hammock took another sip of his Starbucks drink — he was still nursing it — and lifted the cup to show Bailey. ‘‘This thing here,’’ he said, and made a whistling sound. He still couldn’t put it into words. Then, after a while, Carlos and Roby wrote their phone numbers on a slip of paper for Hammock and said goodbye — nothing dramatic; they’d stay in close touch. They always did.
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Hammock corralled each of them into a hug, one at a time. ‘‘Thank you, brother,’’ he told Carlos. Bailey followed Carlos and Roby into the hall. He wanted a word, in private.
He’d called Carlos earlier that day to ask for advice and wanted to finish the conversation. (They still texted and spoke frequently; whenever Carlos was downtown, he’d take Bailey out for tacos.) The truth was, Bailey was struggling and frustrated; he was being held up as a re-entry success story, but his situation was precarious. He seemed to be hustling in all the right ways, volunteering at several nonprofits and now at a trucking company down the street too — sweeping up, or doing odd chores, just so he could sit in their truck cabs with his driver’s manual and study. But things still weren’t coming together. He’d gotten stalled for months, trying to track down a copy of his birth certificate, without which he couldn’t get other forms of ID, access to government aid or his learner’s permit. All the celebrated speaking gigs he did were unpaid, and his funding to stay at Amity was almost up.
He wasn’t sure where he’d go. Though he’d reconnected with a woman in Colorado, one condition of his release was that he wasn’t allowed to leave the state. It was as if Bailey were swimming determinedly away from some monstrous undertow, trying to keep the distance he’d put between himself and his past from closing.
‘‘To be honest, I’m not looking for a big, big life,’’ he said. ‘‘I just want to be remembered for more than what I was.’’ Carlos slipped some money into Bailey’s hand as he shook it and said goodbye.
(That night, he’d start emailing people on Bailey’s behalf, even asking if Stanford and A.R.C. Would consider hiring Bailey to ride along with him and Roby sometimes.) Down the hall, meanwhile, Hammock was finishing his intake interview and getting to know a couple of former lifers in the building. An older man who was paroled last Christmas Day after 31 years asked how his day had gone. ‘‘You been inside a store yet?’’ the man said.
Description movie Let's Go to Prison (2006): When a career criminal's plan for revenge is thwarted by unlikely circumstances, he puts his intended victim's son in his place by putting him in prison.and then joining him. FULL MOVIE Let's Go to Prison (2006) ███ ↘ ████ ► ►►► ◀◀◀ ███ ↗ ███ ↘ ████ ► ►►► ◀◀◀ ███ ↗ ███ ↘ ████ ► ►►► ◀◀◀ ███ ↗.
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