U.S. prisons mull AI to analyze inmate phone calls | Hacker News Reader

U.S. prisons mull AI to analyze inmate phone calls

reuters.com

36 pointsjdmark49 comments

US prisons are liberating in a certain sense...

I don't feel so bad about thinking that the folks who run them are probably the bad guys and are literally evil. Kind of like reading histories of the CIA.

And the more evil they create the less I feel bad about not being okay with the larger governmental entities that operate them.

For a long, long time, I felt like a whiny teenager, being pissed at my parents. As I get older (I'm 45 ish), the more I feel like my disgust at the folks who run these things is an actual ethical stance.

The people who run prisons in the US are literally evil.

There may be literally nothing to be done about that.

But that fact doesn't make the people running those prisons less evil.

> For a long, long time, I felt like a whiny teenager, being pissed at my parents. As I get older (I'm 45 ish), the more I feel like my disgust at the folks who run these things is an actual ethical stance.

Same. They say that you get more conservative with age, but instead I've found that it has only got easier to hold the same principles I think I've always held.

Lately it seems like people have stopped trying to sugar coat their shitty immoral ideas, and now it's really easy to see when someone is motivated by greed or hatred or is just an all around bad person. They used to dress these ideas up as "pragmatism" or "fiscal responsibility" and then you'd have to debate them and second guess yourself. But now they pretty much just tell you that they have no principles.

It doesn't even have to be political... You wouldn't believe how casually people will suggest doing immoral things at work: cutting corners (and lying about it), lying to customers, lying to coworkers, hiding things that make the company look bad (even if people could get hurt as a result), or even committing outright fraud. It boggles the mind.

> The people who run prisons in the US are literally evil.

> There may be literally nothing to be done about that.

That isn't true, you can limit their influence. Prison owners and operators can be evil and do evil things because of legislation that gives them power and wealth. That legislation can be changed.

What a naive and cynical perspective.

Why naive ? Never heard of CIA experiments on inmates ?

What a lackadaisical comfortist non-effort.

You are capable of more productive discussion than this.

yes, it's just pseudo-ethical garbage to justify doing nothing politically

Huh?

3 daily calls is evil?

This kind of reads like this company has come up with this scheme and now they are trying to sell it by forcing prisons to use it through legislation or at least pressure from congress.

Notice that even though the headline says "U.S. Prisons mull AI" the article actually says an unspecified congressional panel and an unnamed Democratic congressional aide are pushing for it to be "studied" there are zero mentions of prisons asking for it beyond a note that a sheriff in a town of 21,000 people claims to have solved a crime using it.

Feels like the real story here is corruption.

Correct, and anyone who works on this is similarly corrupt.

How about we start by not overcharging exorbitant amounts and gouging prisoners and their families before we increase the 1984 levels in prisons?! The whole US prison industry is so damn corrupt its infuriating.

I did foster care briefly. Children were in my care after mom was charged with a crime and in jail awaiting trial.

One of the kids needed a medical authorization approved by the parent so I naively waltz into the local jail and say, "I have a piece of paper for so-and-so to review and sign"

Oh boy, they laughed and laughed at me. You idiot, only lawyers can do that. And her lawyer for her criminal case isn't going to be here for awhile. They said we could talk to her for like $10/min on a video conference system (she still couldn't sign anything) I was like, yeah but I am here face to face, they laughed again. That isn't safe. Only lawyers can talk face to face, you must talk through a video chat system located on site for a nominal fee.

Screw this. So we played the song and dance that involves shuffling papers to court appointed lawyers, waiting several weeks, and this latency made every tiny insignificant element of us providing the best care to these children absolutely impossible.

We quit foster care after 3 months.

I think this is also fault of courts/foster system that did not appointed person able to sign and put the kid into impossible situation.

"Responsibilty without authority."'

Incidentally, an excellent question to add to your interview repetoire:

- What are the responsibilities of this position?

- What are the authorities of this position?

Plugging the phrase into Google Ngram Viewer and Google Book Search is interesting. Big bump at about 1920:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=responsibility...

Responsibility without authoirty is unfair, as well as dangerous, because it risks a sort of shifting blame. You may have seen this state of things among workmen, or between foremen and workmen, but any executive who is worthy of the name will be very careful to delegate both the responsibility for the results and the necessary authority to carry it through.

https://books.google.com/books?id=DT61kZUpxTsC&pg=PA63&dq=%2...

Well known is the fact that responsibility without authority, like authority without responsibility, is doomed to failure.

https://books.google.com/books?id=IGpOAQAAIAAJ&pg=RA2-PA9&dq...

This seems an awful lot like a solution to a problem that shouldn't exist.

Those are state by state decisions. Many states choose to fund the prisons by taxing phone conversations. None of it is encouraged by the private industry - the prisons have a contest between the main vendors (GTL and Securus) and whoever offers to pay the highest percentage and amount of revenue wins. They of course know who is going to pay, but the public has a hard time associating “let’s raise taxes and spend more on prisons” with a reduction in telecom cost for the prisoners. And even those who do get it, view it as yet another way to be tough on crime. Ironically, having frequent contact with family is the best way to reduce recidivism.

> None of it is encouraged by the private industry

I don't know how you can make this claim when you even admit in the very next sentence that the prisons get kickbacks... an obvious incentive to keep gouging the prices?

Then, I don't have any idea how you then turn it into a conversation about higher taxes? As if when someone is being exploitative but the taxpayers should make up the difference between the grift and how it should be?

How does any of what you are saying make any sense? I am just misunderstanding your point here?

While we’re calling out the literal evil the US prison system, this company in particular is terrible:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securus_Technologies

The first paragraph:

“The company has been criticized for developing phone tracking technologies that can be used outside prisons and for charging very high rates for calls, in addition to pushing to mandate the removal of in-person meetings of inmates with their families.“

My family uses their subsidiary, JPay, which is just as evil.

They're applying the same principle to other prisoner amenities as well. Part of Securus's strategy is renting a locked-down tablet to prisoners which can provide them with (expensive) paid access to music, books, etc -- then lobbying prisons to stop allowing prisoners to receive physical equivalents of these items in care packages. Their primary competitor, GTL, is doing the exact same thing.

https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/blogs/the-scoop/prison...

https://www.pittsburghcurrent.com/fahrenheit-412-new-rule-ba...

Access to books - or knowledge, more broadly - should be a human right. It's sickening that these companies can strip the rights of prisoners for such an obvious profit motive, and get away with it - probably because prisons are human wastebaskets, and the prisoners seen as garbage.

How do I get involved in dismantling these companies and their contracts?

"Prison reform" is probably the search term to begin with, and then look for advocacy groups that align with your interests and abilities to contribute from there.

You might also be curious to learn about some of the Scandinavian prison models and the approaches that apply there.

What's even the point of this? If you know anyone in prison you know that secret cell phone access isn't exactly hard to get on the inside. Making legitimate calls harder is like DRM: it only hurts people following the rules.

In US prisons, hurting people is the point.

How else could they keep up the recidivism?

Legalize drugs, fewer people in prison.

And, yes, they should have privacy when talking to family members. And the right to vote.

This would also remove a big part if not the most part justification for all the AML/KYC financial surveillance nonsense.

Sorry... prisoners don't have the right to vote? What country is this?

But how will the people that profit from prisons buy big yachts?

AFAIK most prisons in the us are not privately owned, so the people doing the lobbying probably aren't private prison owners with yachts, it's prison guard unions.

There are plenty of people in the US who profit from prisons but have nothing to do with private prisons. Prison labor is significantly cheaper than “normal” labor, for example. And in states like Florida, felons are effectively banned from voting, so politicians can “profit” by criminalizing their opponents’ constituencies.

Publicly owned prisons all contract out to the same pool of extremely abusive vendors. Private prisons are worse but not by much. The entire system is in dire need of reform, but too many voters absolutely love the cruelty of the existing system.

Roblox is working on that for in-game censorship. They want to be able to block bad words within 100ms.

Google is quite good at speech to text, and still manages to get things wildly wrong pretty often.

Trying to imagine how well some random government contractor will do this.

The vendor they cite as an example of providing this service in the article says they use AWS on their website. Presumable they Speech to text is being done by AWS's Transcribe service.

A good start, I suppose. Though I don't know how well even that will fare with 300-3500hz landlines, busted prison quality phone equipment and a pretty broad variety of speakers, languages, slang, etc.

The government contractors are doing it right now. Badly, presumably.

There are beneficial uses mentioned, but this system seems to increase the power differential between the authority and the inmate and their family, not to mention potential abuses.

I know since they are inmates this might seem like this is a legitimate use of AI surveillance. But there is a benefice to protecting inmates from this kind of surveillance: it sets a very strong standard for privacy by saying that even inmates aren't subjecting to this.

It's fine that prisoners are raped all the time, but we should definitely make sure they aren't talking about anything naughty on the phones.

Exactly the kind of thing you’d expect China to be doing…

Currently this is done by humans, one of the reasons prison phone calls are ridiculously priced. Unfortunately I imagine the AI just means more profit for the telco, not cheaper phone calls.

So we take it as a given that a prisoner has no right to privacy?

> So we take it as a given that a prisoner has no right to privacy?

Yeah, they're in prison. It comes with the territory. IIRC, the only person they have any right to privacy with is their lawyer, and only about legal matters.

It's not ideal, but it's a common enough problem that prisoners try to coordinate criminal activities with the outside while in prison (e.g. give orders to their gang, coordinate an escape, get orders to shank someone one the inside, etc).

Prison isn't a Sopranos episode. The number of instances of what you're talking about are vanishingly rare and nearly impossible to stop anyhow if people are even remotely clever.

It doesn’t have to be organized crime. It can be as petty as someone trying to get someone to smuggle in contraband for personal consumption (e.g. a cigarette or drugs or a weapon.)

> So we take it as a given that a prisoner has no right to privacy?

Right to privacy has been gone since the iPhone was invented.

Then maybe it’s time to move to something different, like

https://calyxos.org/

https://e.foundation/

More like, "kind of thing I'd expect the states of Texas or Alabama to be doing".

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