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Comment by Dieselroar88 | Hacker News Reader

Did 20 months in federal for selling cannabis. Also spent time in solitary. Conditions are far worse than you could imagine. Also, many prisons are functionally solitary so the 4% number is way low.

The economic networks in prisons are wild, and of course there are incentives for guards to participate.

Not only are there massive number of cell phones in prisons, there are cell phones in solitary because the guards smuggle them in.

Capitalism, what a thing, eh?

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> The economic networks in prisons are wild, and of course there are incentives for guards to participate.

maybe a naive question, but where does all the money come from? I can understand that prisoners would trade favors and artificially scarce items (eg cigarettes) amongst themselves. but what's in it for the guards? I wouldn't expect a bunch of people that aren't allowed to have jobs to have a ton of cash to throw around.

Where I was a single letter covered is K2, spice, whatever you want to call it is worth $1500 minimum.The inmate distributing it got $500 of that. Who knows where that $1000 went. And that was for K2, spice, a super crappy drug.

Money comes from outside family and friends.

THIS! Almost all inmates are illegally kept in functional solitary and/or unconstitutional conditions. 30% of my long term facility was classified 'short term housing' because they were not constitutionally allowed to keep people in those cells longer than 3 months due to the long term psychological damage of such small spaces. Dudes had been in their cells 10 years. One guy almost won a case about it, but they just moved him and boom, he no longer had standing for his court case, everything dropped, and no court following saying 'hey we found that this guy was in unconstitutional conditions maybe we should check things out'. Nope, just dropped. Another fun example, the US Courts have ruled that lights on all night preventing sleep is torture. They have a more recent finding that it isn't torture if it is determined it is needed for safety. All the effects of not sleeping for 4 years were totally undone once I learned it was for safety and it wasn't torture.

I assume they wouldn't put electronic outlets in solitary cells, so how did it work for phones? You'd get to use it for 3-5 hours before the battery runs out and then a guard swaps it for a charged one?

Oh no, it's super random what you do and don't have. You have power outlets in your cells. Inmates have CPap machines and oxygen condensers they need to keep them alive. You even have microUSB chargers to charge your MP3 player (https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-jailbreak-a-Sandisk-mp3-tha...). But in the Feds a phone is an automatic escape charge, so if you are caught your are guaranteed to go up one security level. Now I am getting really uncomfortable because can really be traced to me, but funny story I had a Russian girlfriend when I went in. On every call (which is monitored by the COs) she would say the limited calls (15 minute max, 250 minutes a month) and calls not on her time sucked, and that I needed to talk to the Russian inmates and get a cell phone. She never understood when I tried to get her to stop saying this on the calls.

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