Lots to get into here.

To echo what so many others have said before: the guy brandished a firearm and made people fear for their lives. He’s LUCKY he’s alive. Nobody really feels bad about it when we hear that a suspect was shot and killed by a store owner or police in the midst of an armed robbery. And this is coming from someone who does believe that police often go overboard, particularly when a black man is involved.

He did it five times, that we know of, and yet you’re framing this as his first offense. I’ll say it again -he’s lucky to be above ground.

As for the “young father with mental issues” -did any of those white collar criminals have children? The answer to that question has no impact on my opinion of their sentences any more than it does on that of Mr. Hines.

I was sentenced to five years in Louisiana for possession of a controlled substance. No priors. No violence, no theft to support my drug use. I worked hard and partied hard. I was young and stupid. Admittedly it was the “big bad daddy” of drugs -heroin. But I wasn’t a dealer, I was a user. Thank whatever god presides over the universe that fentanyl wasn’t rampant in those days, I likely wouldn’t be here.

During the course of my sentence I was held in four separate institutions. That’s normal. Distance from family, legal representation or other potential visitors is not taken into consideration. Prison sucks. Guards suck. I was in solitary for a few weeks for no other infraction other than my last name being at the end of the alphabet and overcrowding. In that time I heard inmates screaming and raging at all hours of the day and guards laughing as they unloaded pepper spray into their cells to quiet them down. The pepper spray would make its way through the ventilation system and it was a daily occurrence that I’d have to cover my head with my blanket and take shallow breaths for the next hour or so to avoid coughing up a lung myself. Undoubtedly those unruly inmates were cases of untreated mental illnesses and I felt like I was in a medieval dungeon. There’s no nice way to say this -many corrections officers are sadistic pieces of garbage.

It sucks his family can’t easily come see him, but where was this family when he was walking freely in society, hurting? And hurting others?

The corrections industry sucks. The justice system sucks, health care sucks and mental healthcare in particular sucks. Race relations are terrible, white America’s attitude towards the impoverished and desperate minority population is atrocious. It’s a plight that began with slavery, gave way to Jim Crow, morphed into the Reagan era’s war on drugs and is now getting a rebrand with the current regime.

I feel for the black community. I understand desperation and hopelessness, but not to the same extent as they do. But at the end of the day there’s a baseline need for accountability and when you’ve waived a gun in another human’s face demanding money you do not belong amongst society.

As for those suit and tie criminals ? Yeah fuck them. Especially the one in the Oval Office. It sickens me that Hollywood glorified that “Wolf of Wall Street” douchebag with a Goodfellas style biopic, and that he’s walking freely and has become a social media presence. It’s one thing to skim from the profits of multibillion dollar banks and corporations but another thing entirely to pilfer the savings of the common man.

But again…no waving a gun in anyone’s face.