More jails replace in-person visits with awful video chat products

IIRC only ~10% of prisoners are held in privately run prisons. It's kind of a red herring.

The bigger (and much harder to solve issue) is that all prisons, public or private, work with a slew of private companies in order to run (think food, phones, etc.) who have big incentives to keep the prison population high. And they can easily prey on prisoners, who are generally much poorer than the general population, because of America's concept of "justice".

But these huge costs of, say, video calls, are borne by the families of the incarcerated, who, like the prisoners that they're supporting, skew poor. As you pointed out, it's a vicious cycle.

Sure you can, it's just no one is doing. The private market is very efficient at finding the most efficient way to provide the things they are paid for. In this case they are paid to house people where house has a specific minimum definition. They figure out how to provide that stuff and nothing else.

If instead we paid in a way that encouraged reducing recidivism they would find a way to do that instead. For example today (according to google) the average prissioner costs $30K per year per inmate. let's say we paid $10K per year as a base, but then paid another $10K every year a former prisoner didn't commit a new crime for 5-7 years after they got out. Then these companies would be looking for ways to ensure that people don't reoffend because that means they lose out on the vast majority of their pay. I would expect the greedy selfish private prison companies to start providing lots things that prisoners will need to be successful when they leave for example behavior management strategies, life skills classes, GED programs, diagnosis and treatment for mental illness, even providing free post release things like job placement, or family counseling. All because these are things the will prevent recidivism and get them that sweet yearly payout.

The thing about greedy capitalists, is they are very easy manage, if you are the one paying them. If they are the ones paying you... well we call that corruption.

Really I think the fact we don't see more of this type of pattern suggests that city and states that run prisons care more about punishment than rehabilitation.

Prison officials and guards have financial incentive in keeping the imprisoning people business booming even when they work in public prisons.

Because then prison officials would have incentives to aid ex-prisoners in avoiding being identified as perpetrators of later crimes.

Adjust figures and timing as necessary so that it's worth your while, but doesn't incentivize gaming the system too much. This is cheaper to the state than the prison time anyway.

In case anyone reads this and thinks it's just commentary - this is literally enshrined in the U.S. Constitution (13th Amendment, emphasis added):

> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Here's the thing: technological expertise in no way implies social expertise. In fact anecdotally they are inversely correlated. Technologists would benefit from moving in the humility direction outside of their chosen field, they are already hubristic enough as is.

For what it's worth, this phenomenon is widespread beyond technologists. It's easy to think that because you're really good in one field, that you must be really good in other fields too. But sadly it generally isn't so.

So the authors of busybox, linux kernel, display drivers, and all of the myriad open source components used are responsible for basically every embedded hardware product in the world?

But frankly welcome to the US - we have zero empathy for people who end up incarcerated ='(