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Prisons Moving To All-Video Visitation (mic.com)
"A new system called 'video visitation' is replacing in-person jail visits with glitchy, expensive Skype-like video calls," reports Tech.Mic. "It's inhumane, dystopian and actually increases in-prison violence -- but god, it makes money."
Slashdot reader gurps_npc writes: In-person costs a lot to administer, while you can charge people to 'visit' via video conferencing. (Charge as in overcharge -- just like they charge up to $14 a minute for normal, audio only telephone calls). This is new, and the few studies that have been done show that doing this increases violence in the prison -- and it's believed to also increase recidivism. But the companies making a ton on it like that -- repeat customers and all. Of course, the service is horrible, often being full of static and dropped calls -- and the company doesn't help you fix the problem.
Meanwhile, the EFF reports that last year Facebook disabled 53 U.S prisoner and 74 U.K. prisoner accounts at the request of the government, and is urging people to report takedown requests for inmate social media to OnlineCensorship.org.
Slashdot reader gurps_npc writes: In-person costs a lot to administer, while you can charge people to 'visit' via video conferencing. (Charge as in overcharge -- just like they charge up to $14 a minute for normal, audio only telephone calls). This is new, and the few studies that have been done show that doing this increases violence in the prison -- and it's believed to also increase recidivism. But the companies making a ton on it like that -- repeat customers and all. Of course, the service is horrible, often being full of static and dropped calls -- and the company doesn't help you fix the problem.
Meanwhile, the EFF reports that last year Facebook disabled 53 U.S prisoner and 74 U.K. prisoner accounts at the request of the government, and is urging people to report takedown requests for inmate social media to OnlineCensorship.org.
US prisons are a systematic violation of basic human rights. They are barbaric, full of horrific atrocities, and there is no excuse for them.
These perverts will be happiest when they can keep the prisoners alive forever..
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Contact visits with family and loved ones are a privilege, and give the inmates something to look forward to and stay out of trouble for.
If prisoners wind up with daily lives so poor nothing that can be taken away from them, who's going to want to take care of them?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Why would anybody pay to use this service when they can just pay to use/borrow someones cell and Skype? Even better, use a video chat service that works.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
We've gotta put some real controls on the power of $ in our government. Please add your name to this effort for a start: http://www.movetoamend.org/
When the king heard the words of the Book of the Law he tore his robes.2Kings22:11
I suppose your PC is clean of any copyright material you didn't buy, and all software you have is either licensed or open source.
Right?
If this video system is supposedly so "new" then how the hell are they making all kinds of conclusions about violence & recidivism of a large population of inmates?
Or is this just another biased special interest opinion puff-piece being paraded around as "fact"?
If you think that robbers, murderers, and rapists make up even a small percentage of inmates, then you need top do some research.
I was told , and it stands to reason, that the cost of the call , however horrendous we see it, is because all call have to be listened to/looked over, and the additional cost is simply passed over the prisoner.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
???? Stories about dystopian developments make the feed all of the time. Poorly-implemented tech services are being proffered at an enormous profit margin to a locked-in customer base. Do I have to add a car analogy and a get-off my lawn joke, and a alien overlords joke?
The jails are too full of pot heads. There's no space for robbers, murders, and rapists...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
It's true. The bulk of prisoners are made up by the very worst of society, robbers, murderers, rapists and, of course, copyright infringers.
It was a general comment in relation to the OP who said people shouldn't commit a crime so they wouldn't go to jail.
I realize common sense doesn't sit too well on /. but at least make an effort to try.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
to put a guard in the room with the two? I know we can't do that with a conjugal visit but I'm guessing we're not doing those over the net unless the prisons have invested in teledildonics.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I'm not going to generalize about Americans, but I will about the voting public. And the ones who vote make the decisions. Fear of scary gang bangers (read: black people) gets folks to the polls. Fear _always_ gets people to the polls. Concern for human decency otoh does not. To fix this we'd need to make prisons public again. So long as there's a profit motive prisons will be horrifying places (they're not gonna be sunshine and rainbows w/o profit, but it'll help).
The point my rambling is trying to make is that a sizable portion of the population wants to see people suffer for their mistakes. My theory is they've screwed up their lives in one way or another (it's hard not to what with all the competing pressures in day to day life) and if they have to pay for their mistakes why the hell shouldn't everybody else? Regardless if we ever want to fix things we need to take care of that sentiment, switch to a parliamentary system that marginalizes the fear and frustration vote or Mandate voting so everybody goes to the polls. I don't think we'll do the latter two, any ideas on the last?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Our prison system seems to be turning increasingly evil - as in, willfully and casually harming others on a consistent basis well beyond their charter of stopping harm to others, for their own benefit.
They're increasingly subverting our political process, in order to take what should arguably be a time of reformation and a path back to society (and improvement of the general welfare), and using is to transform every human into a maximum income machine, including transforming laws to make the process worse. There's occasional noises towards public good in the letter of the rules of these places, but they're getting increasingly privatized and 'efficient' at gathering money.
I understand the ideal - this is where we throw folks who won't follow the rules, who won't respond to fines, a place where we repay unfairness with unfairness, so that we can remain productive. Which would be a fine ideal too, if it didn't cost taxpayers $60,000-$130,000 a year per person for land,buildings, employees,healthcare, goods, administration, etc.. We're basically paying for a rather large professional army, complete with all the logistics, in order to make a large portion of our population feel bad for the rest of their lives, for the most part.
It's part of why I've never understood the common Christian conception of Hell - a place of eternal pain, complete with the equivalent of angels who spend their existences making people feel bad for something they can no longer do anything about.
If the point of this horrible song and dance was to reduce motivation to break rules - then there should be a television in every public space, if not in every home, to show the suffering of rule breakers, to at least justify the lesson that we should be learning from all this suffering. If all these people were paying the cost, for our benefit, then all our children should see their suffering, so all this suffering wouldn't be a waste of both their lives and the time of all the people spending their lives imprisoning them.
Perhaps we don't because we really are all rule breakers. Most traffic studies I've seen find that the average driver breaks around 4,000 traffic laws every year. Proportionally the same with bike riders and pedestrians. And that's just the easily observable stuff. But we don't really enforce our rules, instead we pay people to selectively enforce them, and prosecute infractions in some of the oddest ways possible. Things like 'discovery processes', armies of paid lawyers, laws changing at the request of lobbyists, special courts, judges owning stakes in other parts of the process, and very strange politics and biases everywhere.
If the point of the whole game is to pay the least amount of resources, in order to keep the maximum number of people cooperative and productive, then I think everyone would judge that we're doing this the wrong way. There's a LOT of nations to compare against, and we're having worse results than almost all of them.
The prisons we have now are doing horrible jobs in all regards, and are actively engaged in a process of making things worse. If we're spending all these resources, the cheapest thing to do is to take this large army, and reconcile it with better, more productive, and cheaper goals. It's never going to be cheap or easy, but almost anything is going to be cheaper and easier than the road we're going down now.
Ryan Fenton
The modern prison system is nothing more than a workaround that pesky 13th Amendment, that's all.
He will kick out all illegal immigrants, but that would collapse the economy. To compensate we will see virtual parole via skype & facebook in the future, were the inmate (the iMate) is only virtually released and can attend his normal virtual social life, while staying in prison working for sub minimum wages and under the normal threat of being raped contract HIV and other STDs.
All possible future perpetrators remain behind bars with virtual release & Corporate America is saved. What happens behind bars stays behind bars.
(Don't question the possibility that this grotesque kafkaesque nightmare could really turn into reality.
Because otherwise I would ask you if you really thought 10 months ago that Donald "Drumpf" could be a GOP presidential nominee.)
This is just another way to isolate inmates and dehumanize them so they have fewer resources and less meaningful, human contact. This is how they strip a person of every last vestige of their humanity.
I understand that for long-distance scenarios this video-visitation could be a good thing, but to prevent people from meeting in person is wrong and abusive.
Welcome to the Prison Industrial Complex, where you're not an inmate, you're a profit-center. Heaven forbid they use Skype, which actually works- no, lets use our proprietary "solution" that's not worth a shit and doesn't actually work. Because if we used Skype we couldn't charge an arm and a leg for our "service".
Some things should not be run for profit, including schools, police services, hospitals, and prisons.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
The jails are too full of pot heads. There's no space for robbers, murders, and rapists...
Would this false meme go away?
At the height of the War on Drugs hysteria, combined state and federal prisoners in for drug offenses (all, not just pot) topped out a little over 25%.
http://felonvoting.procon.org/...
How about something on topic, or something with a technology angle, or something that directly applies to the lives of people who frequent this site in some way?
I hear a bad thing happened in a rural farming village in Indonesia. Can I expect Slashdot coverage of it? Why not?
The prison system is being run by for-profit companies. Those companies actually want the prison population to increase and for prisoners to continually return to prison after their release. It makes the shareholders happy and wealthy.
???? Stories about dystopian developments make the feed all of the time. Poorly-implemented tech services are being proffered at an enormous profit margin to a locked-in customer base. Do I have to add a car analogy and a get-off my lawn joke, and a alien overlords joke?
Poorly-implemented? Two anecdotes about poor video quality. An author with an agenda to push and we get two anecdotes?
Enormous profit margin? Two times numbers ever given. One was $10 for a 20 minute call and the other was $0 for twice weekly calls from the designated call center. Outrageous sums.
Article was light on data and heavily shaded what was presented.
Can I spend a day with you and note down the crimes you commit during it?
If we make it a week, I'll quite likely find something you could do time for.
Our legal system is so out of whack that it is near impossible not to break the law anymore.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Well I fucked that up. I once ate a mince pie on the 25th December while in England.
Yes, well, Let's take a slightly more inclusive view, no?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Why does slashdot have so many stories about prison now?
Yes, well, Let's take a slightly more inclusive view, no?
Inclusive? Those are federal only statistics. A subset of overall prisoners. Not inclusive. Federal crimes. You know, heavily weighted to drug offenses.
If you commit a crime, you go to jail. That's not an argument for jails or against laws. It's an argument against you committing crimes.
The only people who have a problem with this arrangement are criminals and their family members, who are also shitbags.
The fact that there is no article on the travesty in said village debunks your point.
So you've rendered your whole post into spam.
Sorry, took the word "felons" at face value.
So, let's get really all inclusive and call it what it is, Correctional population, which, at a mere 6.85 mil, is at its "lowest rate since 1996", putting only 2.8% of the adult population through the system... But it doesn't show the breakdown.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
An associate got jailed and I "visited" him twice in Glynn county jail in Georgia.
That was the only quick way I could initiate contact from outside. Other ways include sending postcards by mail... The system uses low-end webcams and offers no privacy to the inmate. They don't use a handset, which means audio gets overheard by other inmates. Camera was aimed too high. I could see other inmates. "Visits" at that facility need to be done at specific times and are limited to 15 minutes. I gave him some vital information and setup schedule for for when I would be available to accept his calls.
By contrast, inmates can make a phone call that gets billed to the person outside seemingly at any time. They can make repeated phone calls and the amount of contact seems to be limited mostly by the wallet of the person outside. They use a phone handset, which offers improved audio quality and privacy with regards to other inmates.
My phone bill from PayTel was allegedly 21 cents per minute, but the actual blended rate once you incorporate all the fees is 36.6 cents.
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora
A friend of mine was in prison because federal prosecutors don't have any ethics that they have to follow. The prosecutor lied so blatantly that their own expert witness sued them. Still, the jury ate it up because the lies fit their preconceived notions.
Inside prison, everything is run by gangs. Intimidation is constant, violence is common, maiming and murder is not uncommon, and people only survive by becoming a hardened criminal.
They come out much worse - for them and for society.
I have no problem with harsh punishment. I do demand good results, and our current system is not producing them.
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If you commit a crime, you go to jail. That's not an argument for jails or against laws. It's an argument against you committing crimes.
The only people who have a problem with this arrangement are criminals and their family members, who are also shitbags.
It's this kind of simplistic, binary thinking that people use to justify all sorts of atrocities.
Nuance? Critical thinking? Discourse/dialogue?
What for when I already have this set of conditions to keep me safe from poking my eyeball with my finger?
You see the thing about living in a black and white world, is that the color never changes.
But hey, good thing all those people in the 60s respected the law of segregation. That was a quick, civil conversation with local representatives wasn't it?
Oh wait...
So, I know a felon, a guy who incarcerated for felony theft. He was a real treacherous shitbag before he went in, but now, he's quite polite (I'm sure he's still quite treacherous but I have no interest in finding out). No more late night parties, his house (yes, there is money in his family, so he has a house) is lights out relatively early in the evening. I think prison had quite the correct effect on this guy. It seems to have deterred him from future criminality.
Prison should deter people, both those who have committed crimes so they don't want to return, and those who don't with to have a stay in the first place.
This nonsense about 'everyone is a criminal - you're committing crimes right now' - is nonsense. I haven't seen a shred of evidence to support such a thing (which I how I make decisions on the accuracy of claims).
If you have a panic attack whenever you see a cop, that would seem to warrant an examination of your own life. Don't ride dirty. Don't have guns, drugs or drug paraphernalia on you or in your car.
Are there bad cops? Of course. Do they make up more than a tiny minority of cops? No. I haven't seen a lick of evidence to suggest otherwise.
Lionizing criminals, which I remember in the 70s and 80s only leads to a lot of innocent people suffering. Criminals should be held to account for their actions.
putting only 2.8% of the adult population
Forgive me, but almost three percent seems incredibly high. Three out of every hundred people actually going to jail?
In a (supposedly) free society, there should be no upside whatsoever for putting people in prisons or jails, except that the people put INTO said prisons or jails or whatever, are kept from doing whatever they did to get put into a cell in the first place, again.
Any benefit recognized thereby, such as from prisoners' industry, creates incentives to take free people, and make of them slaves.
Were I a prisoner, I'd do everything in my power to make keeping me as absolutely expensive as possible, and refuse to work, to make keeping me a losing proposition, financially. Not to convince them to let me go, but to fight against this particular form of odius modern-day slavery.
If you think people should suffer and toil and be raped, beaten, and potentially get murdered while incarcerated, I can only hope and pray you find out first-hand what it's like.
The loss of freedom should be the sole punishment for someone when an actual crime, with a real, actual victim is committed. The system we have now does more harm to every single person involved than it does good for any even ONE person it touches.
The victims of the crime are hard working citizens who earn less than they would because their value in the labour market is undermined.
The victims are the citizens whose house is repossessed because their employer has gone bankrupt because another firm has competed it into bankruptcy because it employed illegal immigrants at below the minimum wage.
And of course the most visible victims are the 'dream children' whose illegal immigrant parents selfishly bought them along when the started their criminality, and so deprived them of legal status, instead condemning them to a life of uncertainty.
Illegal immigration; a crime with real victims...
"correctional supervision", not necessarily jail.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
46.4% of prisoners are there for drug crimes. You, sir, are a lying sack of shit. Did you pull that 25% number out of your ass?
No. Three out of every hundred people go to PRISON. There is a huge difference.
Once a person has been convicted by a jury of their peers,we the public have a right to assume they will behave themselves behind bars for the full duration of their sentences. It's not a violation of human rights to fail to provide them with every amenity they want. In fact we are under no moral obligation to provide them with radio, television, games, books, areas to workout, or even electric lights. They should get up with the rising sun and go to bed when the sun sets. They are not entitled to air conditioning either - most of the human race never experienced ANY of these things and most people who have lived were not being deproved of their basic human rights by not having these things handed to them.
Oh, and as to the argument that we need to give inmates stuff to keep 'em well-behaved: Just shoot the ones who get out of line. As I said, they are in there to be punished, often for having deprived innocent people of THEIR rights. There's no reason to tolerate further bad behavior from them.
For the love of all that is holy. 46.4% is a quick and dirty google hit but it is from the FEDERAL BUREAU OF PRISONS. Instead of googling for answers to support your already held beliefs, slow up and think a minute. Federal. Not all prisoners. Federal. You know, the feds who have a disproportionate percentage of drug offenders in the system since the feds don't prosecute a whole ton of armed robbers, rapists and car thieves.
What if another provider came along offering the communication services for a lower cost to the prison jurisdictions and simply had price autonomy so they could, if they so wish, offer free IP phone and video services paid for by tax deductible donations by families and angels?
Just asking.
Let me guess. The payola would prevent that.
Yeah, and a lot of the rest committed burgularies (to buy drugs), or robbed someone (to buy drugs), or even killed someone (that ripped them off or stole their drugs). Buy those don't count as "drug crimes".
Really, who cares if a convict can't visit face to face with people? They're in prison after all. We have far more important things to spend time on. This isn't an issue.
I built prisons more than 10 years ago that were CCTV-only visitation. Nothing glitchy about it. Nothing Skype-like, either.
But, we did have to build a mockup of it at the existing prison well before we could put it into the new prison. This was specifically to invite law suits from existing prisoners. After it was well litigated and all the important design questions were decided by a judge, we moved forward with permanent installations. The courts had already settled whether 9" or 11" or 13" screens were cruel. We knew if they could legally be mounted at 4' or 5' or 6' above the floor. Or if they could be protected behind glass walls. Color or black and white... Plus many other things I would never have thought of, but inmates thought to litigate.
All of this has been settled for a long, long time. Yes, it is a little more expensive. But it cut way down on contraband. It also doubled to let inmates make court appearances without physically visiting the courtroom.
I have read a lot of chatter, on here about criminals, prisons, and the problem with criminals, re-offenders, etc, here is some 'food for thought' to ponder on.
I can't say for the rest of the world, but the 'prisons' in the U.S.A. started out being called Penitentiaries, and ran by monks, because when a 'criminal' was incarcerated, they were to be kept, until they were repentant for their sins, and then they were rehabilitated body and soul so they did not commit more sins. The Penitentiaries, was broken down into cells, for each criminal. each cell was approx. 8x10, with 1 foot think walls, and doors made of solid 1ft thick wood, with a 'food slot', and a single 6" wide 'window' in the ceiling, running the length of the cell, so that the criminal could only look upto the heavens and pray for forgiveness. And the monks wore soundless slippers. there was NO SOUND what so ever. all the 'inmates' were totally isolated from contact with anyone, including conversations with their 'keepers.'
This was deemed inhumane in the early to mid 1800's and the style/design of prisons has evolved into what we see today.
And I can tell you, from first hand experience in today's prisons, being 'convicted' for a 'class-c felony misdemeanor' and sentenced to 15 months in a state 'institution.' There is no such thing as punishment and 'rehabilitation' that most people seem to think or perceive that our modern day prisons are there for.
Once you are 'convicted' of a crime, be it either from a 'trial', (we have all heard/seen the problems with trials, biased judges, Prosecutors 'doctoring' evidence, crime-labs, with falsified/contaminated evidence, police officers falsifying/planting evidence, not allowing defense attorneys see the evidence, etc) or thru a plea bargain (which is no real bargain, as you are rail-roaded into a 'lesser charge(s)' by the Prosecutor's filing more and more charge upon you when ever you try to take your case to a jury-trial, to defense attorneys who either have no idea how to 'defend' against to the charges, to cow-towing to everything the Prosecutor wants, thus putting up NO DEFENSE what so ever.), as well as the assumption of guilty till proven innocent(I have even seen cases where L.E. has used 'civil asset-forfeiture, to 'seize your ill-gotten gains' and your 'assetes are then charged with a crime, instead of you.) you go to a state prison. As well as the BIGGEST 'issue' of 'justice' is from SOCIETY general, where its commonly stated, 'well if he wasnt guilty, he would not have been charged.' The Idea of a 'fair trial' is for the state to PROVE to jury, that you are guilty of commiting said crime.
Instead now, YOU have to PROVE that you DID not commit the crime. And with courts passing 'secret laws' to 'secret evidence' to 'secret verdicts' to 'secret sentences' to secret prisons, it's a wonder there is even a "court system'
Once you are in prison, all your 'inalienable' rights are stripped from you. Your are then 'processed' and classified. You are classified into one of several categories, from Highest Security Risk, to Minimal Security Risk, either for 'escape potential' or risk to other in-mates or prison personal. Then you are sent of to a Prison SOMEWHERE else in the state, on the 'chain-bus.'
Once at your 'Parent Facility,' you are further processed, for any mental of physical issues. You are then sent to your 'Unit.'
Each Unit, is further broken down into 'Pods.' Each Pod is broken down into two 'tiers', an Upper Tier, and A Lower Tier. Each Tier is broken down into 'cells'. And Finally each cell is broken down into an Upper and Lower Bunk.
Depending on your Classification your 'cell' can be an 'Open Bar' cell, or a 'Semi-closed' Cell(a solid door with a see thru window for the guards to due their 'bed-checks'). As well as, in a max-security cell, (where the guards control your movements in and out of your cell(s) i.e. for meals, showers, open toilets in your cell, etc.) and there is no privacy what so ever, to the Minimum-Security, with stalled toilet
I know it sounds like black humor. But prisons are a captive market if there were one.
I think whenever society decides to deprive someone of their freedom (and alas, it seems that it's unavoidable sometimes, although I think it's done *far* more often than necessary), society should assume full responsability for that, instead of abandoning those people to the devices of one or more (state tolerated) mafias.
Replacing reliable analog audio systems with crappy choppy voice-mangling digital platforms... overloaded data streams destroying voice conversations... subjecting families to an organized $calp-you monopoly of a few companies... massive up-front charges and 'contracts' that actually deliver a small amount of 'product'...
It's an abomination I tell you!
[holds up cellphone]
And I'm not talking about prison.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
You just haven't had the privilege of experiencing the Kafkaesque reality we live in. ..." - really, fuck off. We all know lots of "guys", and our personal anecdotes don't qualify for intelligent debate on modern incarceration methods and policies.
"I know a guy that
"I haven't seen a shred of evidence" - must be comfortable, living in your bubble. Think yourself lucky for that, but not for your arrogance.
Even companies are all "potentially criminal" - you consistently price lower than your competition, you can be shut down for attempting to monopolise the market.
You charge more, and you're profiteering.
You charge the same, and you're price-fixing.
You can not win IF "they" want you to suffer.
Are there bad cops? Of course. Do they make up more than a tiny minority of cops? Yes, so long as the tiny minority are protected by the grand majority, you can put them all in the same fucking basket.
I don't have panic attacks when I see cops - I just treat them as lower on the ladder than gang members with patches, not to be trusted, cross the street quietly, don't look them in the eyes and don't try to make friends - at least a gang member has a functional sense of loyalty to rely on - a cop? That loyalty to society that they're sworn to protect, it dissolves as soon they imagine one of them is even slightly threatened. They're just like a gang, only worse, cause they're LEGALLY armed and dangerous, and submit to no authority at all. And they will not police each other, so they can fuck off and die in a fire, as far as I'm concerned, until I start seeing stories of cops routinely being sentenced to incarceration for abusing their authority. A typical gang member still has a "real" job, unlike the social assistance we pay out to our "police force". Glorified public servants, sucking on the public tax dollar, looking down upon us all, the tax-paying civilian suckers.
I get that cops have to deal with the worst of humanity, but we ARE NOT ALL THE WORST OF HUMANITY !!!
And so long as immoral laws remain on the books, you can count on me and millions of others to keep breaking them. We, the criminals, will always be here.
Demonizing criminals only leads to a lot of ordinary people suffering for no good result. Opinionated posters should be held up to reality for their rationalisations.
Don't condemn others, because but for the grace of God, there go you.
It's not that marijuana has never been linked to any deaths, it's that there has never been a lethal marijuana overdose, and estimates of the LD50 are 20,000 to 40,000 times the normal dose. I have no doubt that marijuana in combination with other drugs or other health conditions could be fatal, but [a] the difference between the effective dose and the lethal dose is one of the greatest of all psychoactive substances, and [b] consuming a lethal dose is more than a little impractical. It is completely impossible to consume a lethal dose of marijuana cigarettes. Even taking low estimates for the LD50, it would require smoking more than one cigarette per second for a sustained period of time.
As you no doubt know, the role of cannabis in producing psychosis is debated, and odds are there are genetic factors there as well. I believe it is more fair to say that drug use can produce psychosis in susceptible individuals, without needing to be more specific. Similarly, there are studies on both sides of the violence issue, and using the word "linked" is somewhat disingenuous. I believe further study is necessary to be able to firmly establish either position.
Cannabis has been established as one of the safest recreational drugs. One can even make favorable comparisons to caffeine. As one of the >40% of the US who has tried marijuana, I would say you're being alarmist, and I don't think that balances out the "pro-drug propaganda". Telling people to "Fuck off!" is also not indicative of a desire for honest discussion.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
So? They're in prison. Let them do hard time. I really don't care that much for criminals.
The person the wrote this article is just a few months behind times. No one has charged $14.00 a min for months, and most companies have never. You have to remember our wonderful government became involved and put the FCC rules in place, charging pennies per min. Now onto the subject of Video visitation they are very much correct it does have it's issues. But it is completely in correct on several of the issues and also glossed over many of the reasons why it's being done. The caller can contact a help desk before the scheduled call with the inmate to confirm there work station is setup correctly. Also the inmate does have recourse and can file a request for a refund should they have issues during their call. Many prisons are not making a dime from these calls and are installing them do to staff cuts. This allows them to keep the inmate confined in a secure area while still allowing them visitations. Video Visitation is in its infancy and improving every day. If your going to write an article at the very least you should get a few of the facts correct. That would provide accurate information to your readers rather then just spewing complete crap out that has no value or accuracy.
.
I do not know the experience of that other poster, but I have had my vehicle broken into and ransacked, with everything stolen and the vehicle damaged, had my home invaded and robbed, and have found illegals hiding in my backyard, including one who was taking a dump and then threatened my family when found. I have also worked at a company where armed robbers broke in and took a bunch of inventory at gunpoint, all of this in the past few years. I contrast this with the Reagan years when I'd never been the victim of any crime and routinely could leave the house unlocked and even sometimes leave the keys in the car in the driveway with no concern about any crime. The society is melting down and the tragically ever-increasing prison population is, sadly, the only thing keeping the chaos from being far worse. It would be far better to have a shrinking prison population that was a natural result of people behaving better, and simply reducing the incarcerated population by letting criminals out before they do their time is the absolute wrong answer.
There's nothing positive about ANY of this Obama-era tolerance for lawlessness and rampant societal decay. The current administration is is completely untethered from the rule of law and while some people see this as good because it will let a friend or relative get away with a criminal act, the side effects are to undermine the legitimacy of government, encourage the civilized citizens to arm themselves, and ultimately will lead to rampant vigilantism if not reversed. In the end, NOBODY wins when you destroy the concept of law and order for short-term political popularity in subcultures that embrace gangsterism, and NO I do not use Obama or the term "gangsterism" for any skin color reasons but because Obama is leading this, and the term applies to the behaviors involved.
When Obama leaves the White House at the end of his term, he is NOT going to move to the poor areas of Chicago to live among the chaos he helped create - he and his family will live with round-the-clock taxpayer-funded armed guards and behind tall fences and walls in an exclusive community and will be driven around in limos and flown around in private jets unaffected by all the felons and illegals he has unleashed upon society and, oh by-the-way, unlimited by any "carbon footprint" concerns. He promised to "fundamentally transform" America and he appears to have done so, sadly.
Where is your concern for the victims of these criminals? The vast majority of inmates actually "DID IT". It's a popular theme in entertainment that some good guy has been wrongly accused, somehow slipped through the cracks, and got wrongly convicted while a nefarious "one-armed man" went free. The truth however is that out of the millions who've been convicted and imprisoned over the past few decades, only a tiny relative handful were (tragically) wrongly-convicted. Those wrongly-convicted are a far smaller number than the number of crime victims whose crimes were never solved and far smaller than the number of people victimized by repeat offenders who have been released prematurely.
The incarcerated have at least had the opportunity for justice in front of a jury and a judge and assisted by the organized application of law, including rights to appeal, which is why the number of wrongly-convicted is so very low. The victims of criminals never get any of these things; they are often facing a thug and a weapon with no witnesses, an arbitrary set of rules that change by the moment, and may only make any appeal to the very thug who is victimizing them.
The truly dehumanized are the members of the law-abiding general public who are seen as "just numbers" and who are setup to be future victims by a justice system that plea bargains offenses down and lets people out of prison early to reduce overcrowding, thereby setting up the future encounters between unreformed criminals and their future victims. Oh, and the majority of these dehumanized innocents are ethnic minorities who are told by pandering politicians that it is some sort of favor to them to unleash criminals previously removed from their communities back into those same communities where they will unleash mayhem yet again.
Convicted criminals are NOT SUPPOSED TO HAVE PRIVACY. Society does not want crooked people on the inside communicating privately with associates on the outside who could then abuse/intimidate witnesses/victims/jurors/judges/relatives of guards, organize efforts to smuggle stuff in/out of the facility, organize escapes, or anything else.
Part of the penalty for going criminal and abusing your fellow citizens is that you lose your freedoms and the trust of society.
The easy way to avoid all this is to not be a vile scumbag.
Which other basic human needs can be monetized?
Perhaps we could charge people to see if they can throw politicians* into space, either by hand or using all manner of home-made trebuchets / rockets?
(*) and those politicians collude with against the general population
Requiem for the American Dream
1. When the USA was founded, 12 of the original 13 colonies were officially Protestant Christian and the 13th colony was officially Catholic. Monks are catholic. Therefore: no, US prisons were not originally run by or associated with monks.
2. The founders of the country were quite outspoken and wrote extensively about what they were creating. Rather than listening to stupid people on soapboxes telling you what to think about the founder's plans for the prison system, try something which is rather novel these days: Read what the founder wrote.
3. The Jails in the early US were few and minimal because most people were more-seriously religiously Christian and thus "God-fearing". People who believed there was a God watching everything they did and planning to punish them for anything they did to their neighbors tended to do few bad things to their neighbors. For the very few who did choose to violate laws, there were simple, immediate short-term punishments (like getting locked into stockades in a very public place for a few hours where everybody would see them humiliated and could toss the assorted rotten tomato at them), slightly longer-term punishments of sitting in a jail cell (no recreation, no electricity, no library, no heating or cooling, etc), and for the really bad stuff: death, usually by hanging.
4. The "Penitentiary" was indeed the application of Christian ideas about repentance and redemption, but was championed by Quakers, not Catholic monks. The basic idea was that rather than just using prison as a way to punish, short of the death penalty, society could attempt to rehabilitate the offenders with, among other things, Christian teachings. Secular government never really did this though, and furthermore would have seen the futility had they thought it through in a more seriously religious way (you cannot make another person believe something just because you want them to). In more recent decades, government has decided that any such religious activity would be unconstitutional anyway, so the idea of a penitentiary that took in savages and turned-out rehabilitated citizens who'd payed their societal debt and turned over a new leaf died. The penitentiary became nothing more than a big jail, a warehouse for offenders that made no effort to have them reform themselves and simply kept the public safe by keeping the criminals off the streets.
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." - John Adams
I've lived in neighborhoods (in the United States) where seven out of every ten adults had been incarcerated at some point in their lives, frequently multiple times, with the majority of said citizens on probation or parole when they're not locked up. -PCP
As an economist the logic of what I have said is irreproachable. The fact that you appear unwilling to bother to explain why you regard it as 'bigoted' renders you guilty of wasting my time. We are here to learn from each other, not to indulge name calling...
In other words you lived in the 'hood with a bunch of lazy niggers who only know how to commit crime.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Perhaps they should just virtualize the visitors as well. In that way no one would ever need to visit them in jail any more. But the charge can remain. Win win.