franknews

Families Bear the Burden of Prisoner Reintegration

by David Harding

June 21, 2018

David J. Harding is Associate Professor of Sociology and Faculty Director of the Social Sciences D-Lab at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of 'On the Outside: Prisoner Reentry and Reintegration', which will be published by University of Chicago Press in early 2019. More information about his research can be found at https://prisonerreentryresearch.org. Follow him on Twitter here.

When “DeAngelo” walked out of the gates at the Cooper Street Prison in Jackson, Michigan after serving 11 months for drunken driving, he had little more than the clothes on his back. His girlfriend “Laura” was there to greet him, however, and she drove DeAngelo to the small house in Ypsilanti that she shared with her mother, about an hour’s drive east on Interstate 94.

Recalling that day, DeAngelo explained the rush of anxiety he felt as Laura merged into traffic on the highway. “The most intensive challenge for me when I first got out was the anxiety… It’s not just a jittery nervousness. It’s like... you’re just scared shitless…overwhelmed with just life. As soon as you get in that car and you drive off, it’s like everything hits you like, all the responsibilities you’ve got to take care of and just getting everything back on track.”

For the first three months after his release, Laura and her mother supported DeAngelo in every way possible. They provided him with his basic material needs for food and shelter and supported him emotionally as he coped with the stress of reentry and the uncertainty of “getting everything back on track.” Laura drove him to meetings with his parole officer, to job interviews, to Detroit to visit his 4-year old son, and to treatment for his alcoholism, anxiety, and bi-polar disorder. She helped him to access Washtenaw County’s health insurance for the poor so he could afford those treatments and to enroll in the local community college. After a few months working as a restaurant server, DeAngelo was able to save enough money to afford the deposit on his own apartment.

The story of DeAngelo’s reintegration is but one example of a larger pattern we saw in our study of the experiences of formerly incarcerated individuals: families are bearing most of the burden of reintegration. They provide food and housing, transportation, emotional support, and job leads. They support their loved ones while they attend school or job training, help them to comply with parole requirements, and even pay fines and fees on their behalf.

The moment of reunification with family is a joyous one, but it also creates new challenges for those who welcome formerly imprisoned loved ones into their homes. Such families are typically barely scraping by as it is, juggling complex arrangements of sporadic low-wage work combined with food stamps, welfare benefits, or disability benefits just to make ends meet. A new mouth to feed makes it even harder to make the groceries last until the end of the month, and a new body in a crowded apartment means less privacy and space for everyone else.

The social and emotional adjustment to life outside the regimented world of the prison puts new pressures on families that are often already strained by poverty and poor health.

Yet such familial support, challenging as it is to provide, is critical to successful reintegration. When “Randall” left the Cooper Street prison after serving 10 months for a parole violation, he returned to Detroit without the kind of family support that DeAngelo enjoyed. Shuffling between treatment programs, homeless shelters, short stays in spare bedrooms or on living room couches, and living rough on the streets, Randall struggled to rebuild his life without a firm foundation. Instead of treatment programs and community college, Randall spent his days walking or riding the bus around Detroit to meet his parole obligations, apply for work, and attend a job readiness program, at times resorting to selling plasma and odd jobs to keep food in his belly. In moments of desperation, he sold marijuana to get by. It was not until Randall moved into a spare bedroom in a house with his step-sister and her father, a retired auto worker, that Randall experienced any stability in his life. Three years after his release, after moving in with his fiancé in the suburbs, he eventually found a full-time job as short order cook.

DeAngelo’s and Randall’s experiences of reentry and reintegration also reveal the weaknesses of our institutional infrastructure for reintegrating formerly incarcerated individuals in the era of mass incarceration. Almost everyone who enters prison leaves at some point, but programs that serve the formerly incarcerated have not kept up with increasing incarceration and subsequent reentry.

The result is that poor families, disproportionately poor families of color, are left to bear the burden of reintegration, a hidden collateral consequence of mass incarceration.

Obscure Cryptocurrencies and Where to Find Them

by Grayson Earle

January 27, 2020

I’m recently finished teaching a class at Eugene Lang entitled “Cryptocurrency: Money as Medium” which explores cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology, and artists who have engaged monetary systems in critical or otherwise interesting ways. As part of this course, I had my students participate in a crypto-trading game in which they were asked to spend $100 (play money) on two or three cryptocurrencies. This was intended to get them to pay attention to market fluctuations and do some independent research on various blockchain companies and projects.t

A few interesting strategies emerged, including the cynics investing in mostly Tether (a cryptocurrency pegged to the dollar) as a rhetorical statement against the rampant speculation of cryptocurrency. Others weighed the volume of search queries on various currencies, or just made intuitive decisions based on design choices. At the end of the exercise, I revealed my choices as well: Monero (XMR), New York Coin (NYC), and Photon (PHO).

I chose Monero because it’s what my project Bail Bloc uses, and I’m just superstitious enough to invite a little luck. The latter choices were based solely on the extremely low value of the tokens. In theory, the token value could increase dramatically (or just as easily plummet). I told my students that I would actually invest the $100 to make our experiment more dramatic. This led to the question: “How would you go about buying those coins?” For more established assets like Bitcoin, this is fairly trivial. Set up a Coinbase account and click a few buttons. But all three of my picks are unavailable on Coinbase, so how could I possibly acquire them?

My first instinct was to purchase some Bitcoin that I could then trade for these other coins. I’ve done it before, so I know that it works in some cases. I opted to use Coinbase because of the ease of use, but another option is Local Bitcoins. I won’t detail how to sign up for these services, because that information is widely available elsewhere. The important part is, once signed up you can buy Bitcoin (among other coins) for US Dollars.

grayson1

_{Buying $100 worth of Bitcoin on Coinbase (including fees)}

Coinbase is a few different things. It’s important to make the distinction that in this case it is acting as both a wallet for my Bitcoin, as well as an exchange that sells Bitcoin for USD, for a fee. It is not ideal to leave the purchased Bitcoin in my Coinbase-controlled wallet, but I will soon transfer the money out, in any case.

Time to buy some Monero. After a bit of searching, I found CoinSwitch, a website that allows you to convert between currencies. In this case, I can convert BTC to XMR (Bitcoin to Monero). One convenient aspect of CoinSwitch at the time of writing this is that it does not require an account to convert small amounts.

_{Converting .00776 BTC for 1.02713 XMR}

It’s worth noting the exchange rate I’m getting. According to CoinGecko (again, at the time of writing this) .00776 BTC should be equivalent to 1.07 XMR. Clearly, I’m getting ripped off. This is unavoidable to some extent, though I did shop around a bit and found a better deal on SwapCoins.com. The moral of the story here is to look around a bit. I don’t want to shill any particular company in writing any of this, but if I am to give a realistic account of purchasing and exchanging cryptocurrencies, I need to give details.

_{Confirming that I want to send my BTC from Coinbase to the exchange, in order to be converted into XMR}

The idea with these exchanges is that they find buyers for your trading pair. So if I want to exchange BTC for XMR, they find someone who wants to trade XMR for BTC. The exchange takes a bit off the top as a fee. In this case I sent the .00776 BTC into escrow on SwapCoins. It takes a while to verify that I actually sent the BTC from Coinbase, and you will usually see that represented on exchanges with something like this.

_{Waiting for my BTC to be exchanged for XMR}

At this point it’s just a waiting game. You can optionally view the transaction on a block explorer, which will show in real time the transaction being processed.

_{At this point, it only has 1 confirmation and thus the exchange has not yet executed the trade}

But where does the Monero (XMR) go? I need to have a Monero wallet set up, with an address at which the coins can be delivered. The basic explanation of what a wallet in this context is: Software that allows one to access her crypto via a password. For a more in depth explanation of wallets, check out this great Medium article. In this case, I use MyMonero wallet which I’ve already initialized. Eventually, the XMR materializes in my wallet.

_{It is seen as a pending transaction since it is still being confirmed on the Monero network}

Now that I have the Monero in my possession, let’s review how this all happened. I purchased $80 worth of Bitcoin using Coinbase. I sent the Bitcoin to an exchange, SwapCoins, which asked for a destination Monero address. They facilitated an exchange that resulted in someone buying my BTC and sending the requested XMR. The XMR ended up in my wallet via the address I had provided the exchange. If you are confused or regard this process as a pain in the ass you aren’t alone.

Unfortunately, that was the easy part. I have no idea where to purchase Photon (PHO) or New York Coin (NYC). In fact, when I decided to purchase them I had little idea what either of these are. I picked these solely based on their low values and favorable abbreviated names, since I’m a New Yorker who loves Vietnamese food. I would wager that this is about the extent of the marketing strategy that’s gone into NYC to date, and my vapid decision making serves as some small evidence of its effectiveness. This is all part of the fun, though, and I’m hoping that this story will end up with me buying a beer in New York Coin at Keats Bar in Midtown, which was apparently the first business to accept the digital currency. I have serious doubts, of course, as my initial phone call with the bar led me to have an awkward conversation with a confused bartender.

_{Further evidence that I am New York Coin’s target demographic}

_{Some big news on the New York Coin subreddit}

There are two ways one can acquire NYCoin. I could attempt to purchase some for US dollars from a current holder, or I could mine it. The latter is essentially a process of tasking a computer with the job of verifying transactions on the network and creating new blocks of data (this is why it’s called a blockchain) that prove the record of transactions, the ledger. To set up a miner involves downloading mining software and running it on a dedicated computer. Since many people can mine a cryptocurrency simultaneously, there is a lottery system involved that rewards miners for being the first to solve an arbitrarily difficult math problem. The more miners there are on the network at any given time, the more difficult the problem is so that miners are adding new blocks at a predictable rate. This is an incomplete explanation of the process and certainly confusing for those unfamiliar with the topic, but in a nutshell: Run software on a computer that contributes to the upkeep of the ledger to earn some of the coins as a reward for doing so.

Regardless of whether I’m buying it or mining it, I need somewhere to put it. Cryptocurrency is held in a software wallet, which is a password protected interface that allows you to send and receive digital currency. Each cryptocurrency needs to be stored in a specialized wallet, so New York Coin provides one on its website. Installing it is the same process as any other software.

_{Installing the New York Coin wallet}

_{Once the software is installed it must synchronize to the network}

In order to use the wallet it first needs to be synchronized to the network, which means downloading the entire transaction history of the NYCoin blockchain. Once that’s up to date, recent transactions (including coins sent to me via mining rewards or other users) will be available for me to spend.

The only thing left to do is start mining. I downloaded CGminer which allows me to specify a wallet for hopeful rewards, and then sets to work verifying transactions on the New York Coin network. I can feel the additional heat being produced by my desktop computer while it begins participating in the network, which I appreciate in my cold Brooklyn art studio during this brutally cold time of year.

Rewards are unpredictable and it could take days before I win the aforementioned lottery. So for now, I’m left to wait.

Bitcoin & The Future History of Money

by Kianga Daverington

January 9, 2020

Kianga Daverington formed Daverington PLLC in 2016. She began her career in the Derivatives practice group at Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP in New York. In 2017 Daverington began personally trading and investing in Bitcoin and other crypto assets which has led her to focus exclusively on the blockchain and distributed ledger technology sector in her legal practice. She helped the co-founders of a new crypto asset investment firm launch a $140 million liquid crypto fund as the firm's Operations Manager and Counsel. She is a Managing Partner and Chief Investment Officer of the crypto asset management firm Acre of America Partners LP, and works with Acre of America Co-Founder at Frontline Data Services providing data center co-location, cybersecurity and IT managed services to cryptocurrency mining operators.

WHAT IS MONEY

Your most pressing concern right now is not how much money you have, but rather how you have your money. Is your money in the bank? Is your money in stocks? Is your money in pieces of paper under your mattress? Look at the time. Right now, on your computer or phone – it’s whatever o’clock. Do you know where your money is exactly and whose permission you need to access it? Do you know what your money is?

Walk with me and let’s discuss…

For starters, money is not a physical object like a coin, a bar of gold or a dollar bill. These are all just forms of money that people in a society agree to use. Money is at its core, a technology. It is a human invention designed to solve a specific set of human problems. I want you to look at money perhaps in a new way. Consider that money is a system for capturing time. Time is the one thing we each have that is absolutely finite. We are born, we die, and the dash in between is all the time we have.

With everything else that we see or do in the world, we can usually produce more of it by adding people to a task (also known as “WORK”). But whatever we produce is still limited by the amount of work (human time) that can be organized to go into that production. Since each of us possesses a limited amount of time available to us individually, we need to convince or coerce others to add their time to ours if we want more out of life than what we can do or achieve alone. Out of this imperative, nations are born.

We can look back over millennia of human history and observe that the form of money people used was absolutely fundamental to a society’s prosperity or lack thereof, its very survival and the collective progression of human civilization itself.

It turns out that the way money functions and what we actually use as money is of greater significance than how much of it you or your nation may have or think you have.

The most important quality of any particular form of money is how well it preserves the value of time over time. Can you buy the same amount of stuff or more in the future than you can buy today? If yes, congratulations…your money is accumulating time for you and future generations while you relax on the beach. If it takes more and more of a unit of money to buy the same amount of time in the future, well then I’m sorry, but that unit of money is getting weaker and weaker. It’s losing value or said another way – it’s losing purchasing power. The longer you hold it, the less it buys so you better get off the beach and back to work or get a second job to plug that hole! Sound familiar?

When I refer to the concept of buying time it’s another way to talk about the price for goods and services. Every product and every service requires time to make and time to deliver - your time and/or someone else’s. The price therefore reflects the collective value of all the time put in.

WHY THE HOW OF MONEY MATTERS

Money is a way we exchange time and move it around from where it is valued less to where it is valued more. This is where prosperity comes from. It comes out of how well a society, collectively and each person, spends its time. How much time is spent creating and making? How much time is spent to consuming? If we make more than we consume, we have something left over called wealth. If we consume more than we make, we have nothing left over of course. What we have is debt because you can’t consume what you don’t have unless someone extends credit. Where does this “credit” come from? That’s a discussion for another time, but basically –

it’s made up and too much credit or debt eventually collapses and destroys everything, and everyone mixed up in it.

If we understand that a unit of money represents a unit of time, and we understand time is limited then a unit in a system of money with unlimited supply cannot have any value. This is the problem we are facing today with the world’s money supply. The supply of money in the world is increasing exponentially as central banks create money by giving loans to national governments, which is where our money comes from.

Our entire world financial system is a powder keg of debt.

National currencies today are known as fiat money, a currency without intrinsic value that has been given its power to be used as money by a government that says it is money by regulation. Wikipedia says, “Fiat money does not have use value, and has value only because a government maintains its value, or because parties engaging in exchange agree on its value.” Well said, Wiki.

A government’s job of maintaining the value of its national money boils down to a confidence game. On what basis do the people who use that government’s money believe it has value? What happens to the money and those who hold it when the foundation of that belief begins to crumble?

What kind of confidence would you have in someone who borrowed more money than he could ever pay back or even earn in 329.45 million lifetimes?

Enter Bitcoin – the first creation of a scarce digital commodity ever in the form of a virtual coin.

Bitcoin is a system designed to be a new form of money purpose built for the internet age that does not look to any government to maintain its value. Bitcoin is a distributed open-source technology maintained by thousands of independent computers around the world. It was first described in a 2008 paper published anonymously by a person or group using the name “Satoshi Nakamoto” under the title: Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.

Bitcoin, the currency, operating on “Bitcoin” (with an initial capital B), the network, may be the most powerful tool on the planet for bottling time and moving it around the world to the highest bidder.

Bitcoin helps humanity find the most efficient and productive use of time wherever that might be anywhere in the world, and fast, without regard to physical boundaries of land, space or distance, or identity.

Since governments are not involved in maintaining the Bitcoin system, politicians and their funders cannot screw it up. Bitcoin is independent of governments and free from national politics – it is money available to all the people of the world with radical potential for ushering in a new golden age of global innovation and prosperity. Bitcoin introduces a high functioning and efficient system for capturing and organizing human time the likes of which we haven’t seen since the the 19^th century use of a global gold standard, but much improved.

WHERE DOES BITCOIN COME FROM & WHY AM I READING ABOUT IT RIGHT NOW?

The process of creating a bitcoin is called “mining”. People and organizations around the world operate computer equipment connected to the internet on which the Bitcoin open source software communicates with every other computer connected to the internet running the same software. Operating these systems costs money and takes time. There’s the labor cost to design and raw material costs to manufacture specialized equipment – called “miners”, there’s the purchase price of the miners and the installation, and the data center hosting and electricity cost to run and cool the machines for optimal performance.

Since the Bitcoin system requires human WORK to create a bitcoin the security model is based on natural laws of scarcity value linked to human time. In this system called “Proof-of-Work” the bitcoin is a reward to those computer operators who are incentivized to dedicate resources purely for profit. This profit incentive is a crucial element in the game theory mechanics that secure the system without a centralized authority or management.

What are all these computers doing? It’s very simple really.

They are keeping track.

They are making a record, a record of transactions that is absolutely trustworthy, fixed and immutable because the system does not rely on any single party and no person or group can overwrite the system. Proper record keeping is the basis of civilization, individual liberty and prosperity. In Bitcoin there are no single leaders or individuals who can be bribed, coerced or corrupted to change the functioning of the network in a way that would undermine the confidence of all participants. The system is transparent, updated in real time everywhere all the time. Bitcoin doesn’t change very much. A varied, distributed group of unrelated people must come to a consensus openly and voluntarily and agree in order to implement any changes. Anyone with the necessary computing device can be a participant. No permission or license is required.

The Bitcoin network provides its users with an open transparent trustworthy ledger of transactions. To be clear, this record does not specify the individual names of people transacting on it, nor does it publish the value of its transactions denominated in other currencies.

Bitcoin is only concerned with bitcoin and establishing a permanent and immutable record of every coin and fraction of a coin moving from one address on the ledger to another.

Each transfer is visible for all to see, for all time. Accordingly, it’s actually one of the worst tools a person can use to launder money and commit crimes. Every move is traceable and the technology available to law enforcement for interpreting transaction data to track down and arrest bad actors using the Bitcoin network keeps getting better and better.

In the years since the Bitcoin network was launched on January 3, 2009, this one innovation has spawned thousands of alternative virtual coins that use different technologies and have alternative use cases and serve a variety of functions within their related systems. These are referred to as altcoins.

What makes bitcoin so special is that it was the first commodity available to man that is entirely fixed in supply, and it has a longer track record and bigger network than any of the altcoins.

The supply of bitcoin is programmatically LIMITED like human time. 21 million only. The supply of new bitcoin generated by the network decreases over time according to a pre-set schedule. Every four years, the supply released is cut in half. This is called the halving (or halvening) and the next one looks to take place about three months from now.

So far in 11 years just over 18 million bitcoin have been created, and the last bitcoin is projected to be mined around the year 2140. It’s estimated that 4 million bitcoin may be inaccessible to their holders and lost forever leaving ~ 14 million bitcoin available today for circulation. However, the amount actually available for purchase at any given time is much less than 14 million because a huge portion of the bitcoin supply is held by people who were involved at the very beginning when bitcoin had no tradable value in national fiat currencies. These Bitcoiners, or “O.G.s”, had a vision of the future where money was free of government control, free from abuse, devaluation and corruption. They are HODLers – Bitcoin’s holders of last resort. Many believe all fiat currencies are heading to a value of zero and that we will see a systemic collapse of the post WWII financial order - a global monetary system reset this decade. HODLers do not value their bitcoin holdings in dollars, they value their dollars in bitcoin.

WHAT IS A BITCOIN WORTH?

Bitcoin is not only valuable today because of what someone else may pay for it tomorrow. It is valuable in our increasingly all-digital world because it is transferable along the internet. There are no third parties involved, no bank or custodian is holding your bitcoin and verifying who you are and what business you have with others with whom you wish to transact all while charging you the earth for the privilege. The Bitcoin network has been challenged, attacked from without, attacked from within and has proved itself so far to be reliable.

It is anti-fragile.

The price of a bitcoin when measured day to day can be extremely volatile because this is still a very new and emerging technology (some in the media like to talk about bitcoin busts being equal to the Dutch Tulip Bulb craze, but this is false). Overall, on longer time frames we can see a slow steady increase in adoption reflected in bitcoin’s value today relative to other forms of world money.

WHY BITCOIN MATTERS

We live in especially frightening times right now and we can observe pervasive signs of crisis in trust and a collapse in civilian confidence beginning with the 2008 global financial crisis. Not many of us knew it at the time, but government officials have said we were hours away from total systemic collapse. What happened was an old fashion run on the bank by other banks and a collapse in confidence among banks around the world causing the entire financial system to freeze.

There are signs that something similar may be happening right now as demonstrated by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York needing to issue hundreds of billions of dollars of new liquidity in the form of over-night and short-term loans to financial institutions starting in September of last year. The Fed is scheduled to being withdrawing that emergency liquidity from the market in mid-January.

But fear not! There were a few lifeboats on the unsinkable Titanic. And it is fortunately the case for us that we have a means of escape should the unthinkable happen.

In 2009 the Bitcoin network started operating with little fanfare. Only a handful of people even knew it existed. I think of them as the stewards of humanity’s collective rebuke and response to pervasive and systemic abuses by central authorities.

A “run” on Bitcoin is not possible. There are no bank holidays. Bitcoin never closes. It is always available anywhere and everywhere. If you have a few words memorized, you can go anywhere in the world, get a new computer, and wherever you are generate the private keys to unlock and use your bitcoin. The parameters of the system have been set by computer code, and as the system grows larger and more valuable the harder it is to change those parameters in any way that would harm the system. The power to operate and change Bitcoin is distributed among the many – kind of like democracy.

Those who use Bitcoin are simply agreeing that they find the system valuable and trustworthy for their needs. More and more people around the world agree on this with each passing hour and that is what a bitcoin is “backed” by. The more people who adopt and use the Bitcoin system, the more valuable it has become and will become in the future. This is the same reason any system of money has value – by agreement and because of the trust of its participants.

In 2008 I was a derivatives and commodities trading lawyer at Lehman Brothers and had a front row seat on the front line of the kickoff event to the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Could it happen again?

Well, we are going to find out. What is different this time is bitcoin and the Bitcoin system. We have an alternative. We have a choice in how we HOLD OUR MONEY, so hodl on for dear life.

frank news is dedicated to storytelling across all mediums. A space for debate, discussion, and connection between experts and a curious readership. Topics are presented monthly with content delivered daily.

Founders

Newsletter

Issues

Categories