Comment by rwmurrayVT | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rwmurrayVT | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com