The iPod of Prison | Hacker News Reader

The iPod of Prison

newyorker.com

191 pointstrey_swann92 comments

I don't understand how they can write an entire article about a radio and not include a picture. Anyway, for anyone interested: http://mmuseumm.com/pieces/srf-39fp

That one's not loading for me, but I found this large image: http://i819.photobucket.com/albums/zz117/NewYorkCompany1/Ele...

THANK YOU! Even the wikipedia page didn't have one.

also alt url > http://museum.vaesite.net/__data/edeeddf9608c270fa23148b275a...

Yes, the the picture shows why it's allowed in prisons: it's transparent so the guards can see that there's nothing hidden in it.

I was curious what kind of things are for sale in prison commissaries. A little searching found some price lists (PDFs).

Mississippi: http://www.mdoc.state.ms.us/PDF%20Files/price%20list%202013_...

Federal: http://www.bop.gov/locations/institutions/dub/DUB_CommList.p...

Washington County, Oregon: http://www.co.washington.or.us/Sheriff/Jail/HelpInmate/uploa...

Texas: http://www.minutesbeforesix.com/MB6Files/2010/Commissary%20P...

> ______ IBM Typewriter Ribbon (2) 8.15

wow. like teletype stuff?

No, like typewriter stuff. Most prisoners are not given any access to computers.

Probably this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Selectric_typewriter

The golf-ball typing element has a lever at the top, which opens to unlock the ball in order to change fonts.

Besides the carbon ribbon, there's also a small white-out ribbon, to correct mistakes.

Check this out:

http://www.swintec.com/8-clear-typewriters

These are typewriters specifically made for US prisons. They're that way so stuff can't be hidden so easily. Also note the state by state models which differ on amount of memory allowed.

You know, if I occasionally needed a typewriter, I might buy one of these purely for the sake of niftiness.

Plastic spoon as a condiment? Prison food must be even worse than I thought.

The $1.25 mackerel is used as a currency. I believe inmates who work a "job" get paid as much about ten dollars per MONTH. You can have someone on the outside put money into your commissary account each month. Assuming the inmate has someone on the outside with the means and willingness to do so for them.

Oh, they also have a copier/printer that costs on the order of ten cents per copy. The phone system is also outrageously expensive. In the camps (think minimum security) they have limited access to computers which have e-mail which has a similarly absurd per minute rate.

If you could score the government contract to provide those services you'd make quite a bit money with stupidly large margins. It's a damn racket.

New age slavery is what it is...

It's closer to true indentured service, where a debt is being repaid through a fixed period of labour. I think it's wrong to compare it to slavery, although interesting how the racial make-up in prison supports the assertion!

I do think inmates are probably better off with work to do. I also think it's reasonable for society to garnish a chunk of the profit from their work to offset the cost of crime and punishment. Just my opinion, and at an abstract level rather than specific. I don't say the balance is currently right.

I'd be more sympathetic if the country doing this didn't have a history of imposing harsher sentences on minorities, criminalizing the ingestion of plant material, and a corrupt policing and judicial system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal for just one example.

The US has 716 incarcerations per 100,000. From the list on wikipedia, that's the highest in the world.

It's also roughly the same number as North Korea has (no official numbers, just estimates).

So the US might not be the most heavy-handed when it comes to justice.

slavery is not only racial. The ottomans were more than happy to have white european slaves.

An indentured servant is not physically restrained from moving away, while a slave typically is. SO the jails are closer to slavery than bonded labor.

>An indentured servant is not physically restrained from moving away

What? If they could just move away, then they wouldn't be an indentured servant.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_servant

> Runaways were sought out and returned.

I was pointing out the difference between physical and legal restraints. Indentured servitude, while of the same color, is a much milder situation.

The legal system of course returns an indentured person back, but an indentured servant still has some rights. A slave in the west has no rights.

The key difference is in the amount of liberties and the wages: prisoners in the US are forced to live in tiny cells for years and most importantly, are paid $0.25-1.00 per hour - a symbolic pay just for the prisons to be able to say they're paying prisoners and not using them as free labor.

Worse, the prisons actually get paid (a lot more) for providing these people to companies AND they get paid by the government to keep the prison system running.

Most (if not all) US States use prison labor to make their license plates.

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2012/02/nj_inmates_work_to_...

http://www.cqql.net/adrian.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folsom_State_Prison

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oklKAMEOT7I

The federal phone facility is a lot cheaper than local or state facilities which uses a collect call system with an intermediate company that gouges terribly. If you get a Google Voice phone number in the area code of the prison for the inmate to call it is very reasonable, 90 cents for 15 minutes, and easily supported from outside.

The rate to do email is only a nickle a minute.

Interesting; Mississippi sells the Quran, but not the Bible.

Local Christian congregations donate copies of the Christian scripture to be given free of charge to those prisoners desirous of them. Islam is, to say the least, not well represented in rural Mississippi, so the prison commissary supplies the scriptural needs of imprisoned Muslims who don't have nearby congregations to look out for them.

(Source: I grew up in Mississippi, an hour's drive east of Parchman Farm. Testaments were given out even in the public schools a couple of times during my childhood; that the same or similar organizations would fail also to provide for Parchman's prisoners seems unlikely in the extreme.)

Slightly off topic, but I was disturbed by some of the phrases in there, particularly '30 months for starting a fire' and being proud to have 'managed to stay out of prison'.

What has my home country become? You can make millions of dollars in fraud and walk free, yet have to somehow mange your life if you're an ordinary citizen to stay out of jail. I was considering moving back to the US with my family, but news from there over the last few years has been disturbing to say the least. I've been away for 9 years, and it looks like that time will stretch indefinitely.

I've been out for a year, and it seems every time I begin to miss good carne asada and craft beer something like the Kelly Thomas story reminds me why I got the hell out.

I don't believe in long custodial sentences for non-violent crimes, especially if they're victim-less, but arson is not non-violent.

11 kids on my mom's block died in a fire when she was growing up. The fire was arson.

There was another guy recently who burned down his business to collect the insurance money. He endangered all his neighbors and the firefighers who responded, as well as committed insurance fraud. He wasted taxpayer money to investigate and prosecute his crime. Give him an extra 30 months.

There are pretty stiff penalties for arson, since you have no control over the fire after you start it.

$30 for that radio is price-gouging. A couple of moments googling found the non-clear version for half the price, which is closer to what it should be worth.

But how cool is the non-clear version. I don't want to be 'that' guy in prison...

Clear is probably a requirement so that the guards can see inside and be reasonably sure it hasn't been tampered with, for example, to communicate back to the outside world.

Unless they have a particularly good IF isolation amplifier, you can use it to communicate back to the outside world. Someone would have to be listening, of course, with a sensitive receiver and directional antenna.

You can probably turn the dial and even get some FSK going on.

No, clear is a requirement so that the guards can see it's not stuffed with marijuana or heroin or something.

These are also examples of tampering with the radio, just more obvious (to me at least) than modifications to the actual functionality of the device.

This. They do the same with typewirters:

http://www.swintec.com/8-clear-typewriters

Anything else with sufficient internal voids to conceal contraband, too, I should think. It's a lot easier than taking every such item to pieces during every inspection.

I think this quote from the article should explain why this is possible/happening:

"...Keefe Group, a privately held company that sells items to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and twelve out of fourteen privately managed state departments of corrections."

That kind of price-gouging is ubiquitous in the prison industry. Phone call pricing is particularly egregious and the service is awful and onerous. Nobody really gives a damn, which is why it continues.

One day, a buddy of mine that was in prison called me out of the blue. No automated voice line telling me to give up my credit card number for $3.00 a minute calls, just his voice on the other end of the line. I was amazed, until he told me he was calling from a contraband cell phone.

Somewhat related, one guy began a startup that simplifies, through his website, the process for family members to shop and send stuff to inmates. All the products are within the prison's accepted stuff guidelines, as it seems this is a major PITA for people outside to figure out. He even made a deal with a major record label to start making hip-hop albums on cassette again. Here's the link:

http://www.sendapackage.com

PS. There's was a discussion about this on HN some time ago. Couldn't find it on search.

Why would CDs be banned in prisons? I suppose there's more internal void space in a CD case (between the CD holder and the back cover) than in a cassette case, but that seems like it could be addressed by using clear plastic CD holders, which already exist, and omitting the back cover insert.

I assume because you can break the CD in half and use it as a weapon

A broken CD would make a fantastic shank not just a stab shank like a sharpened toothbrush but a slit somebodies throat kind of shank.

Regarding the next-generation MP3 player and sales kiosks mentioned: finally, a population where DRM works!

(The linked product page is actually quite interesting:

http://jpay.com/pmusic.aspx

It's a mini-tablet for $50, which also uploads emails when attached to the commissary kiosk.)

Emails that you have to buy 'stamps' for:

  Email Postage Fees
  Stamps	Fee
  5	        $2.00
  15	        $5.00
  45	        $10.00
  Each typed page of text cost one stamp. Each attachment costs 1 stamp(s).

How extortionate.

How else would you pay for the censors that comb through your emails before allowing them to be sent?

I work for the keefe group. I was told at a presentation recently that Keefe is actually the #3 or #4 seller of mp3s by bandwidth in the world.

Do you have any influence on what Keefe can provide? Does Keefe have any influence on what is permitted?

Nope. I don't work directly with commissary.

Ah, the captive audience model. Remarkably successful.

Sony has always been pretty good in the battery life department, shouldn't it be possible to get more than 40 hours out of a single battery for a simple analog radio? Or is it rahter due to it being simple that they can't do better?

Might be comparing apples with oranges here, but my PCM-M10 easily lasts >60 hours on two of such batteries. And that includes reading from SD card, processing/converting mp3, DA conversion and an LCD display.

For these kinds of numbers they tend to use 1000mAh for AA cell, what used to be call 'heavy duty' and this radio is 20-25mA, so you are looking at easily at least 70 hours on alkaline cells.

http://ukradio.info/SRF-59/

Bring ebooks to these and it will be revolutionary. Prison libraries range from limited to non-existent.

The cost of ebooks is beyond ridiculous but one would hope that the content providers might be able to see digital contribution to the incarcerated as an investment in future readers (especially since we incarcerate such a mind boggling proportion of our population.)

This would be something for a modern correctional system, focused on making productive members of society of inmates (like it is the objective of e.g. German prison system), in contrast to the US system which seems to be more focused on (barbaric) punishment and filling the pockets of the private-prison industry.

Actually I meant audio books, not ebooks. ebooks are cheap enough but getting a portable device with a display into that situation is well nigh impossible.

Specialized versions of devices comparable to Google Glass might could be designed to be acceptable though. Now there's something to think constructively about.

(Sorry about the "might could be" but I just don't know any economical way to say that which actually exists within the language.)

A kindle probably isn't a huge safety risk/weapons risk, especially with a new shell. Plastic vs glass screen, etc. some kind of kiosk to load books.

I'd be ok with e readers sold nearly at cost, and books sold very in expensively as well.

Write to Jeff Bidzos. If he hears it from more than one of us it might get him to thinking. Despite his hard ass management style there is a strong element of community concern in him.

Not sure the net of the PR for Amazon would be positive or negative, though. I'm surprised at how many Americans feel that the incarcerated should suffer maximally, that there should be nothing provided to ease their time regardless of how constructive it might be. The will to punish runs deep in the American psyche.

It's amazing how fast we forget our past.

I assume you mean Jeff Bezos (Amazon), not Jim Bidzos (early CEO of RSA, Verisign).

(A note on usage: "Might could be" is a double modal, something which is theoretically valid in American English, but in practice serves as a stigma of lower-class speech; it's somewhat common, for example, in Southern American English, which is my own native dialect, and whose use speakers of acrolect and most other dialects regard as a low-class status marker. Semantically equivalent, but more generally acceptable, alternatives to this double modal might be "…could possibly be…", "…could perhaps be…", or simply "…might be…" -- in this case, "might" can be used to express both modality, thus making "could" redundant, and the further conditionality provided by the adverb, thus making that redundant as well.)

The JPay JPlayer, mentioned and linked elsewhere in this thread, is a cheap ($50) portable device with what appears to be a roughly phone-sized display, 8GB of internal memory, and approval from the US Department of Corrections. It is already being issued in prisons as an MP3 player, for music sold at JPay-owned kiosks installed in prison commissaries, and as a tool for reading email and composing replies which can be sent during kiosk sessions at a cost dependent on the length of the message. Adding to this device the capability to read ebooks, and to the kiosks the ability to sell them, seems like it shouldn't be much of a stretch; reading might be more pleasant on a larger screen than the JPlayer seems to provide, but I suppose prisoners can't be choosers, either.

(A note on a note on usage: Yes, living for some time on the Gulf coast is what made me familiar with "might could be" but I learned it in a professional setting that hardly fits lower-class so perhaps the usage has become wider. Maybe you have to live with it to appreciate the very subtle difference between that and "could possibly be." As I heard it used it expressed a much stronger likelihood of the possibility.)

Thank you very much for the JPay JPlayer tip. I will definitely investigate Jpay.

As may be obvious I have a long standing close friendship with someone who, through stupidity more than evil, finds himself incarcerated for quite some time in a Federal prison. He may be stupid but he is far from dumb and while reading helps him retain his sanity, he is older and his eyesight is failing fast. Thus my focus on finding a way to get audio books inside. It could also greatly assist the less than literate. Any tips from anyone on how to go about that will be greatly appreciated.

>Actually I meant audio books, not ebooks

Interestingly enough, my public library has a HUGE collection of audiobooks in cassette form. I doubt anyone takes them out anymore. I wonder if they can be moved to prison libraries. Ever see how many are in your library?

>Puyallup, Washington

Figures that I should see my first reference to Puyallup in an article about prison.

Don't look up Enumclaw, then. (I actually met a nurse in the army reserve who introduced herself as no really a civilian nurse in a hospital in Enumclaw. I spent the rest of her deployment not asking.)

No wonder corporations love it when we throw so many people in prison.

The profits are insane.

Look at what the phone company makes on a call from a prison.

By the way, where the hell are inmates getting $320 a month to spend?

The FCC did step in last year to fix the phone costs.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/fcc-approv...

Do note that the reason many of these costs were so high is because government agencies make money on them too.

> By the way, where the hell are inmates getting $320 a month to spend?

People from the outside can add money to the account.

>where the hell are inmates getting $320 a month to spend?

Family. They probably don't send that much, I know someone who sends his brother in prison about $100 a month.

> Some inmates even had a term for using their radio to create a bubble of personal space: “I headphone myself,” one said.

I work in a large open plan office and do this exact same thing most of the day..

The closest consumer equivalent appears to be the Sony SRF-59 which retails for about $15. It uses the same CXA1129N chip and takes a single AA battery which should last 100-140 hours.

http://ukradio.info/SRF-59/

http://www.amazon.com/Sony-SRF59SILVER-Walkman-Stereo-Radio/...

Really enjoyed this, cheers. Hunt seems to think mp3 players must inevitably displace radios but it's impossible to overstate the way that live radio can bring a sense of connection to a world bigger than yourself. I've used it myself - in better circumstances than any prisoner - to feel less isolated. "I headphone myself" can be as much about escaping outwards as in.

So, has anyone found the circuit? Any interesting things one could build out of it? I mean, now that we know how widely deployed it is…

The article says the radio is "under 30 dollars." I would expect something like that to cost less than 5 dollars.

The prison commissary system (largely run by Keefe Group) tends to overprice and gouge for the vast majority of items they offer. This is not uncommon.

https://betweenthebars.org/posts/10910/the-prison-commissary

Profiting off of prison populations... unprecedented!

Ironic, huh?

It's not actually bad at all:

http://www.bop.gov/locations/institution/dub/DUB_CommList.pd...

Dead

Sorry, I dropped a letter. It's:

http://www.bop.gov/locations/institutions/dub/DUB_CommList.p...

If it were sold at the commissary for $5, it'd be easier for inmates to afford (and keep in mind, as the article states, that inmates can only spend $320 a month on commissary goods).

The goal of the prison system is to make prisoners as miserable as possible by our current societal standards (I strongly believe that 500 years from now, our present prison system will seem as barbaric as public place executions seem to us now), not to make sure they can have a pleasant time.

Then why not make it 40, or 50, or 60 dollars?

Apparently commissaries regularly raise prices on the inmates, so it may reach that price in the future.

To me, the current system seems as barbaric as public executions. I don't need to wait 500 years for that.

So, we could switch back to public executions without offending you any more than the current system does?

I mean, we still have the death penalty, so yeah.

> To me, the current system seems as barbaric as public executions.

I don't ordinarily downvote for content, but you've achieved a rare pitch of absurdity and I feel that should be recognized.

I strongly believe that 500 years from now, our present prison system will seem as barbaric as public place executions seem to us now.

How about this year instead. There are countries that have an emphasis on rehabilitation, which reduces overall crime:

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/feb/25/norwegian-pri...

I completely agree, and I strongly believe that prisons are unethical and inhumane. In this case, I was referring to the general public perception- I wonder what percentage of Americans would agree with "the prison system is unethical".

Thanks for your link! A related book: "The Case Against Punishment" http://www.amazon.com/The-Case-Against-Punishment-Retributio...

It probably cost more than $5 for IBM to manufacture a CXA1129N integrated-circuit chip in the 1970s.

I've seen this headline for a few days but had been ignoring it. I'm glad I took the time to read it. I'm surprised how this activated a desire to collect transparent prison radios. Every child should have The Visible Man and an SRF-39FP. It's too bad the latter is so hard to obtain.

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