On: Prison phones are a predatory monopoly – One famil...

[ndespres]

Not to mention the municipalities that benefit. There's a perverse incentive to pick the vendor with the highest price, since the muni will net a higher dollar value on the kickbacks.

I'm interested in seeing more about using erate funds to pull fiber and invest in other infrastructure, especially if it's then turned over to a private operator. Do you have any more info about who is doing this, and where?

[Spooky23 → ndespres]

I was wrong about the ERate thing -- it wasn't a prison, but a juvenile detention center. Kiddie prison is considered a school.

See: http://usac.org/sl/applicants/beforeyoubegin/non-traditional...

[ndespres → Spooky23]

Thanks for the link and the correction. I'm going to look into pulling a list of contractors who have used erate funds for infrastructure upgrades which mainly benefited a private prison telco rather than the incarcerated juveniles.