This reminds me of a news story from a few years ago. An elderly man had robbed a bank and only asked for $1. When he was arrested he said he couldn’t afford to get the various medical treatments he needed so he wanted to go to jail so he could get the healthcare they would provide him as a prisoner
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Submitted 2 months ago by ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net to aboringdystopia@lemmy.world
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Comments
MrJameGumb@lemmy.world 2 months ago
lath@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I think they don’t even do that anymore nowadays.
AhismaMiasma@lemm.ee 2 months ago
This is false, they absolutely still do.
Watched an inmate receive one of the first cures for Hepatitis-C in 2014.
jaxiiruff@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
I think its funny (incredibly depressing) how disability doesnt scale with cost of living in your local area. Like my disabled mother makes about $1K a month off SSI and she lives in CA luckily with family.
However she would be in this same situation if she had to move and wanted to stay in CA. I aint doing much better but even working a job I dont make enough to rent here so we will have to find a way out together.
morrowind@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
Were both those locations supposed to be CA?
jaxiiruff@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
Yeah my bad I was just trying to articulate that stuck feeling that most people have if they cant really afford to leave or stay. She would lose pretty much everything she ever owned if she had to leave.
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
In older times you could ask any grocrey store and they’d direct you to a place in back where they give away their just-expired food. But now they’re salting their throwaways. ERs are supposed to not turn you away, and if they do it might justify stealing food.
Find out how the police respond to homeless people in your area (fellow transients will know). Some will help you out while others will be glad to assault you knowing no one will care.
Religious kitchens will force you to convert. In the old days, it was easier to play along, but I dont knownwhat the new methods of coercion are. They’re a lot more abusive and bigoted now.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
Religious kitchens will force you to convert.
All what they say is a lie? /s
mechoman444@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Hold up any bank in the United States. Make sure it’s not armed and don’t actually take anything.
You’ll get like five years in the feds. Do 3.5-4 years in a camp. Get universal healthcare and free meals…
America is a third world country.
bamfic@lemmy.world 2 months ago
OP notes that prisons in america now charge you for your stay.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
Meaning it’s a one-way ticket. You never really got rid of slavery.
absentbird@lemm.ee 2 months ago
And if you don’t get caught you can use the money for food and healthcare on the outside.
Eiri@lemmy.world 2 months ago
That is an if so huge I think I can feel its gravitational attraction.
protist@mander.xyz 2 months ago
That thread was toxic AF. OP needed mental health care
cyborganism@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Yeah. Some people offered legitimate and very good advice, but OP wasn’t receptive at all.
ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net 2 months ago
Yeah they were asking for incredibly questionable advice and were just looking for validation rather than ideas to get out of that problem.
BallsandBayonets@lemmings.world 2 months ago
What about the ER? Get yourself checked in for a mental breakdown or the like, stay the night. It’s not like they will be able to collect on the bill if your income is measured in cents per day and your address is “under the overpass near that one busy intersection.”
lunarul@lemmy.world 2 months ago
My mother-in-law was in the US visiting us when she got appendicitis. Took her to the doctor and had to get surgery the same day, her appendix was close to bursting and we were told she wouldn’t have made it another day. My wife overheard the nurse yelling at the doctor for accepting a patient with no insurance. So apparently even in life and death situations, sending you back is an option if you don’t have insurance.
NABDad@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I work at a hospital. I have heard that another hospital in our city will transfer patients to our hospital because, we are “better at treating their particular condition”, that condition being “poor”
Sprokes@jlai.lu 2 months ago
I watched a documentary about the situation of health care in the US and I think it was Texas’s gouvernement who was saying that hospitals are required to give you the health care needed in the case of an emergency.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
As a realistic answer that hopefully no one needs, stealing food and shelter is probably more comfortable than prison. Just do that, and if you get caught then mission accomplished anyway.
blindbunny@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
Punch a USPS driver… It’s a feddie to assault a federal worker… I would definitely reach out to some mutual aid groups first though. Prison isn’t very fun and I can’t imagine not very entertaining if you can’t read.
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 2 months ago
Traffic ticket, hearing, then insult the judge until contempt of court.
Mwa@thelemmy.club 2 months ago
wow america is really a mess of a country :(
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
unironically, dying is a ditch cold is probably safer than being in a prison/jail as a disabled person lmao.
Maybe you could clock into a ward or something? That’s probably a better option.
Emerald@lemmy.world 2 months ago
One does not simply clock into a ward
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
obviously not, but judging by some of the other comments, and the above post, that might be possible for this individual.
lycanrising@lemmy.world 2 months ago
jeffrey archer “is it september already?”
ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org 2 months ago
I knew a guy in the late 90s who checked himself into jail every winter. He just didn’t have enough money to heat his home and buy food at the same time, and he was disabled and couldn’t land a job in construction no more, so that’s the only thing he found to stay alive.
When the snow started to come down, he’d go to our local minimart with a plastic gun. You know, like the really cheesy ones with a red cap at the muzzle, to make sure nobody would think it was real and gun him down my mistake, and to avoid getting a harsh sentence. He knew the store owner, since it was a small town and everybody knew each other.
He’d say hello, point the gun at him and gently say “Could you please call the police like last year?” The store owner used to try to talk him out of it, but he’d say “Don’t force me to make it real because I don’t wanna.”
Then the sheriff would show up - they knew each other too of course - and he would try to convince him this wasn’t a good idea. And the guy would say “Look, will you book me or not? Because if you don’t, you’ll come back next week to my place but with the coroner this time.”
So the sheriff would book him. And the judge, who knew exactly why he was there at the trial, would sentence him to 5 months - time enough to get out in spring.
After I left town, I heard he kept doing that for many years, until he got tired of being poor and committed suicide.
ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
Well that story just got bleaker with each sentence
beirdobaggins@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I lived in Austin, TX and used to know a homeless guy, Walter Dwight Green 1955, back in '98 that spent winters in jail for public intoxication for the same reasons.
Including name, in case anyone else knew him and wants to chat. He was originally from Kentucky.
I was a teenager at the time but I tried to help him as much as I could.
I had to leave town for a year, when I came back, I found out he froze to death in the winter I was gone.
dharmacurious@slrpnk.net 2 months ago
Didn’t know your Walter, but a family member of mine was a corrections officer at a small town jail in Podunk Tennessee. 17k people in the whole county, and each winter the jail would triple their numbers for this exact reason. First snow’s coming, time to buy 50 bucks of booze and get lodging for the winter. Fucking horrible people have to do that. I’ve been desperate. Like, living in a shack with no plumbing, no electric, and by the grace of God and some clever shop lifting a propane heater to keep 4 of us warm in 110 square feet in -26 degrees level of desperate. I can’t imagine being so desperate as to willingly go to jail. Which just shows despite all that, how fucking lucky I am. I worked in commissary, family members have been jailers and cops. It’s better than freezing to death, of course, but no one should ever have to make that choice. Housing is a right, and our laws need to catch the fuck up with that.
Leg@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
God bless this pitiful country.
Montagge@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
I know someone that got shot by the cops with one of those toy guns…
numberfour002@lemmy.world 2 months ago
And then Einstein clapped the Baby Jesus’s ass and all the harpies cried at the wave after wave of baby bald eagles flying over. Amen.
feedum_sneedson@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’m a cynical guy, but the only unrealistic part is the implied community cohesion that resulted in him not getting shot in the face. If you are going to shout into the void, put a little more effort in, even if it might only be for your own benefit.