For a Kid, Plea At Your Own Risk

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“Everybody in there is innocent, right?” This statement, or some variation of it, usually followed by laughter, comes up in a lot of conversations when I talk about doing time. It appears to be a common perception, verging on a stereotype, that prisons are full of people proclaiming their innocence. My experience was actually the opposite. Most men in prison admitted they had done something that led to their situation. More common was a story about extenuating circumstances, or how, even though they were guilty, the police and courts had abused their power somehow to prove it.

Rutgers Webcam Spying Case a Hate Crime, Jurors Conclude

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A former Rutgers University student was found guilty Friday on all 15 charges he faced for using a webcam to spy on his college roommate having sex with another man. Charges included invasion of privacy and bias intimidation. Dharun Ravi, now 20, invited friends through text messages and Twitter encouraging them to view the webcam. Three days after the incident, his roommate, Tyler Clementi, jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge. Ravi’s attorneys did not dispute the facts of the case, according to The New York Times, agreeing that he had indeed set up a webcam on his computer and went to a friend’s room where he saw Clementi kissing a man he had met on the Internet.