How would you feel if you found out a friend of yours was a serial bank robber?

Also, she now works as a paralegal, so she definitely has turned her life around.

How were people hurt by this? (No, I don’t condone bank robbery, but I honestly don’t know the details of how this affects people.) Did she have to pay reparations? Do you feel the sentence was fair? Do you feel that she owed you this information? Are you on intimate enough terms with her that the knowledge of this would somehow negatively affect you in a profound way?

I just ask these things, because I don’t know how I would feel, personally, but I would respect the not-disclosing part because she might be ashamed. Or feel that that part of her life is done and doesn’t want to revisit it, it may be painful to recall. She is likely fully aware that she is google-able, and may figure that that is enough.

My trust would not likely be broken by this information.

I think it would be uncouth to bring it up, unless you are planning to have a very serious relationship with her.

Interesting conundrum for you. Good luck.

Was it armed robbery or did she rob the banks when they were closed? That might sway me, if I were you. Not that either one is justified but knowing someone is violent might make me feel differently.

It was armed robbery and the bank tellers were terrified. But she probably does feel a lot of shame. I also don’t think I’m owed this information. But my friend who’s her godmother invited her along to my house for a party. I do feel like she should have told me. Maybe that’s selfish of me? I don’t know.

For em, the saving grace is that she did it to pay her Mom’s medical bills. And it’s criminal that that needs to be the case in this country. I still would feel oddly about her – it was definitely wrong – but I would not force a conversation with her or exclude her from activities. I might feel disinclined for greater intimacy though.

It is something that causes one to have pause. Did she tell you prior to you Googling her that she didn’t do it? In other words, did she lie about it or was she straight up about it? It’s a big difference.

I have 2 opposite ends of the spectrum I have dealt with in my life. I had my step-daughter’s old boyfriend (who we didn’t like). He told me he had a criminal background, that he had gotten arrested for a minor drug charge – possession of marijuana. When I dug deeper, marijuana wasn’t involved at all. He had been arrested for manufacturing crystal meth. He only avoided heavy prison time by agreeing to testify against the others involved. He obviously lied, that made his status as a potential quality human go way down. On the other end of the spectrum, I had an applicant for a driver’s job that I interviewed. As a matter of the hiring process we have to do a criminal background check. I always ask the applicant if there is anything in their background that is going to show up. I tell them that if they say there is and we document it, that probably helps them more than not telling me and us finding out. He said there was. He had gotten out of prison just a couple years before. He was in prison for conspiracy to commit murder. It was a situation when he was a kid, running with the wrong crowd. They killed someone and because he didn’t turn them in, when they were caught, he went down with them. We ran the background check and that was it. He presented himself as a reformed individual with a wife and child and he was just looking to put his past behind him. I hired him and he ended up being one of the best workers, most upright and conscientious individuals I have ever met.

The point is that people can do horrible things and repent of them. They can try turning their lives around and become great people. Personally whether you talk to her about it or not is really up to you. If she has given you no reason to distrust her, you could go on with life without asking her at all. I think the hardest part is that you Googled her. That makes the conversation a bit more sticky. “Hey, I Googled you and saw you were a bank robber! How’d that work out for you?” Googling looks like you were prying. I think you’d have to be cautious about how you broached it. If you have heard she had a colorful past you could ask about it…say you heard she had some rough patches in her past and ask what went on.

If she is now a good person, I would let it lie. If you grow closer to her, it is likely she will tell you about it. If not, does it really matter?

Just be cautious if she ever asks you for a ride to the bank!

Her godmother mentioned that she had a bad past, and that’s all we really knew. And I actually googled her to see if she was related to my high school principal, she shares his last name. I used google because she’s not on social media.

Also, a couple months ago I recommended her the movie “The Old Man and the Gun”, a bank robbery movie. She gave a slight wince, which I thought was weird at the time. Now I know why lol.

She has no obligation to tell you anything and it’s none of your business.

I get she has no obligation to tell me, but it being “none of my business” makes zero sense, especially because I’ve invited her to my home numerous times. If she ends up dealing with another financial issue, who’s to say that she wouldn’t steal something from me? Also, your statement is an example of black and white thinking. Pretty sure if you had a close friend that was befriending a former bank robber, it would suddenly become “some of your business”. But if it doesn’t bother you at all, then I guess we’re just different.

Well, at least she wasn’t producing and selling meth.

@rockfan That’s just not true. I have a couple of friends who are convicted felons. One was convicgted of narcotics trafficking and the other wire fraud. They served their time and are currently upstanding citizens. I don’t ask them about their past and they don’t offer information. They are both out of prison and gainfully employed and I have absolutely no problem hanging out with them.

I tend to agree with @Caravanfan. she recently served 10 years for robbing 4 banks to pay for her mothers MS hospital bills. It sounds to me like she made a poor decision for ALL the RIGHT reasons, got caught & served her time. She has PAID her debt to society!!! I’ve invited her to my home numerous times. If she ends up dealing with another financial issue, who’s to say that she wouldn’t steal something from me? I see what she did as much MORE than a mere financial issue!!! It’s NOT like she did it for herself. I’d be impressed with the length & danger she went through to take care of her Mother. WHAT IF you’re overthinking all this & she learned a valuable lesson in those 10 years??? She’s older & wiser now. WHAT IF she would NEVER steal from you or your friends??? Now, if you 2 were in a very close relationship & you were thinking of marrying her, I’d think that she owed you an explanation; however, she owes you NOTHING as a less than a close friend.

I don’t expect you to like my opinion, so maybe it would be best if you STOP inviting her to your home…just in case. Maybe don’t leave any cash out on the table. Her crime was robbing banks…NOT stealing from her friends!!! Now, if she googled your brain & could see what you’re thinking, I’m sure she would wonder WHY she ever liked you as a friend.

This is positively the most interesting conundrum brought to us in many years.

I do not know what I would do about all possible instances, but I’m certain I would not bring it up.

Robbing banks sounds awesome. More Americans should rob banks to pay for medical bills.

Also maybe do some kidnapping for ransom, but target medical health insurers, politicians, bank CEOs…

By the way, after thinking about it some more, I admit that I’m overreacting. I’ve already said though in earlier comments that I know that she’s probably felt deep remorse. Considering she’s turned her life around.

Armed robbery = bad. However, she was paying Mom’s MS treatment, not supporting a fentanyl addiction.
She did her time. Give her a break.

So I was actually mistaken, she used an unloaded weapon.

“Give her a break.” Still, I don’t know why people are being so glib today….

Acting as though I’m crucifying her or something.

Also it’s weird to moralize about a fentanyl addiction, when drug addiction is also a terrible disease in it of itself.

@rockfan Honestly, it doesn’t matter she was using an unloaded weapon. It’s still armed robbery and treated exactly the same. I don’t agree with “give her a break” either, and the reason why she robbed a bank is immaterial. Also completely agree with your comment about the moralizing about fentanyl addiction.

My other comment still stands. She’s an upstanding citizen now and that’s what is important. She has no obligation to tell you anything, but she might talk about it if you politely ask her about it.

@rockfan: I tend to agree with @Caravanfan: The purpose of prison for people who committed a crime (at least in the USA and other countries) should be not to punish that person, but to rehabilitate him, and to reintegrate him into society. People can’t say various degrees of crimes require various degree of prison times, and then despise these people when they come out of prison simply because aren’t sure they’ll commit them again. That’s hypocrisy, pure and simple. They should’ve wished for life sentence for ALL crimes.

By the way, where in h**l is it written that it’s most certain that crimes will occur only from people who committed them once before? It’s just as likely people who never broke the law can also commit crimes. I’m saying this because anyone under the right circumstances can commit crimes.

@luigirovatti It isn’t written that most crimes will occur only from people who committed them once before. However recidivism does exist and society tends to contribute to that. It’s sort of a chicken and egg thing. Person commits crime. Person does time in jail. Person gets out and is an ex-con. Society has a distrust of ex-con. Life is harder for ex-con than for someone that hasn’t been to prison. Ex-con is having problems trying to reform their life. Ex-con ends up getting desperate and going back to crime to make ends meet.

Trust is the issue. The ex-con has caused people to distrust them. They have shown themselves to be dishonest (at least once in their life). Trust is not something you automatically get back…it has to be earned. And along the way to earning trust, you have to spend a certain amount of time with each person you meet to establish that trust. People that are not ex-cons have not shown themselves to be dishonest to that extent so they are given the normal amount of distrust. We all have a certain amount of distrust of people we don’t know. Ex-cons have doubled or trebled that amount.

@rockfan and @Caravanfan While I can sympathize with the sentiment that drug addiction is a disease, I can also tell you from first hand experience that it is not a disease like most. Drug addicts can help themselves to get better and they are the only ones that can. And it is very hard to do. Rehab only works if the addict really wants it to work. Most do not.

I had a heroin addict in the close family. At one point my wife and I went to Nar-anon meetings…meetings for the families and friends of drug addicts. All the stories were identical except for the ending. In every story the addict got hooked on their drug of choice. They started getting worse and worse…lying, stealing, selling their bodies…whatever it happened to be. The family tried to help, giving them a place to stay, food and drink, support, even covering restitution for their crimes and bailing them out of jail. The more they tried to help the worse things got since what they were doing is removing the obvious negative impacts of the addiction. They were enabling. At some point the family and friends had enough and told the addict they were done. The addict was thrown out of the house and left to fend for themselves. At that point the story changed. Either the addict realized quickly how screwed up their lives were and what they had to do to survive, or they died.

I knew quite a few of the drug addicts my child knew. All of them had been to rehab several times. Most were not because they felt they needed help, but because they were told to go either by family or the courts. Since it wasn’t them trying to get clean but being made to go, they went through the motions, got done with rehab and went right back to the drugs. The ones that truly wanted to change their lives were the ONLY ones that actually got better.

^^ this

@seawulf575: It can be argued from this that if people don’t trust enough ex-con, either in searching for a home, or for work, or something like that, that ex-con are forced to recidivism. I don’t really know how we can live in a society like that. I don’t know how to solve this situation.

Also my questions in my original post were hypothetical and not necessarily what I’m feeling. Just trying to spark a conversation and seeing how others feel.

I have known a few ex-convicts. The ones I knew had all reformed their lives the way @seawulf575 describes. It was very, very difficult at first, rebuilding trust and finding a way to meet their needs. Sometimes they found that second chance through a faith based ministry.

I have met one man who ran a business that employed ex-cons. What a wonderful idea!

@luigirovatti That is what I meant when I called it a chicken and egg thing. Some criminals, like some junkies, are just going to go back to their criminal ways. Others are actually trying to change but run into issues of trust that beat down their resolve. They feel like they are trying but nobody is giving them credit. And they continue to run into difficulties every time they try to re-establish their lives in a good way. It is just a fact of human nature to be a little doubtful about strangers and if that stranger has a criminal past, it raises red flags even more.

Two things my step-daughter ran into when she was getting clean and turning her life around gave her the biggest threat to success. The first was that her criminal past wasn’t completely done. There were fines, fees, other charges, etc that were still dangling out there and that continued to show up from time to time. It was very depressing for her. The other was that in her mind she was good now and everyone should just accept that. I told her that she had spent years proving to everyone around her that she cannot be trusted and that she had told them then that she was good and could be. Now they hear the same thing. I told her that she is just going to have to put up with people not believing her blindly for a while but that people would start showing her they did trust her. One of the biggest wins we gave her was when we gave her a key to the house again. It showed we trusted her completely and she was ecstatic.

@seawulf575 I didn’t realize you had medical training in addiction medicine. My mistake.

@rockfan To answer the concern you expressed about us being too flippant, thinking about it, I would be very shocked to find that someone I was getting friendly with was an ex-con. It would take some processing on my part for sure. I might want to reserve judgment on getting close to them but I would not ask about their past unless they brought it up in some context.

(And just as an aside, I love it when someone tries to mansplain me my own job)

@Caravanfan Real world experience only. It is amazing though how dismissive people can be about that.

As I’ve said before, I believe in second chances (with some exceptions) so I would stay friendly but probably not be too close.

If they commit a crime and fulfill their legal obligations, they’ve tried to make it good. Plus you likely don’t know the whole story unless transcripts were available. No one’s perfect. :)

Isn’t the good ole U S A the best country in the world where someone has to resort to robbing banks to pay for overpriced healthcare?

@SQUEEKY2 People stay home and die so they don’t bankrupt their families. My cousin is a dual citizen and went to Japab for his surgery due to the lower cost. It’s disgusting.

I think if it was recent, I would distance myself. If they were upstanding citizens for years and it was way in the distant past I might ignore it, but I really don’t know. Armed robbery is a pretty big deal. Probably people rationalize stealing from businesses isn’t as bad as stealing from an individual’s property, and banks have a lot of money laying around, but the person terrorized people and risked really hurting someone. Even if the gun was empty, there is a risk of someone firing a gun. Stealing money from any business costs society money in one way or another.

She served her time. Punishment completed. She ought to be free to live her life normally now.

I was wondering if anyone would hire a pedophile who had already served their time in prison to babysit their kids? After all, if they served their time, and punishment was completed, why not hire them to babysit? Why not hire them as a full-time nanny?

@snowberry you are adding apples and sofas. Do you not understand that there is a profound difference between sexually abusing children and someone driven to desperation by the lack of means to pay for medical care for a loved one?

Of course. I was checking to see if anyone else here understood. Good to know!

@snowberry: Paedophiles should have the same chance at being reintegrated into society as any criminal. They should not do any job that puts other people at risk, of course. I mean, just as a bank robber shouldn’t do jobs related to money, paedophiles shouldn’t be near kids. But here we go into gray areas all around, that law simply doesn’t clarify. For example, there are non-offending paedophiles who never committed abuse in their lives, but are all the same attracted to kids. Do they need to have jobs that let them go near kids? Reasonably not, but offensiveness varies from individual. There are also preventing measures, in which if a sexual offender has served his time, the state appoints him a psychiatrist who decides whether he’s fit to be freed, or remanding him to prison. Without any crime having been committed!

I mean, in a more utopian society, we’d like to prevent all the crimes from being committed. Also, we could arrest all the people about to commit the crimes before being committed. But right now, we simply can’t be sure, we just tend to assume recidivism for any criminal, when we simply aren’t sure.

If the pedophile is rehabilitated, they should be free. If not, they should not be free.

I’m not sure they can be. I certainly wouldn’t want my kid to be the one to try them out!

@RocketGuy I’m with @snowberry on this one. “Rehabilitation” in prison is a joke. Incarceration is punishment, but real rehabilitation rarely happens. Pedophilia is often a compulsions, and compulsions can only be managed, not cured.

I think the difference between the individual that did the bank robberies and your garden variety pedophile is the driving force for the two crimes. The bank robber did it to get money for a sick relative’s medical care. She wasn’t doing it for a self-serving reason so the driver for robbing banks is likely gone now. A pedophile, as @Caravanfan stated, is a compulsion. In my mind this puts it up there with alcohol or drug addiction. It CAN be controlled, but is very difficult to do so. There isn’t really a “cure” and the driving force for the compulsion is not gone.

That means sentencing for pedophiles is terribly flawed.

@RocketGuy take out the words “for pedophiles” and I agree with you.

Incarceration isn’t always about rehabilitation. It is about punishment for a crime committed, it is a way to give justice to the victims, and it is about removing a person from society that presents a danger to others.

Incarceration CAN be a blessing in disguise for those that are incarcerated, especially drug addicts. Not that they are going to suddenly see the error of their ways, but because they are being removed from the drugs that have control of their mind/body/soul. It forces them to detox, something that many of them would not do willingly. It gives them time to fully recover from the withdrawal symptoms before putting them back into their lives outside jail. It removes them from all the triggers they had in their lives that made drugs so acceptable.

And incarceration CAN sometimes lead to rehabilitation. I give the case of my former employee as an example. Just a kid, got in with the wrong crowd, got arrested for a pretty serious charge, got sent to prison for quite a few years. In that time he did some serious soul searching and decided to make some big changes. He did that and turned his life around.

That blessing in disguise is just a byproduct of the system. It’s just there to keep people in.
That’s like saying slaves gained marketable skills while being enslaved. Any rehabilitation that happens in American jails is due to some effort in the inmate community, not due to any process set up by the system.

@RocketGuy right or wrong, we do learn through negative reinforcement as well as positive. In fact we often learn faster. Burn your hand once on a hot stove and you learn real quickly that touching it might bring a pain. You could be told dozens of times not to do it and still not learn as well.