Matthew Cox: belief

Transcript context

…So are there people in this world you trusted or you still trust? The problem is eventually I cooperate. And at the time, I didn’t want to cooperate. I didn’t believe in cooperation. But after seeing how many people cooperate and the way the system is set up, I think that my understanding of loyalty is vastly more realistic now. And I think that if you are committing crime, if you are absolutely like the things I did, I did a bunch of scumbag things. I mean, I’m not killing people, but I’m doing scumbag things. I’m lying, cheating, stealing. I’m a thief. You boil down to it. That’s what I am. So you can’t go around behaving like a scumbag, dealing with scumbags and then expect those same scumbags to suddenly abide by some kind of a street code and not roll over on you. And it does happen, but it’s in the 90 percentile of people that cooperate, 90 something percent. And people cooperate when they’re not even looking at any real time. So if you’re looking at 30 years, and especially after going to prison, you go to prison and it’s like this guy’s a standup guy over here, he got 30 years. He could have cooperated against all of his co-defendants but he didn’t. Nobody comes to see him. His wife divorced him. His kids ended up in foster care. His friends are cleaning out his house. Nobody puts money on his books. Nobody comes to see him. Nobody answers his phone. Nothing. He took 30 years. Most of those guys turned around. They end up getting indicted for other things. Years later, they cooperate. And the best thing this guy’s got going for him is that he can walk around and say, well, he’s a stand-up guy. That guy’s going to the same halfway house as me. He’s going to do 30 years where I’m going to do 10. A stand-up guy meaning he never snitched.…

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