prison cw

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

elidyce:

writing-prompt-s:

You’ve been sentenced to 400 years for multiple murders. It’s been 399 years and your jailers are starting to get nervous.

I was twenty… twenty-five, I think?… when I was sentenced. Four hundred years was a length of time I couldn’t even imagine. It was a length of time I don’t think anyone could imagine, even the judge. It was just a big showy number that let everyone know I’d never see the light of day again. The mages who cast the spells were dramatic about it, practically shouting the part about ‘until death claims you, or four hundred years hath passed, forsooth, thou shalt be imprisoned here’. They don’t waste that kind of magic on most prisoners, but I was special.

The Slayer, they called me then. The Monster of Sentan. I’d killed nineteen people… I remember that number because I was so furious that they stopped me so close to my goal of twenty-one. And I didn’t just kill ordinary people, no, but the Chosen of the Gods. The Great and Good. They were terrified of me. So they locked me away, to die forgotten.

It had been a little less than a hundred years when the king died without heir, and a civil war tore the country apart. When the fighting was all over, the losers were dragged down to the deepest cells under the castle, and the new king and his soldiers stopped and stared at me. “Who… who is this?” he asked, frowning. “Some victim of the usurper?”

People like cooks and jailers and scrubbers don’t change as easily as kings. The same man who’d been bringing me my meals since there was still brown in his hair and beard shuffled forward, hunched and grey now. “No, yer majesty,” he said humbly. “That be a special prisoner, from before the old king died.”

“Special? Special how?” He frowned, moving closer to my cell. “The old king died more than ten years ago. This woman must have been a child then. What could she have done to – “

“Don’t get too close, yer majesty,” the old man said sharply. “That’s the Monster of Sentan… an’ she bites.”

That was true. I do bite.

Keep reading

Tags:

#storytime #death tw #murder cw #prison cw

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

elidyce:

writing-prompt-s:

You have the strange one-of-a-kind ability to know, just by looking at a sheet of paper, what is meant to be written on it. Growing up this helped you ace every school exam with no one the wiser, but as an adult you’ve found it has other advantages – and disadvantages.

I was Anne, once. Anne with an e, like in the old book. 

No-one here knows my name. Here, I am Rosetta. 

It seemed so harmless when I was younger. When I looked at a paper, any paper, I knew what should be written on it. It started with my diary, when I was very young. Then quizzes and tests at school, essays and reports and so on. 

It doesn’t work on blank paper. Blank paper is neutral. Uncommitted. It needs to be committed to something. A title or heading is often enough. Sometimes I need more specifics to get me started, maybe a short precis or something. Translation and code-breaking are easy – they put them on a form, with spaces for the translated words, and those come through very clearly. 

When the war started, I volunteered. Many of us, the ones with gifts, did. Our duty, we thought. For our people, for our country. So we came forward and admitted to our gifts, and put them at our country’s service. 

That was about sixteen years ago. I have not left this facility since. 

They don’t tell me much, but I don’t know why. It’s not as if they don’t give me every coded message to decode. I know more about the war – the current one – than most of them do. 

This is the second, or maybe the third. There was a break, but so short that it might just have been a cease-fire, or a temporary truce. They made an effort to pretend to me that the same war had lasted, but after a while I tactfully pointed out to one of my handlers that I spend more time reading top-secret communiques than they do. His angry embarrassment was very amusing. 

My days are monotonous, but not altogether unpleasant. I eat well – not fancy food, but wholesome, tasty food. Every day, I spend half an hour doing exercises, to keep my body in good condition.  I spend my evenings reading, watching movies, listening to music, whatever I feel like. If I’m unwell, a doctor attends me.

It took me some time to make it clear to my handlers that they would have to make me comfortable. That wasn’t a pleasant time, and I still have some scars. But eventually I was able to talk to someone capable of reason, not just obedience. My work takes concentration. It’s hard to concentrate if you’re uncomfortable. If I’m hungry, I can’t concentrate. If I’m in pain, I can’t concentrate. If I’m tired, I can’t concentrate. If I’m uncomfortable – too cold, bad chair, all the little discomforts they tried to use to break my will – I can’t concentrate. 

If I can’t concentrate, I can’t work fast… and I make mistakes.

I am very cooperative, if I’m comfortable.

Keep reading

Tags:

#storytime #abuse cw #kidnapping cw #prison cw #war cw?

Criminal Georg skews recidivism statistics

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

nostalgebraist:

stumpyjoepete:

michaelkeenan:

Have you ever seen those concerning statistics about criminal recidivism? Like: 44% are re-arrested within a year, and 83% within nine years (source: this Department of Justice report).

I’d seen those statistics before, and been concerned. There’s a great case for shortening prison sentences for deterrence reasons, because likelihood of punishment is much more deterring than severity, but at least prison incapacitates criminals from plundering society while they’re imprisoned. Why hasten prison release if they’ll be back soon anyway? “Once a criminal, always a criminal?”, asks one headline about recidivism.

But today I learned that there’s a huge caveat to those statistics. The more often you go to prison, the more you’re counted in recidivism statistics.

Consider five people who go to prison. Four of them never commit another crime, but one of them was Criminal Georg, who is imprisoned ten times. Out of the fourteen prison sentences (ten for Georg, four for the others), nine of them are followed by recidivism (Georg’s first nine). The proportion of these people who are serial criminals is 20%, but the recidivism rate is 64%.

When considering people rather than prison releases, the recidivism rate is lower than I thought.

see this thread for more examples

Thank you, I hadn’t seen it and it’s a great resource!

I knew I’d seen this pattern before, but I didn’t have a name for it. The linked post by Elizabeth Wrigley-Field tells me it’s called “length-biased sampling.”

The mentions several examples with real-world importance, incl. the recidivism one, and argues the concept should be more widely known.

(It also makes an argument that “length-biased sampling is the deep structure of nested categories” which sounds interesting but which I am not awake enough rn to wrap my head around)

Tags:

#fun with statistics #(well maybe not ”fun”) #the more you know #prison cw

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

tanadrin:

This is the best economics paper I have ever read; and to describe it in those terms is to seriously undersell it. I’d quote the last paragraph in one of those nostalgebraist no-context things, but the context is pretty incredible.

Tags:

#interesting