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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.
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
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
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 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.
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
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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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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.