The predatory prison phone call industry is finally about to be fixed
theverge.com
theverge.com
Who Are Your Lifelines? - https://www.taxiwars.org/p/who-are-your-lifelines.html (2015)
That passenger recently reappeared on me. He's still "imaginary", and is still working on getting a plastic ID card. Part of his predicament has to do with [redacted]. Supposedly. In 2016, this passenger's sister told me some of the details about how her brother got trapped in his little emotional rut, when he was about 18 years old. I still have the postcard he sent me from jail, circa 2016. He greatly appreciated my efforts to keep him alive while on the jail's starvation diet.
I exercise my mental phonebook regularly on account of this passenger.
In Federal prison the phone and e-mail system is still pretty bad, but not as bad. We often joked that it was like going into a time machine nearly 25 years in the past where "phone minutes" were still a thing and they even invented the idea of "email minutes".
On the note of "email minutes" they actually charge you for the entire time you are in the system which includes wrestling with their UI/UX which has obviously been "fine tuned" to be as abusive as possible to drain your email minutes. They also remove basic features like copy/paste and in general most of the basic typing features you take for granted every day like holding CTRL or SHIFT to navigate between words or type over existing words. This is again another cheap tactic to ensure that generating text output is as slow as possible. There are similar tricks that are used to slow the progress of reading messages. (FWIW printing messages is somewhat possible and costs about $0.70 per message since you can't combine them into multiple on the same page and the font size during printing is large)
Entertainingly this creates a class of inmates that are highly adept at navigating this stupid system and can churn out messages faster than anyone else combined with decent typing skills and knowledge of all the failures of the system. It's not a bad "hustle" as it's actually pretty impactful to help people send messages to their loved ones.
Fun story! While I was doing my time I setup a script that uses puppeteer to scrape the front page of HN itself and tried to get the most interesting stories per week. It would then generate a PDF and email it to my friends who would print it out and send it to me, so I actually had a weekly digest of HN in my inmate mail. Originally I didn't know how absurd the rules would be about keywords and such (spoiler, they're not very strict and mostly only concerned with overt things) so I had a mapping of words that would get modified like the word "Hacker" became "Wacker" and "Auth[entication]" became "Lock" as a way to avoid spooky headlines like "Hacker Steals Authentication Codes" would become "Wacker Steals Lockentication Codes" - it was crude and ended up not being neccessary so a friend of mine modified the script to remove it upon request. I had originally wanted to hook the whole thing up to a printing API to automate the process (the entire thing was thrown together a week before I had to surrender) but the various printing APIs weren't really capable of handling the rules for inmate mail about page limits, colors, labeling, etc.
Ask me anything!
How was the prison library?
What did you learn from the experience?
My passenger [0] says the Maricopa jail wouldn't be so bad, if the food was better than 2 inedible meals a day.
Unlike public facilities the food there is much worse, but the guards are paid much lower and have significantly less training. The result is that they more-or-less don't want to get involved in anything and the facility as a whole goes out of their way to keep inmates occupied with things. The result is that they have up-to-date gaming consoles like Playstation 4 with a decent selection of games and because their guard staff is underpaid a much larger amount of drugs make it into the prison on a regular basis. The story from most who rotated through these facilities told me it was more or less just a "party pod".
In Federal the food is fine. All of the prisons in the entire country follow the same basic meal schedule, the highlights of which are usually every Wednesday is hamburger day and every Thursday is chicken day where each inmate gets a large baked chicken breast. I was told by almost every inmate that had ever been to State facilities that the food there is virtually inedible while they were happily scarfing down lunch.
> How was the prison library?
The facility I was at had a different library than what most people think of when they see prison in the movies. There was no big room with large isles of books or any tables to sit at while reading. It was a very small room where inmates could enter and browse the various catalogs (mostly in binders) and then ask the inmate working as the librarian to rent a book. Access to books was simple and there was a decent selection. Many books were more readily available if they were more popular since inmates often leave their books with the library when they are released. I found something on most every subject I was interested as long as it didn't get too niche and we even had a decent selection of Dungeons & Dragons books ranging back to 2E.
> What did you learn from the experience?
I learned that literally 85% of people are there for drug related crimes. Most "repeat offenders" are there because they had access to a firearm while on supervision. The result is that if you ask another inmate why they are there, almost every time you literally just get the sentence "drugs and guns" which is a catch-all statement inmates use because their story isn't interesting and just involves the usual "sold drugs, got caught eventually" stuff.
I learned that in Southern California (where many inmates originate) their legal system is so taxed that some of these offenders for drug crimes spent a total of 45 minutes with their court appointed public defender before being sentenced to an average of 7 years in prison. Some of them didn't even know the actual charges they ended up pleading guilty to. To be clear: they did sell drugs, and they are guilty of breaking the law - but they were also completely denied an adequate defense and in many cases English isn't their first language. Contrast that with my case and the dozens of hours I spent with my team of (public defense) lawyers and it seems unfair. Legally they either deem a case "complex" or not and mine was considered complex, whereas the drug offenders usually just get thrown to the least experienced public defenders most of which see no point in arguing against their potential future boss or judges they have to interact with daily to advocate for a client. (My public defenders were amazing, but I'm not from Southern California)
Did you get caught taking the fractions of pennies that normally get rounded off on every transaction?
I was dumb in many ways and made my attacks overt after a while in an effort to "troll" the server operators.
My case went on for many years as my legal team challenged the details of the attack and if it really qualified as how I was charged. The "four corners of the indictment" as it's often called. My legal team was actually very ready to go to trial and beat almost every charge leaving a jury even less likely to convict me on any of the remaining charges, but as most people involved will tell you, it's not worth the potential risk of a X year sentence if convicted when you have a readily available plea offer for a year or less available.
I ended up taking a plea offer for the minimum sentence of 366 days ("a year and a day") instead of the potential offer I could have had for less time for a few months. The reason I took the "year and a day" offer instead is because when doing less than a year you may have to do the entire time in county facilities which are very dangerous.