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Personal experience tells me that in federal prison you get 300 minutes a month. You pay 26 cents a minute for long distance. There's legit virtual phone tech businesses that service the families of those incarcerated. You get it dropped down to 6 cents a minute.........

That 15 minute maximum includes a mandatory waste of 38 seconds of a recorded message telling the receiver that the person on the other end of the line is in federal prison. Additionally you waste approximately 1 minute during the call when a woman's voice reminds you all that the call was placed from federal prison. That's just the time the voice is talking.. it doesn't account for the fact it is seemingly random and derails any train of thought. All in all you waste over 1.5 minutes of the call...

Outside of Unicor you're screwed if you expect to make more than 20 dollars a month.

Oh and the email system ha ha ha haaaa you pay by the MINUTE to email. Imagine how many people can't type well at all? I spent so much time typing up messages for people because they couldn't type well. It's just pretty sad. Huge rip off for every one in a vulnerable position.

State prisons and jails, at least the ones I've been in and heard about (was an inmate for the better part of a decade) are much more expensive.

Federal prison was progressive in many ways compared to the states.

I do agree with you. The fact that people in the feds that have been in a state prison refer to it as easy street is deflating. The local places I have been are much worse. Manhattan/Charlotte/Hampton Roads are all really, really shitty.

Truth be told, if you have some minimum level of funds available and you are within regular travel distance of visitors the federal system is not bad at a camp or a low.

The existence of a straight-to-camp prisoner is a little silly to me. Camps should really only be a stepping stone down from higher security level on your way to release. The feds could save a lot of money by sending people with 18-36 month sentences to a modified RDAP program while living at a halfway house or home confinement. I fully believe every one in the federal system should be participating in an RDAP-type program to evaluate their criminal thinking and have better availability to skills training. Prison and Oren Cass' book "The Once and Future Worker" really influenced my thinking on what should be done to help.

Are you writing this comment from prison? What's the internet access like?

No. I'm writing it from my desk at my place of employment. I went to the privately owned halfway house in May of 2019. I get released to probation in October of 2019.

Internet access is non-existent without a cell phone. The higher up in security level you go the harder it is to get a cell phone. Camps at Fort Dix, Petersburg, Morgantown, etc. without a fence.. they're readily available for anywhere from 100-300 USD. A low that has an attached camp a little harder and more expensive. A low with a fence you're looking at maybe 1,000+ USD. Beyond that good luck. These are the shitty prepaid 30 dollar Android phones. Get caught with a cell phone you'll lose up to 200 days of good time and get an automatic shipment (through the horrible OKC facility...) to the next security level. Camp -> Low -> Medium -> High.

General rule at a camp is expect to pay 4x the street price for anything you want. Multiplier gets to be more like 5x-7x if it's something bulky and unusual.

I don't think that's a fair assessment. Just because it's not a huge revolutionary reform that doesn't make incremental improvements a red herring. These are just steps toward a better world.

I suppose I was being a bit strong. I just don't want anyone to get the impression that it's anything _but_ the teensiest of baby steps.

Is almost 10% of prisoners really only baby steps? I understand your point, they will be transferred to a new prison that will still have private interests, but to call it baby steps still seems exaggerated and defeatist

Public jails are doing the same things because companies that provide those services lobby them to do it. The FCC under Obama had capped the amount they could charge which was promptly undone with government changes.

This also ignores known stories such as an example where a judge had a stake in a private prison company (or was bribed outright?) And as a result was sentencing school kids to prison for things which probably needed detention at worst. And this went on for a decade.

The prison system in the US is not good to begin with. Largely because the citizens look at prison as retribution rather than rehabilitation. But the private nature only adds to and exacerbates issues.

Agreed, there's lots of work to do in public prison reform, too.

FWIW, the judges you mention are probably the two in the Kids for cash scandal [1]. They're currently serving sentences ranging from 17 to 28 years. Good riddance.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

Yeah, the worst part is that these jerks would be out by now if they kept their mouths shut--they should rot permanently.

Thank God they opened their mouths, pissed off the judge overseeing their plea agreement who then yanked it, and got sentenced to about 3 times the jail time they would have had otherwise.

The problem here is corporate capture. These companies are raking it in with huge margins which would be super attractive to large amounts of competition... if competition could compete in a free market instead of buddying up with government officials.

Offering cheap phone calls isn't exactly rocket science.

> The FCC under Obama had capped the amount they could charge which was promptly undone with government changes.

We see this time and time again. There really needs to be a better protocol for this. It takes so much time and effort to make these laws, yet they can be undone in a heartbeat. It's an inherently flawed system.

> It takes so much time and effort to make these laws, yet they can be undone in a heartbeat.

The whole problem is that these were not laws. The FCC does not make laws. If it had been done through Congress, it would have been a more lasting change. But anything one president can unilaterally do, the next can unilaterally undo.

These things COULD go through a functioning legislature. Functioning being the key word. When you have one party who outright states that they will stop any and all work in the legislature just because Obama is president, and the citizenry continues to re-elect that party, what else do you do? What else SHOULD you do?

> These things COULD go through a functioning legislature

Which would just make them subject to switching when the legislative majority changed, rather than actually fundamentally changing the situation.

But I'm not sure either is really a problem: otherwise, bad laws would be impervious to change, too. If you want good laws, you have to keep electing good government.

True but there are multiple levels of law "inertia", and stuff passed through congress at one point carried more of it

Yeah, I've always thought the private/public prison thing is a bit of a red herring. Construction and maintenance companies get paid either way. Staff gets paid.

I think it makes more sense to focus on specific aspects of the criminal justice system rather than simply the private/public distinction. There should be standards for the pay and training of prison staff, security of inmates, quality of food and nutrition, medical care, etc.. It might be true that private prisons skimp on these things more than public prisons, but the standards are what is important.

Of course, this may very well mean that the best way to implement and enforce these standards is to have as much "public" (state) direction as possible in the development and operation of prisons, and I'm not at all against that if it is in fact the best implementation.

I partially agree. I think the ban is necessary in part because once we go down the route of private prisons we create massive economic incentives to push people into prisons and keep them there. These incentives will be on top of the incentives that already exist.

So I see this as cutting off a potential source of greater problems down the line.

But you're 100% right, there are already massive incentive systems in place that we need to overcome to achieve real change.

Frankly, I think a great first step would be eliminating prison guard unions or at least putting pressure on them (e.g. other unions refusing to recognize them).

Just a reminder that approximately 2.2 million people are incarcerated in the United States.

10% of 2.2 million is 220,000, and that is 220,000 more people than deserve to be a human sacrifice to a corporation and its bottom line.

You also need to consider that several people are processed through private facilities on their way to a public facility. CCA Youngstown and others hold prisoners before they are finally transferred to a federal facility. CCA Youngstown can melt off the face of the Earth as far as I am concerned.

Uh, no, that's 2.2 million (or possibly 2.42 million) more people than deserve to be a human sacrifice to a corporation and its bottom line.

"Less than 10% of incarcerated people are held in private prisons."

While this is true, that's still 133,000 people. An attempt to make the system more ethical for over 100,000 people makes a significant difference.

Well, you wouldn't have things like the Kids for Cash scandal as likely to occur.

https://nypost.com/2014/02/23/film-details-teens-struggles-i...

yeah the govt seldom builds anything. it just contracts it out. A federal prisons may be staffed by govt. employees but otherwise privatized in every other respect such as construction, surveillance, and supplies.