Americans Don't Care About Prison Phone Exploitation, Says FCC Official
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He wasn't able to successfully complete a call to my cell. After he said his name and it told me to press 1 to accept the call, it would just disconnect. Frantically trying to figure something out because I know they don't give you many calls. I ended up having to "add money" to my account just so he could call my cell phone and tell me where he was so I can contact a bailsman.
I had to pay money just so he could make his free phone call to retain a lawyer or a bail bondsman.
EDIT: This is the company I had to pay https://web.connectnetwork.com/
There are a lot of ignorant voters out there. If you want to make change you need to learn how to communicate with them, not just look down your nose at them.
If it was a Muslim majority country we would were discussing a link to the Quran that gives context would be useful.
However, I don't see an iterated discussion of this as a useful tangent for the thread to take, so let's discuss instead how religious philosophies of all kinds could or should have informed the believers of those religions in the issue of prisoner treatment. What leads to the dichotomy between religious messages of peace, and the warlike behavior of some adherents to those religions?
But it remains one more of the ghoulish practices that crop up when there is an opportunity to profit from misery.
Both Republicans on the panel.
I included the 'think of the children' bit to illustrate how easy it is to turn a persuasive argument into a blatantly manipulative one.
[0]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/h-a-goodman/bernie-sanders-wil...
[1]http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/06/politics/bill-clinton-crime-pr...
Well, considering that private prisons are banned in the state of NY but not VT. Yes.
Also, the 'private prison donations' is very loosely connected.
They were bundlers, who worked for a lobbying firm, a firm that got 0.35% of it's money from private prisons. But, that doesn't matter, as they money they raised came from people outside of the lobbying firm and outside of the private prison industry. As that is what bundlers do. If he called me up, and I sent in a check, how is that "private prison money"? It's not, it'd be tied to my industry/job instead. source: https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/firmsum.php?id=D000032306&...
The only actual money she got from an actual PP lobbyist, was given to a charity, and it totaled something like $8,600.
This is similar to how she was connected to the 'oil and gas' lobbyists. People would say Ben Klein, a bundler, represented "oxbow" an oil company, therefor hillary gets money from oil. What they don't tell you is his firm only did 60k worth of business with oxbow (<0.8% of their revenue). But their #2 business was Brookfield Power, aka Brookfield Renewable Energy Parters. Who do Hydro. Yet, Mr Klein, is an "oil lobbyist". Source: https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/firmsum.php?id=D000034396&...
At the time, black communities were being decimated by crack cocaine and by the violence associated with its trafficking, and getting tough on crime was seen as a way to save black lives. (This is also why the majority of the Black Congressional Caucus had voted a few years earlier for making the sentences for crack cocaine much longer than those for powder cocaine).
Did the crime bill work out as hoped? Perhaps not. But its passage had nothing to do with corruption.
It does bring moral questions, and it is worthwhile to think about limiting the power of "donations" in politics, but people can hold an opinion that we dislike even before receiving a donation. The question is whether they will change their opinion when confronted with data.
No, fuck that. Corporations should be banned from giving money to political parties. Our politicians are supposed to represent our interests as citizens, not our interests as corporations and their employees.
I'm open to changing my mind on this matter if anyone can provide many strong examples of where corporate donation to political parties has lead to demonstrably better outcomes for people at citizens.
Corporations are banned from donating to either candidates or national party committees (DNC/RNC).
What they're not banned from doing is spending money independently to promote political causes. And I can give you a good example of why that's not a bad thing: had Citizens United gone the other way, the government could have banned the tech company protests against SOPA/PIPA.
> many strong examples of where corporate donation to political parties has lead to demonstrably better outcomes for people at citizens.
I'd bet you could find many strong examples in both directions. I think we'd need either evidence that its systematically one way or the other, or strong logical arguments as to why it would be inevitable (i.e. evidence lacking).
My initial reaction to corporate lobbying was probably too knee-jerk. I suppose what gets in the way (or in my way, at least) is ideology. If a corporation (or any group of people) lobbys for something I'm in favour of then I'll cheer them, if they lobby for something I'm against I'll yell boo.
Biases hey.
Or, why do you hold her to a higher standard than others? (Yes I think they're all corrupt.)
[0]http://articles.philly.com/2016-06-27/news/74031420_1_house-...
In the pre cellular days we always thought prison collect was high but so was charging .37 per minute to any light user.
Overcapacity and cell phone Ubiquity never made it to private networks like prisons.
If there's one thing we don't need, it's a fiscal incentive for the government to jail people.
Prison is meant to be a punishment for crimes and (depending on who you ask) an opportunity for rehabilitation. Without the latter you're going to have way more of the former.
I'm not saying that inmates should have 24/7 free phone calls, free video calls, etc but price gouging a captive (no pun intended) audience isn't right either.
This, public or private, the root of the problem is that private companies and unions financially benefit from a larger prison population and both have money and political power to lobby effectively.
Remove the financial incentive that has bad effects and you get a better system.
Beside the points others made here that it isn't, and it shouldn't be, I'd like to invite you to think about the ethical and practical implications of punishing someone over, and over, and over again for years or even decades, for an action that usually took only a very, very small fraction of time compared to the length of "punishment". The very idea flies in the face of... well any kind of experience with people and how they learn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retributive_justice#Principles
Personally, I think we've gone too far down the 'retributive' route without corresponding investments in rehabilitation, but a lot of Americans prefer to lock the door and throw away the key.
You can look at other societies where they spend more time rehabilitating offenders (e.g. Norway), and Norway does have lower crime rates, but which way does causation run? You can argue that rehabilitation lowers crime rates, or you can argue that low crime rates makes the society tolerant of relatively lenient punishment.
And if it turns out that retributive punishment does work effectively, are you willing to pay for increased crime rates just to find out that our current system is alright?
This type of what-if paralysis isn't rationally supportable. Some similar examples to show where the logic fails:
And if particle accelerators do produce black holes, are you willing to destroy the planet just to prove it?
And if it turns out Cthulhu does live on the moon, are you willing to unleash its wrath by visiting?
Instead of paranoid fear of worst-case hypotheticals, we should be using empirical evidence to guide decisions. We can look at other countries. We can look at differences between states and counties. We can conduct experiments in smaller areas and roll them out over time if they work. Or we can just have some basic human empathy.
Its funny how the goal that I wanted to work towards changed from that game to a successful life.
In some other countries prison is seen as a place for rehabilitation or at worst a way to protect the public from unstable individuals.
As I recall a couple years ago he made public complaints that the prison had not yet given him a PlayStation 3 to replace his current PlayStation 2, because it offers more suitable games to his playing style. Probably has it now.
Punishment should fit the crime is the model in the US but since the 90s ever since sentencing became a political football that model has broken down.
I find that rehabilitation is a word that comes easy to people who have never been victims of an actual crime. Prison time should never be population control/engineering but it should be a deterrent.
Some people believe they help people imagine creative solutions.
I find counterfactuals, especially in history, to be devoid of any meaning and used by pseudo-intellectuals who don't really want to pursue the hard work of finding actual causality.
So, when someone asserts "Hitler caused Holocaust" some enterprising graduate student comes along and writes a thesis on Hitler's willing executioners and argues counterfactually that if Hitler wasn't there, Holocaust still happens.
That doesn't mean at all that Hitler did not cause Holocaust or that the "eliminationist antisemitism" German culture caused Holocaust. I wish you had chose a less value-laden example.
Using prisons as a warehouse for the mentally ill is another problem. These people should be handled differently than general population in a prison.
IMO, you go to prison to reflect on your choices, work on underlying issues and come out a stronger person. It's _very_ hard to do so with mentally ill roommates, rape, gangs, etc all around you.
I am a "victim" of an actual crime. My younger brother was hit by a car crossing the street. The driver was distracted and going >10 mph over the limit in a residential area. This individual had no insurance. No lawsuit was ever filed.
And the last people who should define punishments are victims of crimes, because our own instincts for revenge are wholly miscalibrated for modern society. I've had thousands of dollars of irreplaceable equipment stolen from me, some of which I designed myself, and yet I rationally accept that the perpetrators (never caught) shouldn't be strung up in the proverbial town square for all to see.
Until about two centuries ago, it was not all that common to imprison people as a punishment. It was mainly used to confine those awaiting trial, and to induce compliance (contempt of court, debtor prisons etc). Being convicted of an actual crime generally warranted some form or combination of fines, public shaming, corporal punishment, banishment, or execution.
Then, during the 17th century, the society had started to increasingly reject torture in general, and death penalty for relatively minor crimes (theft etc). Conveniently, that's also when European countries acquired sparsely populated lands that they wanted to settle ASAP, and so penal colonies were born, and replaced a significant chunk of previous death penalty convictions. That system eventually inspired the creation of proper prisons as we know them today.
Ironically, if you read about the prominent people behind the movement that made it happen, most of them subscribed to "prison as repentance" theory, rather than punishment. It's why it was seen as so progressive and radical for its day.
We all know how well that worked out.
Not in my experience. But that's just an anecdote and no doubt there is a lot of data backing your assertion. I also suspect that this is different for different countries.
The question should probably be: Why should any sane person in the prison industry be for it?
They basically are. See "commissions": http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/prison-phone-comp...
This mentality is the outgrowth of "us-vs-them", but most people are closer to being "them" than they really know. If you've gotten behind the wheel of a car over the limit 3 or more times, in most states, you deserve to be prisoner.