Hundreds of counties around the country have ended in-person jail visits, replacing them with video calls and earning a cut of the profits. One mother said, of two years without seeing her children, “It broke our bond.”
The modern prison-communication industry emerged four decades ago, after the federal government broke up A.T. & T.’s Bell System. New phone companies competed for customers by slashing prices. But inside prisons and jails a different model developed: telecom companies persuaded local officials to sign exclusive service contracts in exchange for hefty commissions. The costs of these commissions were passed along to incarcerated “customers” and their families, who lacked consumer choice. Price gouging was the inevitable result. By the nineties, prison phone-call prices in some jurisdictions had soared to twenty dollars for fifteen minutes.
I’ll never understand how and why prisons and anything related are allowed to be privatized.
People make mistakes and some are prison worthy. However, we want them to do their time, grow in the process, and ultimately return to society as better people. Instead, we throw people in prison who don’t belong there, keep out privileged ones who do far worse and need prison, don’t provide the needed help, and make prison so miserable that people can’t actually grow into something better.
WTF. I jokingly wanted to be a king (dictator) as a teen because I figured it would be faster to fix things… starting with firing every politician (although at that age I said ‘off with their heads’). It’s such a horrible idea. It wouldn’t work. But then that thought comes back in moments like this and I’m like, “just give me a few years to fix things and clean things up”. Ugh. No wonder people eventually end up doing insane things. How long can we wait for reform?
The Romans would appoint a temporary dictator during times of hardship, such as war. We aren’t responsible enough for such a system today. Says something about how much we’ve gone off the rails.
False narrative, Biden circumvented congress to give Israel close to a hundred billion dollars in the past year, a billion just yesterday, no questions asked, we have the money
I’ll never understand how and why prisons and anything related are allowed to be privatized.
People make mistakes and some are prison worthy. However, we want them to do their time, grow in the process, and ultimately return to society as better people. Instead, we throw people in prison who don’t belong there, keep out privileged ones who do far worse and need prison, don’t provide the needed help, and make prison so miserable that people can’t actually grow into something better.
WTF. I jokingly wanted to be a king (dictator) as a teen because I figured it would be faster to fix things… starting with firing every politician (although at that age I said ‘off with their heads’). It’s such a horrible idea. It wouldn’t work. But then that thought comes back in moments like this and I’m like, “just give me a few years to fix things and clean things up”. Ugh. No wonder people eventually end up doing insane things. How long can we wait for reform?
The Romans would appoint a temporary dictator during times of hardship, such as war. We aren’t responsible enough for such a system today. Says something about how much we’ve gone off the rails.
They weren’t responsible enough for it either.
So it sounds like there’s still a chance that I can be a temporary
dictatorking? I mean what could go wrong? 🤪It starts with a government trying to balance its budget. It can’t cut schools because parents will get upset.
You can’t cut services because they are already cut to the bone.
You can’t raise taxes because that will just piss off everyone.
So…who can you piss off and they can’t vote you out?
Cutting the prison budget often doesn’t get headlines. But raising their budget often does and makes you “soft on crime”.
So it’s an easy target for budgets, especially at the local level.
False narrative, Biden circumvented congress to give Israel close to a hundred billion dollars in the past year, a billion just yesterday, no questions asked, we have the money