I once attended an internal presentation while working for the UK's Ministry of Justice.
A large number of contraband mobile phones had been confiscated, and a team performed some data analysis to see what they'd been used for.
The overwhelming conclusion was that the phones had been primarily used to keen in touch with family.
There's also a whole bunch of research that showed that maintaining ties with the outside world while incarcerated led to reduced rates of reoffending (and the inverse was also true - isolation led to increased rates).
Allowing free phone calls in and out of prisons makes a lot of sense both socially and economically.
I would guess that there are many cases where it reduces the burden on the prisoner's family - a burden that should never be a purpose of incarceration, and which may lead to follow-on social dysfunction.
A lot of what makes sense socially and economically doesn't happen (esp. in the US) when the alternative is a very profitable business, often an oligopoly. E.g. free prison phone calls hurt the >$1B "inmate telephone business."
Prisons themselves can be a profitable business, which (if you own a for-profit prison) provides strong incentive for reducing rehabilitation and increasing recidivism.
Incarcerations should be harsh and life-ending. Look at North Korea, they have way less crime than even Tokyo. In comparions to Chicago look like a mess mafia gangland. When you reward the prisoners with a lot of benefits, you simply tell everyone crime pays. The focus should be on expediting justice and ensuring correct justice to be dispense. Prisoners that committed crimes should be left for them to be in miserable states to discourage them to do crime. Reoffending one can be liquidated. I really dont want my tax going to feed this kind of inhumans.
Even if you're into the pure punishment angle, prolonged isolation is a factory for mental instability. And you're releasing most of these people back into society at some point.
This is an absolutely bizarre take. Even if you’re all for the pure punitive aspect of it, why would you not want to improve society and the economics? Are you Kim Jong Un or something? I’m genuinely confused how any reasonable argument can be made here, regardless on your stance towards the prisoners themselves.
If you're a retributivist, you believe the point of prison is to punish the guilty. Therefore you will be uncomfortable with the idea of prison as a means to "improve society or economics".
Kant:
> [Punishment] can never be inflicted merely as a means to promote some other good for the criminal himself or for civil society. It must always be inflicted upon him only because he has committed a crime. For a human being can never be treated merely as a means to the purposes of another or be put among the objects of rights to things
And the country we're talking about is run by retributivists, and even further, whatever that is called - people who just want to see other people punished.
But if I’m a retributivist, why do I want to be less efficient with money and also make MY life worse, just to inflict more punishment on some prisoner? That just genuinely makes no sense. I can understand the logic of wanting to punish them for the sake of it, but I would also want to be efficient about it, and not make my life worse in the process.
You don't want to be "less efficient with money" or "make your life worse". Factors like that don't come into it. Neither does "making society better," "reforming the guilty party," or deterrence. And "inflicting more punishment" isn't the goal either -- that's just cruelty.
The basic point is simple. If a person commits a crime, they should be punished in proportion to the crime. Full stop. Within that simple framework, efficiency is fine, but it shouldn't be the goal.
I interpreted it as snarking on the current state of affairs. By and large, in the US the point of the prison system is *not* rehabilitation or providing benefit to society. It's about lining the pockets of wealthy people and keeping the downtrodden in that position. And that sucks, but stating it as a matter of fact doesn't mean one supports it.
While it may improve the outcome for prisoners wouldn't it be abused by criminals at a large scale? In my country at least phones are smuggled by criminals to continue running their enterprises from behind the bars.
This is the same type of logic used by police to justify civil forfeiture of cash in the USA. Drug dealers carry a lot of cash because they can't use banks, so anybody carrying a lot of cash must be a drug dealer and the cash must be illegal proceeds from drug dealing.
Not only has this logic severely damaged public trust in police, but it's been incrementally extended to seize money and property from many innocent and/or uninvolved people.
I'm not saying it will never happen, but we should not be punishing everyone for the misdeeds of the few. We should not be attributing anything to criminal activity that has not yet been proven to be criminal activity.
Prison should be about aggregate improvement of society while minimizing dehumanization. Sure, a drug kingpin might keep running their empire from within prison. But we might buy safer prisons and improved reintegration with this cost.
According to whatever study the parent comment cites, most of them are used to contact family. Seems the solution to allow free calls from monitored prison phones is a good compromise.
> Seems great to allow it through monitored devices for free, you might gather more evidence this way and convict others.
The conviction already happened. Continuing to gathering evidence (for any purpose other than exoneration in cases of suspected wrongful convictions) - and without new warrants - violates the spirit of double jeopardy (Fifth Amendment).
> Obviously the right to privacy (4th amendment) is lost in prison among other rights so there shouldn't be any issue with the surveillance.
When you say "Obviously" do you mean what things are like, or do you mean what things should be like? If you mean the latter only, then I would agree with you. (Although, I'm not sure whether the US constitution implicitly supports a right to privacy.) The chilling effect means that both the convict and the loved one on the other end can't freely express themselves in a private conversation with each other. If your family member gets prison for life then should you lose your First Amendment rights whenever you want to talk with the convicted family member? By default, criminals shouldn't have zero speech rights and zero privacy either. Whether someone is dangerous or has done immoral things is on its own not enough reason to take away constitutional rights. One possible reading of the 13th Amendment allows slavery and involuntary servitude "as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted" [1], but the same doesn't apply to other rights.
In the context of prison, freedom of expression and privacy are about as important to me as voting, and I'm not a fan of felony disenfranchisement [1]. In my opinion, US citizens in prison shouldn't lose their voting rights for any period of time, especially considering that vote by mail exists.
>When you say "Obviously" do you mean what things are like, or do you mean what things should be like?
I mean thats what things are like based on previous Supreme Court rulings [1].
You have no privacy or expectation of privacy in prison, this includes communication with the outside world.
There as with all things of this nature some nuance to this, but bottom line telephone communications are allowed to be tapped without a warrant so long as the phone isn't given under false pretense of being unmonitored, which leads to expectation of privacy [2].
Its seems odd to be debating this since at it base prison is an act of depriving rights. You cannot have a private conversation with your family nor can you have dinner with them or go anywhere because you are in prison...
It basically in the 5th amendment: "nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law".
You have been deprived of liberty through due process of law...
There is no logic that a good thing should be free. In fact it should likely cost prisoners something if it is good for them. Just like breakfast is good for you but it is not free.
“If it’s good for you, it shouldn’t be free” is a very strange hill to die on, even if we weren’t even specifically talking about attempting to rehabilitate criminals.
> In fact it should likely cost prisoners something if it is good for them.
Which is equivalent to "if it is good for them it should likely cost prisoners something" i.e. "if it is good for them it likely should not be free for prisoners".
I'm aware that the hnarn's comment said "you" instead of "prisoners", but the principle of charity leads me to assume that hnarn meant specifically a prisoner rather than any person. And regardless, the answer to the question "Can you find a “shouldn’t“ part in my response?" is yes.
>“Which is equivalent to "if it is good for them it should likely cost prisoners something" i.e. "if it is good for them it likely should not be free for prisoners".”
You will have the same conclusion if there is no “likely” in the sentence, so you are obviously trying to pretend it is not there or you likely need basic logic course. (Don’t ignore likely here again, though)
If I say "you likely should give me 1 dollar" then in my interpretation there is a "should give" part in my response, even if there were also a "should not give" part or an "I don't know" part.
hnarn:
>> “If it’s good for you, it shouldn’t be free” is a very strange hill to die on, even if we weren’t even specifically talking about attempting to rehabilitate criminals.
up2isomorphism:
> Can you find a “shouldn’t“ part in my response?
In your case, you said "should likely cost". You took issue with the "shouldn't be free" part in hnarn's comment, so in the context of hnarn's comment, your first comment in the thread can be expressed as "should likely not be free". To me, there is a "should not" part in "should likely not be free", and I am not claiming that the "should not" part is the whole.
There's more to it though. Here's what you, up2isomorphism, wrote in full:
> There is no logic that a good thing should be free. In fact it should likely cost prisoners something if it is good for them. Just like breakfast is good for you but it is not free.
My natural interpretation is going to be one of the following:
1. up2isomorphism wants calls to cost something for prisoners (should not be free for prisoners)
2. up2isomorphism thinks that calls should cost something for prisoners regardless of which outcome up2isomorphism personally wants (should not be free for prisoners)
3. up2isomorphism is not sure about what they want or what should be the case regarding whether calls should cost something for prisoners, but they are leaning toward "should cost something" (should not be free for prisoners)
If all three of those interpretations are wrong then I'm just wrong about what you said. If so, sorry.
I know it is your "natural" interpretation, but it does not automatically make you correct. In this case, I did not give anything particular stance of if prisoner should be given free calls or not. I merely state that being a good thing for somebody is really not an supporting cause why it should be free. There might other valid reasons to provide it free or not free, but being a good thing for prisoner is just a poor argument. The same goes for things like since non-prisoner are already paying bunch of things for the prisoners they should not be bothered to pay another thing.
Also in your particular example, if you walking in a woods that is private or requires hiring people to maintain, you will likely need to pay it. You don’t need to pay it if you walk in the wilderness, but even that you still indirectly paying it via tax if there are any work needs to be done to keep the wilderness looks good to you.
The lack of basic logic training in the responses are hilarious, and some of them can’t even notice there is a damn “likely” there.
The fact that A does not imply B, and A often implies not B does not mean that you cannot find an example that show both A and B. But it is sufficient to weaken the argument to support B using A.
This is totally stupid and illogical. The fact that you already paid some money for the other people doesn’t necessarily give you any reason why you should pay more for another expense, big or small.
Again, none of you guys seems to care about the reason and just want the conclusion.
> The fact that you already paid some money for the other people doesn’t necessarily give you any reason why you should pay more for another expense, big or small.
You're right, but in the wrong place.
You're paying for another big expense when the person commits another offense and ends up with another round of prison. BIG bucks. If you'd just paid for their phone calls when they were in the last time, you'd have had a much better chance of not needing to spend that additional money.
People that become incarcerated have also paid for their phone calls and prison sentences by virtue of having been part of the public. They also don't cease producing value while incarcerated, but the prison system captures that, not the public.
Think of it like health insurance. Everyone pays, it's a service available to all of us, but not everyone uses it.
I know you just threw that in, but there is considerable evidence that breakfast is not good for you (unless perhaps you're out working in the fields), and the modern concept that "breakfast is the most important meal of the day" was invented by ad agencies.
On the topic of meal timing, I recommend anything by Salk Institute researcher Dr. Satchin Panda.
In the libertarian ideal, a clean ecosystem should be monetized to incentivize the production of value by those who think they need a clean ecosystem. In theory, we would all be richer for it.
A terrible theory. Business owners can increase profits by X% by polluting more, and they can just live in the clean air areas that have higher property values and make the poor live in the polluted areas. Weather patterns move pollution in specific directions.
Don't believe me? Look at industrial cities like Cleveland where the poor areas are concentrated phyiscally downwind of the factories, and the wealthy areas are either upstream on the West side or further away on the East side, where they built a private train for themselves that allowed them to be further from the city while keeping commuting distance. This line is now the RTA Blue/Green line, and if you do a street view of the line in Shaker Heights you'll see that it runs straight down a boulevard of period mansions.
The wealthy can avoid almost every negative externality they create:
Underfunded public transit in NYC? Just take a helicopter to work.
Too many people are poor and crime is high? Hire private security and live in a gated community.
The poor are mad at you every time you go out in public and have their pitchforks at the ready? Fly private, have your assistant pick up your coffee, dine out in a private room, spend time in places the poor can't afford to go like your yacht or Monaco.
In Science Fiction, they go as far as moving off-planet, like in Elysium.
If things that were good for society were profitable we'd be living in a Star Trek utopia by now.
Here (Maine) calls are almost $7.00/hr which is indeed outrageous, however the jobs pay 2-4x better than other prisons i've been in, the food is better, you are given more things like clothes that other prisons would make you pay for. And I am allowed to go to college, and even hold a job developing software.
So although it is absurd, I have been in other prisons where the calls are dirt cheap but they have shit food, they dont give you ANYTHING and there isn't shit for opportunities. I understand that sometimes the profit they make off the calls might be going to things like quality of the food, etc. I know that this is almost never the case, but I do know that it is somewhat the case here.
How I got here is a very interesting related recent (17d) submission, where a tech-savy inmate discusses how lucky they were to pretty much accidentally end up getting sent to a Maine prison, where they were able to get access to the internet & go from what reads to me like a hopeless prison mentality to a hopeful, interested, engaged & active person in the world, even from their confines.
Alas, the greater context here, and seemingly much of why they write, is that Maine seems to be the one a few rare states where they believe there's any hope of reform & rehabilitation. And even to get this context, it seemingly took Covid for them to be granted access to the knowledge & information to unlock & enable their journey & growth, for them to escape a foreboding dark prison fatalism. https://pthorpe92.github.io/intro/my-story/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38229231
This is unhumble as heck & just my own weird strange warped view, but I personally think there is a resounding screaming loud truth that access to FOSS is a civic virtue that can redeem lives & should be amplified accelerated & supported at all levels. Prisons, schools, & elsewhere: being able to personally entail ourselves into such great projects lifts the soul, gives us worthy efforts to motivate & work towards. FOSS invites us in to participate in the greater non-zero-sum aspects of humanity.
I do pay rent because I work (10% of my salary) as well as I obviously pay my taxes. This is why I feel like it is insane that people wouldn't want this to be more prevalent.. would you rather have me sucking up tax payer money and leaving prison in worse shape than when I came in? or completely changing my life and paying for my housing and paying my taxes and leaving with a career and a guarantee that I never come back? seems obvious
I think you shouldn't be in jail in the first place!
Drugs being illegal is batshit insane and literally keeps the cartels in business which destabilizes entire countries and kills way more people than having legal drugs.
Anyway thats a whole different conversation.
That being said theres this weird liberal trend to feel sympathy for murderers. And in my book if a person is a murderer or rapist or something, they need to be in a dungeon not a comfy prison with internet.
But for the bullshit you got in for Im glad you were able to find a good spot and make the best of the situation.
Hope you can get some sort if early release situation.
The big difference of course being that you’re surrounded by low-IQ, violent men (often mentally ill) who are prone to doing dumb things. Not the kinds of people you want to spend your days with.
Also, it's not just the published rate. They do things like...
- add credit card surcharges
- bill whole minutes
- no refunds for unused minutes when the service isn't needed.
And, it's not just phones. Similar treatment for email/telegram type services, commissary type items, books, music, etc. Some even deduct from these accounts for medical service visits.
These things have a balance, though. If you're planning on letting people out of prison one day (i.e. if they don't have a life sentence)...
And it's punitive to the point that familial relations break and people lose what little support network they have and ability to live outside of prison...
You can expect they're going to show back right up where they started. In which case, by facilitating repeated recidivism, you've neutered deterrence, incapacitation and left them unable to make meaningful restitution.
Even for life sentences I believe it makes sense to have prisoners work and earn some small privileges inside.
For one its possible to encourage good behaviour by threatening to take it away but also because a sense of purpose and achievement is important for a healthy mental state. That's true for incarcerated people as well and a stable population reduces enforcement costs and churn among the guard personal.
...according to one textbook, in one country, that happens to have the largest prison population in the world both per capita and in total.
> Retribution prevents future crime by removing the desire for personal avengement (in the form of assault, battery, and criminal homicide, for example) against the defendant. When victims or society discover that the defendant has been adequately punished for a crime, they achieve a certain satisfaction that our criminal procedure is working effectively, which enhances faith in law enforcement and our government.
And yet when victims and victim families are interviewed on this subject, most of them aren't terribly satisfied by criminals being "punished."
What they typically care about is that the person won't harm others, and that's where rehabilitation comes in.
Concepts of justice are old. They tend to include these elements, though I’m open to seeing how others formalize its aims.
> when victims and victim families are interviewed on this subject, most of them aren't terribly satisfied by criminals being "punished."
Source needed. Also, retribution reduces not only victims taking the law into their own hands, but also the public.
Note that I am not saying every incarceration needs a retributive component. The American justice system is absolutely too retributive. But it’s an old institution [1] for good reason.
> What they typically care about is that the person won't harm others, and that's where rehabilitation comes in.
I'm not sure this is true for society at large. There's zero chance that Elizabeth Holmes will pull off another Theranos, or that Sam Bankman-Fried will pull off another FTX. It's hard not to see their sentences as being entirely for retribution and deterrence (deterring others). And few if any comments here took issue with that.
You're focusing on retribution, but incapacitation is the primary purpose of prisons and is used even in whatever progressive European countries you think America should be emulating. Somebody like Brevik will never be released; he's being incapacitated not rehabilitated. Making sure criminals can't hurt the public again is the first priority, only then can rehabilitation even be considered.
TL; DR I'm not arguing we do these things well. I'm just saying these are the components of justice.
> Not sure what the value of retribution is other than deterrance
It's irrational. But it seems fundamental to human nature. If you remove deterrence, victims and those who identify with them--which in the modern world is increasingly the public--take justice into their own hands.
The 1984 subway shooting acquittal is one example [1]. Goetz shot four people in cold blood. He was obviously guilty. But the jury acquitted, because he was seen as acting justly. (The four kids "allegedly tried to rob him," and there was a lot of unpunished robbery in New York at the time.) The reaction was in excess of self protection. But the public bought into the vengeance narrative because the criminal justice system wasn't doing it for them.
Another example was Chesa Boudin refusing to prosecute someone who unintentionally killed a kid. He said it wouldon't bring the child back. Which is true. But that infuriated the victim's family. They wanted revenge. (They got it through the recall. But most families don't have recourse to the political system to sort things out peacefully.)
> substantial number of inmates commit crimes while in prison
Not on the public. But yes, we fail at this.
> We need to find a better way
I agree. I'm describing tenets of justice. We fail to do justice in America--we do not deter, we do not incapacitate and we certainly don't rehabilitate. We're okay with restitution and retribution, though it's a statistical versus comprehensive approach.
That doesn't undermine the theory, however, which has persisted for millenia and across cultures for good reasons.
Has it not occurred to you that, if we want people to become productive working members of society, that perhaps allowing them to learn and work from prison might be rehabilitative?
Perhaps you misinterpreted my comments, $7/hour for calls where the money is used to provide better meals implies that without additional funding the meals would not be at an acceptable level.
I don't think he negated that and just stated that the funds to do so should mostly come from somewhere else - otherwise there is motivation to exploit the prisoners.
What kind of jobs take in a dev that's in prison? I hear havig any prison record is one of the easiest ways to fail a background check, even if you are otherwise a stellar candidate.
But that is good to hear about college. So much of my state to this day is still on the "hard on crime" narrative even though I'd bet my bottom dollar that over half the prisoners just need a detox session (or need to be released yesterday over weed charges). Some direction and education would help further and reduce recidivism.
I work for a company that develops education software for people in prison, founded by two people who were released after being sentenced to life as juveniles.
Massachusetts has pretty strict laws on criminal records in general but also questions about criminal backgrounds in applications and interviews.
Some cities in MA are prohibit companies they contract with from discriminating against those with criminal backgrounds. And before some smarmypants jumps on my back: there's verbiage about it only applying to those who will not be working sensitive positions. I'm not an expert but I believe it's things like unsupervised handling of money and working with vulnerable populations.
That would be wholesome. Though if word goes out you're earning SW dev wages then you're making yourself a target for extorsion/racketeering from gangs and wardens meaning you'll probably have to pay half your wage so something bad doesn't happen to you.
people talk, and word will get out. you can only bribe your way out of so much.
if it's just going to a bank account somewhere though, whatever. keep your mouth shut, tell em you're getting $3.24/hr, and then go on a bender when you get out with all that saved up cash.
I've been reading your comments here, and am really interested in hearing more about your story, especially your place of work. Where can I learn more? Your perspective is so interesting.
edit: I see your blog post linked below by someone else. I'll read that!
When I first went to jail (for being poor) it was costing me $1.50/min to call my family.
Six years later, when I was still locked up, my mother was dying of cancer and I could only afford to call her for five minutes a day.
Illinois at least dropped the prices of its prison calls to 1¢/min.
Amazing that this bill includes the county jails. Often jail and prison regulations are totally separate and jails usually get the short end of the stick.
And remember, it is never the prisoners that pay for the calls. It is always the friends and family having to put money onto the phone or commissary accounts. Often a male prisoner has left behind a woman and children and they have lost their primary income, but now they are being burdened with paying for phone calls, hygiene products, clothing and food for their loved one too.
When a judge sets bail bond (which is what you're referring to in your prior comments - yes I read back because I was curious), it is either to ensure the accused returns for trial, or they set it very high to keep them in jail because they are a significant flight-risk.
I suspect you being a UK citizen was a big factor there - but I'm very surprised that your case is taking TEN YEARS and that you've been in jail the majority of that time. How does that happen? Are you appealing a prior case outcome?
You also got 1.5 additional years for violating a court gag order on your own case? Is that right?
I reposted the above Tweet and the judge freaked out about it. The newspaper article is about the fact I was getting arrested every day when I was on house arrest for a short time in 2021/2022 due to the monitoring system being a piece of crap. The judge said I shouldn't be posted under a fake name. My name is Charles and the link is to a newspaper article written about me under my real name.
The other one that was at issue looked almost exactly like this, but wasn't this exact one:
10 years. And the prosecutor called me to court and dropped all the charges a week or so ago.
The bail amount was set simply because I was a UK citizen, despite handing the court my passport, despite owning a house, despite being married to a US citizen.
Illinois just became the first state to abolish cash bail, so this problem will be less frequent now as the bar is higher.
Courts have been routinely ruling lately that cash bail was always constitutionally invalid, which makes sense, because it distinguishes rich from poor.
But I honestly don't see the problem in principle.
If a court issues you a fine and you simply ignore it, that's not a situation society can just ignore. If you are truly unable to pay, that's more complicated, but should not just simply magically resolve you of responsibility.
There has to be other measures to ensure that money is paid or an equivalent cost is beared. Garnishing wages being an obvious first step.
(This is especially true if fines were to scale with income/wealth)
All the people I was locked up with for "being poor" who were serving a sentence of conviction (as opposed to those in pretrial detention for inability to pay bond) were there because of child support payments.
Basically what happens is that often the court makes a poor determination of how much a person can afford to pay each month, and when they can't make the payments they are jailed for contempt of court (for violating a court order). Often the first thing states do is take away the person's driver's license as a warning before jailing them. This makes them unable to get to/from work and usually results in their unemployment.
Somehow I don't think it is that hard for the judge to find out if you're really poor and can't pay or you don't want to pay and take reasonable action. Jailing people for being poor is catch 22 with people's lives.
People are not jailed for being poor. People make philosophical arguments for why that’s actually the case when people are arrested for breaking actual laws. None of the laws that send people to jail state it’s illegal to be poor. Getting arrested for trespassing isn’t getting arrested for being poor.
Not paying a fine? You committed a crime that led to the fine. The not paying is an after effect.
I do agree that something needs to be extracted and it’s probably better to require community service than being locked up. If you can’t or won’t pay your debt to society through money then society can hire you to repay the debt.
We get a lot of interest from universities with students that want to intern/volunteer but most of it seems to be UI/UX stuff which I recently found out, doesn't usually include front-end work.
There is an existing platform in production right now in a few different facilities. We are currently re-writing it from scratch.
It's almost an LMS, more of a UI that allows a portal for students to access many other LMS's, all the while storing and logging the data and building a transcript.
As crazy as it sounds, prisons can tell you that I didn't stand up for count (roll-call) in 2014, but can't tell you what classes, if any, that i have taken over the years or anything about my educational progress.
The only thing I can say is to reach out, hopefully we can figure something out :)
"The Department of Correction :currently charges 12 cents per minute, and most county sheriffs charge 14 cents per minute — forcing cash-strapped prisoners, or their families, to spend $2.40 and $2.80 for a 20-minute call in addition to extra fees for putting money into an account."
Yeah, that's completely unethical and I'm very glad to see it changed. Hopefully other states will follow suit.
> The Department of Correction :currently charges 12 cents per minute, and most county sheriffs charge 14 cents per minute — forcing cash-strapped prisoners, or their families, to spend $2.40 and $2.80 for a 20-minute call in addition to extra fees for putting money into an account
> Counties will be refunded for their calls’ costs through a fund facilitated by the Executive Office of Administration and Finance, according to Tenneriello. Telecommunication contracts with companies like Securus will continue until they expire, and will be renegotiated.
This isn't quite clear; will the state be reimbursing county prisons at the rate of $0.14/min? Because if so this is outrageous, calls do not cost that much to make, and now there's a perverse incentive for municipal entities to encourage calls in order to siphon funds from the state.
The question is why don't they provider the services at cost? It's not like they invest in the phones. They are in the end public phones no? And secured a little bit so they can't be damaged easily, but that's it.
> Because if so this is outrageous, calls do not cost that much to make
About 15 years ago, phone companies (both mobile and landline) essentially switched to being internet providers with phone service on the side, and when that happened, you stopped being charged for individual calls (within the US at least). Before the trend to unlimited phone calls, the typical rate for a phone call was roughly in a $0.10/min region.
In that light, it's less that prisons charge outrageous amounts of money for a phone call and more that they're only people who are providing phone service that's not a side project of internet service.
> When the law goes into effect next month, Massachusetts will join Connecticut, California, Minnesota and Colorado in eliminating prisoner phone call fees.
Mildly relevant - the Telmate Terraform provider for Proxmox [1], which now stopped working with latest Proxmox version due to seemingly being abandoned, was initially mostly developed by an engineer employed by a company of the same name. They've since rebranded [2].
I've used that provider for a while, and only recently started looking into the specifics. The repo is effectively owned by a company profiting off of incarcerated persons in the US. Pretty wild.
Mostly writing this since I've spent the last few days migrating my Terraform setup to a different, supported provider [3].
I remember a few years ago that CenturyLink/Lumen got out of the prison dialing business. Wonder if they knew or were just worried about bad PR in general concerning the various issues around prison dialing.
I would’ve expected American prison calls to be much more expensive, here in Finland local calls from prison cost 3.60 euros per hour. Calls abroad can easily cost 10s of euros per hour, even within EU.
The US has 50 states. And everything like this is can vary by federal, state, county, and muni's. So...
Jail is for naughty people. Prison is for bad people.
Jails are usually run by counties and muni's and hold people before trial and serving sentences for minor crimes. Prisons are run by the feds and states and hold prisoners convicted of serious crimes.
In general, the idea is a jail is where people who are accused of a crime stay while they are awaiting trial if the nature of their potential crime warrants it, a prison is where people who have been convicted of their crime serve their sentences after the trial. But it is confusing because jails are often used for short sentences (on the order of a few days or months).
This is not correct. Yes, jail is people waiting for trial and usually convicted people with less than a year sentence. Prison is usually for people with a year or longer sentence. My state has a prison for younger drug offenders and other places for violent convicted criminals.
Good idea. Technically the cost of phone calls is so low that they might as well be free; or at least flat fee. Also, why use phone calls when you can do internet calls? They are typically not metered per minute at all. I use phone calls only when nothing else will work, i.e. very rarely. Mostly I'll use whatsapp, skype, meets, zoom, etc., depending on who I'm talking to. Most of these are completely free.
As a courtesy to relatives, who by virtue of not being locked should be presumed innocent, providing some more convenient ways to check up on their loved ones might be a nice touch. You could time box it, restrict it to certain hours, etc. But there's no need for extorting people over this.
Since the US tends to run a lot of its prisons as businesses, it's not surprising that the contractors involved are ripping off their customer (the state).
John Oliver recently did a nice episode on the abysmal state of healthcare in prisons vs. the insane profits that contractors are making. I imagine this is the same for this kind of stuff. Expensive, inefficient, stupid at many levels, and enriching some really dodgy companies and people in the process.
A large number of contraband mobile phones had been confiscated, and a team performed some data analysis to see what they'd been used for.
The overwhelming conclusion was that the phones had been primarily used to keen in touch with family.
There's also a whole bunch of research that showed that maintaining ties with the outside world while incarcerated led to reduced rates of reoffending (and the inverse was also true - isolation led to increased rates).
Allowing free phone calls in and out of prisons makes a lot of sense both socially and economically.