FCC votes to limit prison telecom charges
worthrises.org
worthrises.org
I'm in a Zoom conference with the federal court in 45 mins trying to get two constitutional violations at the biggest jail in the country fixed, but obviously the government's lawyers are maintaining that this jail is too big to fix the problems. The judge's line is that if the smallest jails in the country can not violate the rights of the detainees, why can't the biggest? The government is adamant that their size protects them from having to say, provide a working mail system.
This is the sort of people that run our jails and prisons -- and spend your tax dollars.
They tried to insert this clause, but my lawyer had it excised.
Yes, my case was (probably, maybe) barred from injunctive relief because you can't sue to fix problems at a jail or prison if they release you[0]. Some people have been prematurely released just to activate this option.
You can (sometimes) get declaratory judgment though, which at least declares you a winner and you can then pass the baton to the guy behind you who is still behind bars and use that as a stick to hit the institution over the head with.
And sometimes you can also get monetary damages too, which can be another stick to hit them with.
[0] some exceptions apply if the case is likely to repeat itself, but this argument is very, very hard to muster
Or does class-action not apply to this kind of violation at all?
My case involved access to news and mail delivery. The mail delivery claim is left open for a future class action as the judge made an excellent ruling on it, just short of handing me victory. The person behind me can cite that persuasive ruling to bring a class action if they can find representation.
Law doesn't work like cryptocurrencies. Two different judges can see the same motions and make completely different judgements.
The appellate courts do the real work of determining the legality of the judge's decisions and fixing them where necessary. If you don't have the resources to marshall a competent appeal, then you're usually out of luck.
War on Drugs is the case in point. The entire system is abusive and corrupt, but most of the people with first-hand experience are automatically disenfranchised, so it has persisted for generations against all reason.
I’ve helped several families set up Google voice numbers in the region of their loved one’s prison just to save money.
I used to use them to try to call the UK instead of paying multiple dollars a minute when my mother was dying of cancer. But it's a game of cat-and-mouse. And if you're in a place that makes you wait 4-8 weeks to get a number added to your call list, then you can't afford your number to get banned.
Every day I help multiple guys inside do "3-way" calls from prison to numbers that aren't approved onto their lists yet. It's a dangerous game, though, as the calls are often detected and blocked.
My boss's friend operates https://phonedonkey.com, which provides a VOIP relay service such as what you set up.
2. The private company realizes it has no competition, raises prices as much as it wants.
3. The government is surprised with the outcome.
I would say the government is at fault here for prohibiting competition, not the companies.
It's the 21st century, you could establish a system where any company, with an appropriate license and government approval, could offer tablets / cell phones for prisoner use, with appropriate limitations and restrictions placed on them of course. Prisoners could then choose which company they want to go with. That would instantly eliminate the problem.
Florida charges their inmates $50/day as a "bed fee" that they must pay when they are released. If you were found guilty and sentenced to 5 years in prison, but were released after 1 month because your charge was overturned, you still have to pay the fee for the full 5 years you would have been there.
It makes me ashamed to be an American.
I see lots of references to it for people who are cleared years later, which is awful, but I want to make sure we're not mixing horrible facts and horrible fictions.
Secondly, the prison system in the US is meant to be one of vengeance and a continuation of slavery as clearly stated in the 13th amendment[1] rather than one of rehabilitation:
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-13/
Also, many county jails charge bed fees even if the case is dismissed and you never go to trial. These bed fees have been ruled legal many times by courts.
And, as a final kicker, the 13th Amendment isn't as clear as the text makes out. The US Supreme Court has carved exceptions out for small amounts of slavery. For instance, the government is allowed to force pre-trial detainees who are unconvicted to do cleaning jobs and it does not violate the 13th Amend.
Source: 10 years a slave.
This is not true. Many wrongfully convicted people are found to be "factually innocent" when their convictions are overturned. This is because after you are convicted the burden of proof to overturn the conviction switches, you are now presumed guilty, since you've been convicted beyond a reasonable doubt, and must prove your innocence. Some Supreme Court Justices even hold that being innocent isn't enough to get out of even the death penalty.
Just no, one doesn't need to understand that - because it doesn't change anything.
I thought that in any functional society you were innocent until proven otherwise. And even if you play with words it doesn't somehow excuse it. And a poor vengeance-based prison system isn't relevant either because that only applies if you are found guilty.
https://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/reforming-po...
Because most of the people this happens to are black. (And the rest are white trash.)
I find it completely acceptable to charge an inmate money for his stay, people are against prison labor cause it makes it profitable for a state to have prisoners, which is true, but somehow the state has to recoup money it poured into an individual eating free and using public services without paying taxes for multiple years. You decided to commit the crime.
Now, I am against you being charged pre-sentencing, unless you are found guilty, in which case you should be charged for that pre-time as well.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/amer...
People hide all sorts of diseases and complaints until they are so sick they have to be forcibly removed -- this way you can avoid the fee.
The takeaway I got is he generally believed the people impacted by the laws were bad. And even if they served their time there was basically no limit to what we should try to impose on them. Furthermore, even if they didn’t do the crime they probably did others so no remorse on other things that might seem unjust. He thought they deserved those things too.
Someone murders another, pleads down to manslaughter. Will spend 4 years in prison... but the cruelty is that after he gets out if somehow he manages to come up with money that the court system can even become aware of, we might make him pay for some of the $250,000 cost of keeping him in the cell?
Or do you just mean the people who were wrongly held before evidence exonerated them? It's not cruelty there either, just revenue collection. Someone's gotta pay for it, and when the people who should be paying get to duck out because their only income is cash from street drug sales or fenced shoplifted goods and impossible to recover, I guess those people who can hold a job that direct deposits into a bank account are on the hook.
God, I'm glad you don't review my code. Full of bugs because I'm in a hurry, don't understand the problem clearly enough, or the specifications were bad... "that's no accident, you're being cruel to the shareholders".
Even if I concede that literal criminals should have to pay for their accommodations (which I don't), there should be a straightforward path to appeal those costs if found not guilty. If the fees are meant to be further deterrence, then it is absolutely vital that we only deter those found guilty. Otherwise, we are depriving people of life, liberty, or property for "driving while black" or "being poor in front of your betters".
See here you're confused. You built the cage, you hired the staff to watch the cage, you are by proxy forcibly caging people in it who ought not be there, YOU pay for the damned cage! When selling coke gets you a box simply because a plurality of nitwit voters think someone selling coke should get the box, it's not about morality anymore and it's just a war... err a case of "you pay me to go beat him up because you think he stinky, but hey I found that burglar last week and stopped Russia last month so it's tots cool! *peace sign*"
Okay, let's extend this principle to the rest of society - if the government investigates a business for labour violations, then the business should pay for the cost of investigating them. if the government investigates you for not paying taxes, you should have to pay for that, even if you are 100% innocent.
Oh look, the more baseless accusations the governments creates, the money money they collect, how convenient!
Now, if they made the "bed fee" proportional to your net worth, that would be interesting. But that would be Communism, can't have that.
[1] "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
Concerning Stieglitz, it’s unclear to me whether we owe non-contributing members their freedom. The federal USA costs a trillion per semester, so it’s 6400$ per year. Those who don’t contribute so much per year, are a weight upon the others. If anything, the actual-workers are slaves of the poor people.
Granted, social friction makes that it is not possible to make everyone contribute efficiently. But we owe them money only because the society is not perfectly organized, not because they’re poor.
As for the slavery induced by the prison IO system, it is obviously inhumane and we should repay the victims probably a few hundred dollars per day in jail.
This is totally disgusting. But I guess they need underclass of slaves. Fucking piece of trash.
Keeping the fined even after the conviction is overturned is an extra horrible case, comparable to keeping someone in prison even after the conviction is overturned, but that shouldn't be mixed with fines in general just like imprisoning someone after their conviction is overturned shouldn't be mixed with imprisoning someone who has a valid conviction.
> Lose child to the system due to being found guilty.
> Rack up $18,250 in bed fees for 1 year incarceration.
> Lose ability to vote until $18,250 can be paid.
> Can't get job because of previous conviction.
> Become homeless.
> Re-arrested for sleeping under a bridge on public property.
> Rack up another $5,000 in bed fees for 100 day incarceration.
> Rinse and repeat.
Don't try to pull wool over my eyes that this is a just system. It's sole purpose is to disenfranchise voters even if they weren't charged with a federal crime.
Why commit crimes and steal food when the taxpayer will literally just give you free food or free money for food.
https://mydhr.alabama.gov/content/forms/application-english....
(There is an online form, but it requires an account.)
Note the last page, particularly "You have the right to have your application acted on within thirty days without regard to race, sex, religion, national origin, age, disability or political belief. You have the right to know why your application is denied, or your benefits reduced or terminated. You have the right to request a conference or fair hearing either orally or in writing if you are not satisfied with any decision of the county department. You have the right to be represented by any person you choose. You have the right to examine your food assistance case file in relation to any hearing you may have."
Expedited services are available: "You may get food assistance benefits within 7 calendar days if your food assistance household has less than $150 in monthly gross income and liquid resources (cash, checking or savings accounts) of $100 or less; or your rent/mortgage and utilities are more than your household’s combined monthly income and liquid resources; or a member of your household is a migrant or seasonal farm worker."
It is a little known fact that few infants, for example, can survive 30 or even 7 calendar days without food.
Not to mention the actual difficulty of getting, maintaining and living off snap.
>it also means the crimes need to be deserving of being crimes.
I don't want to get into the details of what crimes should or should not be crimes, that won't be productive for this community. But if you are going to use an example to try to make a point, please note that picking an example that includes something you think shouldn't be a crime, or at least a crime deserving of imprisonment, means that my critique was not applied to that example to begin with.
Also, my criticism was specifically about considering the fines as being a point of complaint while not doing so of the incarceration. You example of losing a child is a result of the incarceration, not the fine. Your example of not being hired has to do with the conviction and people's general perception of those convicted, as well as with insurance and similar, and not with the fine. So neither of those are specific to my previous post.
You also end with a critique of the legal system in general. Which is not what I was talking about. Once again, I was specifically talking about the instances of criticism being levied against fines that should be, but aren't being, applied to incarceration as well, creating at least the appearance that incarceration is tolerable but fines are going too far.
Please understand that critiquing a critique of X does not mean that the person doing so agrees with X.
Of course, a society that dehumanises criminals, favours retribution over rehabilitation, and believes heavily in the 'free market', has simply opened the space for such a pipeline to exist.
In the case of the wrongful conviction, it sounds like indentured servitude. You're not actually free until you've paid off your contract with Private Prison Inc.
I suggest you read my post again because your response doesn't seem to be related to my post. Your response is taking issue with private prisons and with businesses making money off prisons. My post was specific to people being okay with imprisoning someone, making no statement if it was in a private or public prison, but not being okay with fining someone.
If you want to discuss how to make sure prisons aren't ran in such a way to ensure you don't have a pressure to increase prison usage, that is a fair discussion to have, but unrelated to the specific critique I was criticizing.
Even without reoffending, it stops people reintegrating successfully as it is very hard to get a job after incarceration and people end up having to take cash jobs for way below minimum wage and live in slums just to try to pay off these debts.
Sending them to prison causes them to reoffend as shown by the recidivism rate of people based on how long they are in prison, as they learn to be better criminals while not learning skills to fit back into society, and as imprisonment creates a life changing stigma which negative impacts their lives. Perhaps instead of criticizing fines, you should criticize imprisonment and even the act of convicting them that creates the stigma that makes gainful legal employment so hard to find.
You couldn't get cheese at one institution unless you had a court date; they would give you a cheese sandwich at court. I would smuggle coffee out of the jail (through a full naked visual body cavity search) to trade for cheese sandwiches in the court holding pens, and then smuggle the cheese slices back in (through another full naked visual body cavity search).
Those are excellent life skills. Thanks jail!
Exploitation is what it is. Legal or not, it’s gross and it’s what these companies have been doing for years without consequences.
The rates aren’t even really accurately reflected in those per-minute tables. There are also a lot of service charges and other fees, blocks of time must be purchased with minimum amounts ($20 minimum is not uncommon), and then fees are taken from the prepaid funds as they are used, causing the balance to decline much faster than one might expect, and allowing the service providers to further conceal their deceptive billing practices.
Actual average rates can easily exceed $0.50/min, and it shouldn’t be surprising that the folks who depend on these services to maintain family and relationships are frequently not the most flush with cash. This has been a brazen redistribution of funds from those who have the least resources, to those who have the least conscience.
Somewhat relevant, video calls have been hailed as improving the ability for incarcerated individuals to keep in touch with their loved ones. This is also a cynical lie. Video calls have been used nearly across the board as an excuse to end in-person visitation. It’s cruel, and should be stopped. Some minimum visitation should be afforded to inmates, particularly since many of them are pre-trial and presumed innocent, and in any case their families and loved ones deserve to maintain contact with them, not to mention it’s a positive reinforcement towards rehabilitation and reducing recidivism.
A corporation doesn't have morality and can't exhibit ethics: the individual people who embody it do, can, and should, of course... but, in my experience trying to point that out--such as how software engineers and designers should be held in moral contempt by their friends, family, or even merely coworkers for working on "dark patterns" at big tech companies--you get strong push back with either the excuse of "just doing one's job" or the insistence that "someone else would do it anyway", as if the act of profiting off of your directly-bad actions is so trivially justified; and, worse, once you connect this with the realization that your employer is, by its construction, amoral, you've created a scenario where we are intrinsically absolved of all sin.
if you want to maximize ethics, it was probably a bad choice to build our society around paperclip maximizers. Obviously the system will perform its design function to the maximum extent allowed by its environment (and a small degree beyond, in some circumstances).
that said, I think we all instinctively understand why the orphan crusher is the least bad of all possible worlds, of course. As such there is obviously no need to discuss or elaborate why. Omelas could not be as bright without the orphan crusher - simple as. Omelas is one of the Central Tigers of the last decade, look at how the orphan crusher has transformed their economy, and you want to... what, turn it off, take it all away, because of some hippie bullshit?
https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf
And I mean, it’s pretty much too late to turn them off. Like, we designed them with decentralized, automated, self-correcting memeplexes for governance. They really don’t like it when you talk about turning them off - that sort of talk doesn’t lead to anywhere that maximizes paperclips at this juncture, it’s not productive discussion.
Obviously both the overall societal design and the architecture of the paperclip maximizers is designed to route around any failures to maximize paperclips, such as ethics or externalities. That was the design goal. The internet routes around errors in physical infrastructure, the paperclip maximizers route around errors in paperclip maximization. What else could we do? No other society is possible, obviously. Critics really need to just take a step back for a moment and be serious.
if you don't build the orphan crusher, our competitors will, or a startup. and do we really want to live in that world, where we're not the ones running the world's orphan-crushing-as-a-service? You wanna let Elon Musk do it, or Zuck? Get real.
Only reason I can see is it's sanctioned hunting and torture (through humiliation and deprivation) of a very vulnerable class by the state: criminals.
...
Maybe substitute outlawing for imprisonment generally, and offer imprisonment as the rehabilitation option which protects the guilty from the victims' retributions. If pedo hunters are an example, I'm sure there are lots of grown up school bullies who'll go around making outlaw lives hell out of pure joy alone.
Yes I would like functional civil institutions that are able to protect me from the unethical behavior of others. Welcome to Civics 101 today we are reading John Locke.
> Yes I would like functional civil institutions that are able to protect me from the unethical behavior of others.
This is the opposite of claiming that people should become more moral. This is setting rules. They shouldn't be set around "morality," they should be set around established civil liberties.
Who knows, maybe I'm just too... european to truly understand.
What I'd really like to know instead is the conversation that your representatives and the telco board had on the matter. Also, the golf course where it happened.
Because I'd bet very good money that nobody in the current (or any previous) administration is in any way surprised with the outcome.
I couldn't find out of the money goes "straight through" to the phone system provider or if the government collects and forwards it, but does that really make a difference?
It all makes sense when you accept that the American justice system is configured for maximum vengeance, not rehabilitation, and certainly not the best outcomes for society. WE MUST PUNISH THE SINNERS!
But even on top of that, what would the dream free market implementation even look like here? An entire licensure and certification system for these tablets which will inevitably be crammed with as many upsells as the law does not prohibit? What is the recourse for someone who is in prison and chooses a company whose products do not work? Are they supposed to call tech support?
Every company's dream: Free labor and captive audiences.
If it's software -- you're usually shit out of luck. If it's a serious bug and enough people file paperwork every day, then after a few weeks of outage it is often escalated to the operator. Another few weeks after that they will eventually fix it. Things move very, very slowly in jails and prisons, so expect long stretches of downtime.
[1] https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/local-news/i-team-investi...
There was a time (when I was young) where there was just one phone company in the USA. Prices were high for long distance (My mom is first generation so called out frequently). Then deregulation and competition (MCI/Sprint) lowered those prices dramatically.
In the late 90s I lived with roommates that didn't have long distance. We used phone cards we bought at the local convenience store. Those were actually pretty good price wise.
They're still price-gouging prisoners because they can. That's still abhorrent behavior.
The government is still to blame for having private prisons. For everything you point out, a prison should not be private because it's a market with a literal set of captives that cannot choose their prison. That incentives the prison to gouge at every turn.
To borrow a slightly old meme, porque no los dos?
If my local government cuts firefighting budgets, and I decide to take advantage of this to become an arsonist, I don't think anyone would say that it's the government at fault for half the town going ablaze.
No, they are not.
We keep giving officials a pass by making their malicious behavior out to be incompetence. The entire goal of the prison system in the USA is to extract as much money out of each prisoner from the tax payers, the prisoners, and the prisoner's families.
I scheduled a bail hearing due to my mother's illness, but it took months. It was scheduled for a Monday. My mother died on the Saturday. When we got in front of the judge on Monday the prosecutor snapped on the judge, "Judge, what are we even doing here! This is total waste of my time. His mother died already. This issue is moot."
The state and local governments are partners with these phone companies and the outrageous rates are not a surprise outcome but an intentional one. In exchange for allowing such rates the prisons get free surveillance services and some combination of a fixed and percentage of revenue payment from the companies. In other words a legal kickback.
While Prisoners have no expectations of privacy, most do not know that all of their calls are listened to, transcribed, and shared with prison officials. There is some speech-to-text sentiment analysis that will prioritize a call that has certain phrases spoken.
It's just...a mess.
When I was a public defender, I had prosecutors and jail staff hint to me about things that were said during the calls. A few years later, they had to drop the charges in a few cases because it was discovered and reported that the calls between attorneys and clients were being monitored and recorded.
We should be naming and shaming the companies that choose the immoral path. That does happen sometimes, but over the last 40 years the US seems to have shifted to "if you can get away with it, that's fine", especially for corporations.
That attitude has waxed and waned over the history of the country, but the progressive era (from the late 19th century) was notably one where doing the right thing (or "doing well by doing good") was considered proper.
If all costs are passed to the inmates, then the prison doesn't have much of an incentive to pick a cheap vendor, compared to a convenient one or the one that takes prison officials on free golf trips.
Worse, hyphies may be considered a feature if the institution is trying to pressure inmates into to "work" programs which are profitable for the institution.
It's always the government that is at fault for either poor/ineffective regulation or lack of enforcement. Unless a company is flagrantly breaking the law, blame the government. Companies are just doing what we know they will always do - engaging in every lawful (or gray area) tactic they can to turn a buck. When we don't like the way a company is turning a buck, we have precisely one recourse - government regulation.
I think it is very sad the moral standards are so low. I find that even harder when mixed with “why does the government get involved in everything?” attitude.
I also don’t lead my company of 27 people that way.
It actually reminds me of a Dutch policy (which may be apocryphal, please correct me) wherein prisoners in the Netherlands do not face further penalties for escape attempts because they are simply engaging in the only natural behavior we can expect from a person in a cage.
But I agree that a lot of companies are so big and so faceless, that they do too much bad stuff and lots of people in the company would just shrug it off with “it is not my job to say something”.
This is my philosophy as well, which is why I as a juror would be soft on "crimes against law enforcement" because being a cop is part hunter, and do you expect all your game to not attempt evasion?
I don’t think the free market has a ton to offer for basic services that should be guaranteed.
Look at American internet, plenty of supposed options but terrible rates and performances compared to Europe. Yes we’re more spread out but that doesn’t begin to explain service sucking in a city with limited options.
Now you understand why healthcare, higher education, big infrastructure, prisons and so much more is so completely broken.
Big companies have bought their way into every level of government so they can extract profit at every step.
Note this is not a bug, this is by design.
This sort of thing happens at every level, but it's more often than not the Federal government preventing abuses by the states.
Edit: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2019/02/11/kickbacks-and-c... - it's even more blatant, they're paying a large share of this revenue directly to local governments.
What exactly would the prisons have to comply with here...
Not overcharging for phone calls?
You're saying "the government" a lot, but AFAIK there's no specific federal mandate of any kind to the effect of requiring a specific company handle calls at all jails and prisons. If anything that is the consequence of an absence of any specific regulation rather than the presence of one, which is completely the opposite of the point you seem to be making.
In reality, a variety of completely separate state and local correctional facilities put the service out to bid. If anything, it is federal level prisons that would most fit the description of "the government" where you have the best regulations, where there is scrutiny of the bidding process, where there are already caps to limit the expenses associated with calls.
At the county and municipal level, companies that tend to win the contracts have special deals in the form of a "site commission" payments, which are a kickback to the prisons, incentivizing them to give a monopoly to whichever company charges the most and kicks back the most to the prison.
Edit: I feel like I (1) spoke directly to what the parent commenter was saying (2) stated uncontroversial facts, (3) echoing a point a chorus of other commenters are making about what "the government" really means, but I'm seeing a bunch of drive-by downvotes. Would appreciate if anyone wants to chime in and help me understand what I'm missing.
This topic has fired every one up because it’s unnecessarily cruel, hurts families who didn’t do anything wrong, enriches companies not providing any value, and shows people trying to be “tough on crime” when very ironically they’re probably creating more crime by eroding support systems.
The parent commenter mostly expresses that outrage, and makes a passing comment about business competition.
By this time anything you said that could be perceived as possibly being near the other side of the argument is going to be taken as supporting the other side.
But they are two separate points that can be independently discussed you say? Technically that’s true, but humans don’t work like that.
Always step back and look at the biggest point being made and realize, there may be little room for nuance depending on the context.
On one hand, you are challenging the dominant narrative, so that gets some reaction.
On the other hand, the logic you are using includes bold and unsubstantiated claims about kickbacks, which alienates your message from the remaining readers.
>Site commissions are payments that phone companies make to prisons and jails in exchange for the exclusive right to offer service to inmates. FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks said that banning the commissions will "end the practice of provider kickbacks to correctional facilities and payments for costs irrelevant to providing services so callers will no longer be forced to bear the financial burden of these costs."
https://www.wired.com/story/prison-phone-call-fees-fcc-caps/
There was some strange language in the FCC quotes. 8 out of 12 of the phone providers had a profit before the cost of "safety and security categories that generally are not used and useful".
I guess the charitable take of the FCC statement is that these services are not required by law, but still desirable to prisons?
I remember one call from a girl to her wife and the entire call was about how she badly wanted to get clean, the drug classes she was taking, the rehab they were setting up for her after she got out. It was literally as wholesome as you could get, and yet it was flagged for drug crime.
When there's a government-sanctioned monopoly like this, you get all of the efficiency and speed of a for-profit corporation, but it all goes in the wrong direction.
I once read a game-theory study somewhere that showed you need four or five operators minimum to avoid monopolistic cooperation.
0. Rent-seeking private company/ies realize that prisoners could be a literal captive audience, and successfully lobbies governments (state and federal) to require prisoners to use only a single, prison-approved phone operator.
Also, step 2 is now redundant, and replace step three with "Profit!!!"
Provide prisoners with tablets or cellphones and let them choose their own service provider?
You know that prison phone calls are monitored right?
Wait until you hear how much tax payers pay for school lunches and textbooks, prison libraries and commissaries. I also better not mention the bail bond industry. We just aren't doing neoliberalism hard enough yet, don't you see?
I do wish there was an easy way when things like this happen to immediately say, "if you are happy with this FCC decision, here are the politicians responsible, the FCC directors and employees that did nothing for decades, etc." and then we can deny-list those people and their families from polite society.
Edit - this from the article makes me thing that maybe it'll be OK? Sounds like there was some congressional approval involved?
> The regulations adopted today mark the implementation of the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, which established the FCC’s authority to regulate in-state phone and video calls from correctional facilities, in addition to out-of-state phone calls that it had already regulated. The discussion during today's vote will result in only minor changes to the draft rules released on June 27, and be released in the coming days.
They will rule exactly how everyone expects them to rule. They might provide the flimsiest of justifications for doing so, or they will just say it's within their absolute authority to do so.
> (A)establish a compensation plan to ensure that all payphone service providers are fairly compensated, and all rates and charges are just and reasonable, for completed intrastate and interstate communications using their payphone or other calling device, except that emergency calls and telecommunications relay service calls for hearing disabled individuals shall not be subject to such compensation;
What does "just and reasonable" mean? With Chevron deference, courts would have to defer to the FCC on this. Now they don't.
Now Chevron deference is a bigger issue when laws are written more broadly and vaguely like "the EPA should ensure the air is clean". We had 40 years of Congress over multiple administrations deliberately writing laws to defer to Federal agencies.
But a prison telco could still bring suit arguing the rates are not "just and reasonable".
[1]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/154...
A prison telco can bring any suit they like, but it's not like the removal of the Chevron defense requires the court to accept the case and laboriously work out an exact definition just because the prison telco wants them to. Courts aren't going to want to do this, especially the higher ones.
No; Chevron was a formalization of the status quo, not a change to it.
> the higher courts are going to start to refuse to hear cases that are clearly just "industry does not like being regulated in clear compliance with Congressional mandate"
Not when a single-judge jurisdiction in Northern Texas keeps happily issuing nationwide injunctions against things he doesn't like. https://www.texastribune.org/2023/04/07/texas-abortion-drugs...
The suit won't happen instantly, but an injunction can be granted extremely fast. That restores the status quo ante, and gives time to shop for a jurisdiction that will find in their favor. It may take years for that to work its way up to the Supreme Court, but that's to their advantage.
No, it isn't because we've had 40 years of Congress writing laws assuming Chevron deference. If you're a programmer of any kind, think of it like one of our constraints or preconditions that you've built your entire software stack on suddenly changes or is removed.
Imagine your server was built assuming all packets would arrive in order because the networking layer beneath you guaranteed that. Now it doesn't.
> because the higher courts are going to start to refuse to hear cases
So the only court with discretion as to whether they want to hear a case or not is the Supreme Court. Every other court must hear a case brought to them, even if it's just to dismiss it, which they need to issue a ruling for.
> A prison telco can bring any suit they like, but it's not like the removal of the Chevron defense requires the court to accept the case
With Chevron, the courts would simply say "by Supreme Court precedent, we have to defer to Federal agencies on any ambiguous legislative language". That's quite literally what "deference" means.
Now they don't.
So a district court has the authority to rule on matters they previously didn't and we've seen courts do just that for things the judge simply doesn't like.
Worse, there's not even a statute of limitations on challenging Federal regulations anymore, thanks to Corner Post [1]. Previously there was a 6 year period from instituting a rule to challenge it. Now it's 6 years from when the injury began, which means you can challenge a century old rule by simply starting an LLC, knowing that the rule exists, and then saying you've suffered injury. That's not an exaggeration.
You also do that in a favorable jurisdiction to get a favorable judge to block the ruling. This is what happens in Texas. Previously most of the rulings friendly to patent holders came out of one court with one judge from the Eastern District of Texas. Now a lot of issues are coming from one judge in the Northern District of Texas.
Both of these courts are in the Fifth Circuit, which itself tends to be friendly to such causes.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corner_Post,_Inc._v._Board_of_...
It’ll just be arbitrary regulation by whoever is least qualified to decide policy. The courts are the new regulators.
https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/in-the-news/2017/hrdc-says-f...
good summary here: https://www.rstreet.org/commentary/chevron-is-out-of-gas-wil...
I also communicate with a friend in the state prison system in Texas. An "email" (they do have limited use tablets) costs a "stamp", and each photo I attach is 1 stamp (limited to 5). (each "stamp" costs $0.45)
I generally support prison being a less-than-lavish experience, but charging for phone calls seems over the top. Inhumane, if it prevents inmates from talking with their loved ones. They're still humans, and most of them will get out of prison someday, we should keep that in mind.
The staff in prisons are never motivated to run any kind of real rehabilitation programs, and worthwhile ones are incredibly rare. They get the press when you see a prisoner learning AutoCAD or something, but there are so few slots for something like that, while everyone else does bullshit classes where they ask you what you should do when you find a wallet in the street and then make you color some pages with crayons (really).
We used to. I have an ancestor who worked for the prison system in Southern California, ~1920s - 1950s. I don't know what they called his role, but for most of his career he was in charge of the re-integration wing, a set of low-security barracks that prisoners moved to for the last six months of their sentences. During that time they did job interviews (maybe even had work release?), lined up housing, received what sounds like "life coaching", and otherwise prepared for their release. Visiting rules were much relaxed.
I never met the man, but have been told by my relatives who knew him that he was intensely proud of his work, and protective of the men for whom he cared. He was regularly stopped on the street to be thanked by former inmates; he was godfather to some of their children. I am proud to have been named for him.
I've become interested in reading about the Progressive Era of American history. We've lost a lot of what was built (physically and socially) ~100 years ago. I'd like to get it back.
(Personal note: Qingcharles, I really appreciate your comments on this site. Thank you for being here.)
The only "rehabilitation services" I received in prison was the day before my release they asked if I wanted to sign up for Medicaid lol.
After prison you'll often be shipped to a halfway house, and this was an even bigger eye-opener because I got to spend a couple of months in very close quarters to newly-released parolees to see what happens next. (I was only there a very short time because I was about 8 or 9 years past the end of my sentence when they finally did the paperwork to release me and so they cut my parole very short)
I think 90% of the people I was with at the halfway house with were returned to prison within three months. Many of them were put on a track that locks them up for two years until they can apply for parole again.
Of the ten percent left, I would say nine percent were homeless and with warrants out that the police didn't have the time to execute on. So my anecdotal data is that about 1% stayed out for a year. Of that 1% I know two of the guys I was with as they live nearby and are now indentured slaves. They work 7 days a week for zero money, just for a roof over their heads, and if they try to take a breather at all their boss picks up his cell phone and starts to call their parole agent to have them returned to prison.
I wonder what was different in the 20s? There were definitely drugs, but I don't know what the addiction rate was back then? Was there only opium? Drug addiction is by far the greatest reason for recidivism in my experience. Community and family support might have been stronger? Sentences were likely a lot shorter too, so less likely to lose touch with your support network. Probably a criminal record mattered less. Manual labor was more prevalent. The only place I saw parolees getting jobs was at the local abattoir.
> (Personal note: Qingcharles, I really appreciate your comments on this site. Thank you for being here.)
Haha, thank you. I don't know how much help I am. I'm just a loser who got to see the criminal justice system from the inside :)
I genuinely don't know. I have a history degree, but have mostly read European early-modern, not American or 20th c. history. I think you're right about manual / un-trained labor jobs being more prevalent / available. The 20s were a decade of full employment, too, so that had to have had an effect. To your list I'll add a few speculative ideas:
1) Housing was easier to come by. Not nice housing, mind you, but there were boarding houses and "SRO" accommodation, at achievable prices, more available than there are today. There were also (this goes to your social support suggestion) nation-wide organizations, like the YMCA and the Salvation Army, who were committed to sheltering people living on the margins of society. They were more successful, and more economical, than localized "homeless shelters" seem to be today. Many people start using substances because they're on the street, and I'd guess that many of them wouldn't if they were in more comfortable circumstances. You'd know more about this than I: what do you think?
2) Along the same lines: drugs, as we have them now certainly weren't the same thing - no fentanyl, no crack; marginal weed, opium, cocaine; all of them relatively more expensive than they are today. People can, however, just as surely ruin their lives just with alcohol. Maybe the fact that booze was illegal during the 20s made it enough harder to get fucked up that that had a marginal effect?
3) The surveillance state wasn't a thing. If you didn't choose to disclose it there was no way for a prospective employer to know that you were a felon and disqualify you for a job on that basis. Heck, if you wanted to change your name and move somewhere else to start an entirely new life there were many fewer obstacles to that than there are today.
4) Mental hospitals. For all of their much-publicized abuses, they kept obviously unstable people off the streets and out of the penal system. I don't know what to think about them overall, but there's nothing like that anymore.
But, we should be wary of overstating our case. The US in the 1920s was a much poorer country, and in general its penal system was harsher than it is today. We shouldn't be eager bring back chain gangs, or early 20th c. execution rates. They did, however, have an enthusiastic constituency for reform, and at least local successes, like the system with which my relative was involved. I don't see either today, when even "Progressives" seem to propose only modest, marginal reforms.
A question I keep thinking about. My position at this point is that prison should be considerably less used than it is today. I am certain we can devise non-prison punishments for most crimes. I would like to see prison reserved strictly for people who need to be separated from society.
Even if we do use prison as punishment, I don't know that there is all that much difference in most cases between a few months and a few years. I'd guess it takes less than a day to decide this is the worst thing to happen to you, and it quickly reaches a point where it can't really get a lot more convincing. Maybe I'm wrong. But it seems kinda meaningless to differentiate between 1 year, 10 years, 25 years.
We cannot really expect to send someone away for a few years and have them just slip back into society and continue to be successful. Not with all the non-judicial punishments we inflict on convicts. That is another thing I keep thinking we need to figure out a better answer for. A criminal record is a huge hinderance to gainful employment, maybe we should be a lot more circumspect about who is allowed to see it, or require it for employment or housing.
Prison removes people from society. That should be the only time it is needed -- when someone can't be reintegrated. And then in that case, we need to try to understand why we've made that decision. Is it a mental problem? If so, they're not to blame and should be housed at a non-punitive facility that can (maybe) make them well enough to be free.
Also agree that we need to rethink criminal records in a major way, although the Internet is the arbiter of your background now. It doesn't matter if we sealed something up legally when it is already out there. "It's like trying to take the piss out of a swimming pool."
I'd argue that once we've hit that point, why bother with keeping the person alive at all? If they truly cannot be reintegrated into society, there is a simpler solution than indefinitely locking them into a facility.
For some people simply being alive is worthwhile even in prison, but other people commit suicide rather than face a lifetime of that.
A lot of room for debate on that one.
One guy I knew very, very well. I say this about almost all the murderers I spent time with though: they were by-and-large some of the nicest people I've met. I rarely met a murderer I didn't like. This particular guy was convicted of a double murder at 19. It is likely if he can find the right lawyer that he'll get the sentence reduced to something where he'll one day see the outside world again.
> This comes as the two largest market players, Aventiv and ViaPath, each navigate financial crises. Aventiv recently effectively defaulted on its $1.3 billion debt after a year of failed refinancing efforts. ViaPath was reportedly closing in on a $1.5 billion refinancing deal until news of the regulations killed the deal.
This suggests that either they overestimated how big the kickbacks they can pay to the prisons were, or the whole business model wasn't actually that lucrative, and providing phone services to prisoners is actually expensive (likely primarily due to the surveillance requirements).
This regulation doesn't just remove the exploitation of a captive market, but also makes prisons shoulder the cost of surveillance. Which, for the reasons explained in the article (better connections to society = better chances of rehabilitation) is likely a good idea, but I can see why people would make an argument that this part of the cost of incarceration should be borne by the inmates/families, not the rest of society (the obvious counterargument would be that we don't make inmates pay the full cost of their incarceration either).
Another option: those in charge extracted too much money from the business too fast, perhaps believing their days are numbered (or perhaps just out of run of the mill greed).
I think society should shoulder to entire cost of prison, and hopefully we think better about who we want in prison and for how long.
They already are cheap VOIP services too, you can hear the high level of digital compression on all the calls.
There is a high cost probably in maintaining all the handsets inside the facilities.
You'd think that competition would foster better correction facilities, but as with big pharma, being effective is counterproductive because it hinders growth, which is at the core of capitalism.
Not saying competition is bad, only that it's maybe not universally applicable to all areas.
Why would you think that? It's not like consumers get to pick their prisons.
However, I am actually making the point against that. Privatization of that area makes no sense at all. I might have phrased that in a way that works against the central point of my argument, but the idea is that no, there is no competition that could possibly justify privatizing the corrections sector.
1. Materialism vs Idealism. Materialism is simply the idea that people affect the physical world and the physical world affects them. Idealism is the idea that essentially some people are inherently good or evil.
Idealism underpins our entire discourse around prisons (and, more generally, politics). It's really damaging. It essentially says that some people are just inherently violent or otherwise criminals. It's far more productive to take a materialist view because an awful lot of crime is simply a response to material conditions. The link between poverty and crime has been observed since Plato.
If simply locking people up worked, the US would be the safest country on Earth since we have 4% of the world's population but 25% of the world's prisoners.
2. We exploit every aspect of prisons and prisoners to the deteriment of those prisoners and our society as a whole. Keeping in contact with family helps reduce recidivism but no, we can't have that. We need to extort prisoners communications. Same with any form of commissary. Then there's prison labour. And of course contracts to build prisons. Every aspect is a profit opportunity.
3. Prisoners are human beings. We should never forget that. Something as simple a prison cats reduce recidivism [1] at such a ridiculously low cost. The US justice system is overly carceral and punitive. We had an era of locking people up for a decade for mere drug possession. Thing is, you can only do this by dehumanizing them, which robs you of your own humanity.
[1]: https://www.indystar.com/story/news/local/indianapolis/2020/...
For-profit companies operating carceral facilities is just not the main reason things are so bad.
There is an easy way to see this: lots of public, government run jails & prisons are also brutally awful and evil places. For example, Rikers Island is not a private prison. On top of this, private facilities incarcerate only a small percentage.
You could turn all the private prisons over to be operated by government employees and not much would improve.
On the other hand, it is true that many problems in the carceral system are created by profit-seeking companies. Mainly they look like what we see here: contractors operating a single service possibly winning the contract through kickbacks, and then providing a bad service. You see this in food and healthcare too not just telecom.
I guess it is true that private prison operators will want to do the same thing. But it's a problem for all facilities, not just the small number of private facilities. And even if you could solve these issues via regulation or competition, it wouldn't change the many other evils that are inflicted on incarcerated people.
So I can't understand why "the US has private prisons" appears to be everybody's primary talking point about why the US carceral system is so awful.
As another example, Louisiana is phasing out private prisons. That should be great! Meanwhile Angola (state-run) continues to have prisoners picking cotton.
I know people know about this because they always bring up prisoners picking cotton in these conversations, but then the talking point remains "private prisons" somehow. So I still don't get why this idea is so sticky.
> The primary factors driving the FCC’s lower rate caps is the exclusion of security and surveillance costs as well as the exclusion of commissions. [...] With today’s new rules, prison telecoms will be barred from recovering the cost of the majority of such services from ratepayers.
Now they are barred from passing the costs to the inmates.
I wonder if the telecoms can opt out of offering service to prisons
It's far more likely that the FCC knows the requisite surveillance is already integrated into the general telecom infrastructure in the country. There is no longer any need for special surveillance, because we already track everyone. Each prison just gets a ittle web page telling them which prisoner should be watched and why.
But don't worry. Even though we've now successfully integrated surveillance and tracking into our nation's telecom system, I'm confident they won't use any web app like the ones prisons will get to track people who are not in prison. /s
Anyway, it's zero cost to the telecoms, precisely because the requisite tech is already there and running 24/7. And guess who put it there? Who will opt out? No one, because the government wants that data. And the telecoms and government are collaborating to get it from every segment of society. I know this next part might be going a step too far, but it wouldn't surprise me if the real issue behind this is that the rank amateur idiot prison telecom companies don't collect good enough data. The powers that be may have decided to get the bumbling dimwits out of the way so they can see more clearly what's going on.
Not good enough. Anyway shouldn't these fees as least go back to cover public court fees or something? Why are we allowing cartels to leach money from prisoners?
Do the prisons pay less in overhead in exchange for the higher rates?
Or is it just that the market for phone providers isn't competitive?
According to one source (below): some prisons gets a commission on each call, which ultimately would be paid for by the users/convicts. This makes sense as a reason for high prices because you have the entity (prison admin) choosing a provider with an actual incentive to not choose the lowest cost one.
The prison operator has a (joke not intended) captive market and that is exploited by contractors who often share the proceeds with the prison operator.
The tablets are also often starting to replace physical mail - inmates are being denied physical mail, instead letters and drawings being filtered, scanned, and uploaded remotely from elsewhere. Or they can write letters outbound - just have to pay for "digital stamps" - even for electronic mail. Double points for making people on the outside buy the "digital stamps" to send them inwards, too!
Every single corner is designed to extort the prisoner while making themselves look like the Good Guys for providing access to all this information and capabilities in such a safe and controlled manner and at "no cost to the taxpayer!"
A packet of Ramen in a prison store will cost several dollars. There's zero acceptable justification for this. Making a prisoner pay more for a snack isn't justice.
Also, it's not a snack, because in most states, prisoners are only required to be given two """Meals""" a day. There are very few nutritional or minimum standard requirements for these """meals""" and in many counties, there is a rule that every dollar of the budget for feeding prisoners that is not spent is given directly to the guy who sets the menu and operates the canteen.
Most prison meals in these systems look like that famous picture of a "sandwhich" from the Fyre festival.
You know, the kind of thing that would be used as an example of "Perverse incentive" in a high school economics textbook.
I'm not making a defense here of any particular price or practice, just giving you a partial answer to your question, in that there are costs in these services above and beyond what you would expect for a "normal" service of this type.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/154...
but it would feel much better if you followed up with "and this is <insert reason> why the law is so clear-cut that the decision by the FTC cannot be seen as inventing regulation and so nobody will litigate much less win in court against the FTC".
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2023/01/19/martha-wright-r...
Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40999575
Of course most people have no idea how brutal these systems are simply because they have nobody in the system.
That was me, until someone ended up using this stuff.
Frankly, I was shocked!
I have a major league problem with for profit prison. Big conflict of interest.
And this extortion on top of it.
Good to see reform.