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Jails Are Replacing Visits With Video Calls (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: In recent years, more and more jails have introduced video-calling services. Theoretically, these products could make it easier for inmates to maintain their relationships with family and friends outside. But many jails have moved in the opposite direction, using the advent of these "video visitation" services as an excuse to restrict or eliminate traditional in-person visits.
There are a number of reasons jail administrators have gone this route. But critics say that money plays a big role. In-person visitation requires more staff supervision -- both to escort inmates to and from visitation rooms and to make sure no contraband changes hands during a visit. So switching to video visitation can save cash-strapped jails money.
But jails also profit more directly from limiting in-person visits. While on-site video visits are usually free, the companies providing the system generally offer a paid off-site video-calling service, too. And jails get a hefty percentage of that money.
There are a number of reasons jail administrators have gone this route. But critics say that money plays a big role. In-person visitation requires more staff supervision -- both to escort inmates to and from visitation rooms and to make sure no contraband changes hands during a visit. So switching to video visitation can save cash-strapped jails money.
But jails also profit more directly from limiting in-person visits. While on-site video visits are usually free, the companies providing the system generally offer a paid off-site video-calling service, too. And jails get a hefty percentage of that money.
Studies have consistently found that prisoners who maintain close contact with their family members while incarcerated have better post-release outcomes and lower recidivism rates. These findings represent a body of research stretching back over 40 years. For example, according to “Explorations in Inmate-Family Relationships,” a 1972 study: “The central finding of this research is the strong and consistent positive relationship that exists between parole success and maintaining strong family ties while in prison. Only 50 percent of the ‘no contact’ inmates completed their first year on parole without being arrested, while 70 percent of those with three visitors were ‘arrest free’ during this period. In addition, the ‘loners’ were six times more likely to wind up back in prison during the first year (12 percent returned compared to 2 percent for those with three or more visitors). For all Base Expectancy levels, we found that those who maintained closer ties performed more satisfactorily on parole.” https://www.prisonlegalnews.or...
(1) Keeps inmates sane. (2) Keeps inmates compliant. (3) Reduces instances of sex between inmates. (4) Keeps inmates connected to the world outside the walls. Social support network and significant others are important in preventing recidivism. CA and NY, states that actually pretend to care about rehabilitation, have kept them for that reason.
I, for one, think we need to squeeze all humanity our of these toxic masculine evil men. They should be a hollow shell when we're done with them. They're just men after all; evil from the day they were born, amirite?
Healthcare, prisons, and education, should never be run for profit, as this amounts to an automatic restriction of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Prisoners can fight back. Refuse to participate in any work release program. Refuse to participate in any prison line work program (laundry, kitchen, etc...) Making private prisons a losing financial proposition will force the state to implement prison reforms.
Good people go to bed earlier.
They'd be better off using both, to be honest. Video is not a replacement for friendly human contact in person. All other in-perosn human contact in a prison (with jailers, other inmates) is likely to be abusive.
A good way to warp someone's mind is to only allow them abusive/coersive human contact.
"Video calling allows for much more frequent contact,"
According to who? Sure it sounds like it should, but everything prison related tends to be expensive.
So if you are going to make the claim it allows for more frequent contact then you had better back it up with facts.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
In before the "they deserve hell on Earth because they were caught with a small amount of drugs or stole something worth $100" authoritarian crowd chimes in. Anyway, in-person human contact in a prison -- from jailers (not "correction officers") and other inmates is likely to be violent and abusive. Giving inmates the opportunity at loving contact with family, friends, and spouses (yes, conjugal should be allowed) makes them more likely to be sane upon being released. Removing all normal human contact makes psychological damage and violence more likely after release.
I understand the need to save money. But money is best saved by non locking up non-violent drug offenders -- what adults put into their own bodies should be their own choice. Same with diverting petty thieves, the homeless, non-functional addicts, and the mentally ill to community service, shelters, and mental health therapy as appropriate.
But hey. It's America. We'd rather punish than treat. Because Puritanism.
The prison service in the US is run as a profit-centre.
Literally no civilised country in the world sees incarceration rates, or such profit from the prison services, as the US has.
Basically, the US keeps modern-day slaves of the prison population, in for-profit prisons, thus giving it the incentive to incarcerate as many people as possible (contrary to almost every other country which is trying to CUT their prison population and spending money to do so).
Ironically, the US forbids buying items produced in foreign prisons but makes more of them than any other country in the world.
This is how most people will react:
1) They did the crime, they should be able to do the time.
2) They did the crime, they should be able to do the time.
3) They did the crime, they should be able to do the time.
4) They did the crime, they should be able to do the time.
People do not realize that not all that are in prison are harcore criminals. At least not the first time they went in. And as long as the prisons keep making money and are for-profit, why should they care? It is so much easier to turn a blind eye and say that these are not our problems and just be even tougher on those who get out, so they are put away and we can sleep knowing we have done what we could.
Oh and if they are in prison, rape is ok, because it is funny, right?
I absolutely understand those high risk car chases in the US. If I am in Europe and they catch me, I will get perhaps a year and I can start to get a new life. In the US, my life is over. I have nothing to loose, so why not risk it all in the off chance that it works.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Mostly because these people are Human Beings, and deserve some sense of humanity.
Because of America's hard nose attitude towards the law, they are a lot of small time offenders in jail, who are not really a danger to other people or themselves. But are locked up for breaking the law.
The jail system in general needs some benefits for good behavior and things that can be removed if bad behavior. So for many of the small time criminals in jail, and being that can behave, they should have access to normal human rights.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
You're British from your writing. You're actually understating the problem. There is no "US Prison Service." The closest one can come to that are Federal prisons, but most inmates are not in the Federal system.
What we have are State, County, and even City prisons, all run by different authorities, some public, some privately contracted, all with opportunity for abuse, corruption, graft, and kickbacks. There are thousands of little fiefdoms that operate without much oversight from competent authorities.
Same goes for police forces. UK has them on a national and county level. Every American jerkwater town can have their own police, and training, hiring standards, etc vary widely. If these systems were consolidated at the State level with strict court oversight, a lot of corruption would be cleaned up. But no one wants to give up their little profit centers.
Throughout history, the unjust jail and jail until the masses get tired of it and kill the jailers. It's not something you are going to hear in the media, it's just a fact. If you doubt me, look into the history of the Bastille and the Tower of London. Both have been the impetus of revolution. That's just a taste, too, since history is rife with such stories.
Where there is not a public safety concern, inmates should be given the occasional day pass to visit friends and family outside the prison, and return afterward. Likewise, they should be allowed to hold jobs outside the prison. Whenever possible and with no requirements on time served, they should be transitioned to parole in so far as the public safety risk is assessed to allow such transition. Parole fees must be abolished.
The environment inside prison should resemble the ideal societal environment as much as possible: prisoners must be treated with dignity respective of their value as human beings, and their individual needs must be met. All surfaces within the prison must be scrubbed clean at all times; proper hygiene must be available; and communication with the outside world must be retained.
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The profit center piece of this should not be understated. Prisons extort significant amounts of money from prisoners' families for communications.
In Tennessee, a 15 minute inmate phone call costs $2.40 for in-state long distance and $3.15 for out-of-state long distance. "Maybe these just haven't been updated in a long time?" No, these are the updated rates from 2017. Before that it was almost /double/ this.
With that as prologue, why should we expect any less from video calls?
Yeah it would've been best if this was in addition to regular visits. I would bet that it would reduce in-person meetings a bit as well since they're a pain in the ass. E.g. instead of weekly visitation, do video calls a few times a week and in-person every other week or so. Would be a win-win for everyone.
Where there is not a public safety concern, inmates should be given the occasional day pass to visit friends and family outside the prison, and return afterward. Likewise, they should be allowed to hold jobs outside the prison. Whenever possible and with no requirements on time served, they should be transitioned to parole in so far as the public safety risk is assessed to allow such transition. Parole fees must be abolished.
It's a political problem. No politician wants to risk being Willy Horton'd because of such a program; no matter how much sense reforms such as those might make. Even if the program ran smoothly they'd still fear the "(Insert politicians name and bad B&W photo) released thousands of convicted criminals into your neighbor hoods." ads.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I have proposed a Constitutional Amendment including the below:
The purpose of law being to establish Justice and insure domestic Tranquility, the execution of law against an offense shall be to redress and rehabilitate.
To this purpose, and to the purpose of a fair and speedy trial, no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property except as necessary for the security of the public, and any such action shall to the greatest extent achievable respect the dignity of the person as human beings and ensure their individual needs are met and rights protected; and no bail shall be required except where other means are insufficient to the same purpose; and civil damages shall not be imposed in excess of those necessary to redress.
I'm also running for Congress.
Many of our local politicians and the people with whom I speak on the streets concur with the full implementation of the Nelson Mandela Rules and other reforms. It's actually surprising how strong many of my proposals are: collective risk sharing, strong immigration programs automatically extending expired visas where there is no compelling reason to revoke, a minimum wage policy that rises faster than inflation (even the small businesses like this), and a corporate income tax policy based on net operating profits all seem to have pretty decent buy-in. Conservatives, Republicans, Progressives, business owners, the unions, I've gotten decent response rates among all of these types.
Reforming our prisons will take a little public education. People are not so hot on having open prisons for certain prisoners; many are quite happy with allowing prisoners who seem to not produce a public safety risk to work real jobs outside prison, so long as they come back to prison at the end of their shifts. Full and heavy use of parole seems to get split results at a brush, but good responses in face-to-face discussions. Everyone seems to think prisoners should be treated with full respect and dignity, cared for as well as possible, and not really punished--except for some personal exceptions that a few folks voice now and then because they dislike a certain type of crime.
More parole, cooperative work programs, and open prisons give people an experience with felons as being just people they may meet on the streets. They're sympathetic to anyone who is trying to be better, and so they accept these things in principle as an individualized consideration, and become more hesitant as you broaden it to a general systemic policy. It's actually fairly easy to get people to push against their own reservations and throw their vote behind reform, because they expect these things to reduce crime in total and that's valuable to them even if they fear that some of those people won't be separated from them at a given point in time.
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Fact of the matter is, that's how people on average react, and that's who he's referring to. You're probably upper-middle-class with an education, can see past the end of your own nose, and have upper-middle-class friends, who likewise have an education and can see past the end of their own noses; the 'average' person is not you or your friends, the 'average' person doesn't think enough moves ahead to really consider what the long-term effects of anything is, and they think with their emotions more often than not and not their intellect, so you get knee-jerk reactions to 'criminals' ("lock 'em up for good!"). Sad but true.
It's the result of the way you dehumanize them in the prisons. There are plenty of examples of how to do it the right way, in Europe but also in the US. For a start, Americans could stop jokingly accepting prison rape as a means of punishment....
Lower middle class and poor or more likely to be in jail or know someone in jail. I think they have a much better handle on jail and it's effects than most people on the other end of the class spectrum.
It all sounds ideal....until you actually have to deal with the type of people you actually have to deal with in prison.
In practice, this is what happens. You treat people like animals and they become animals; you treat them like decent people and they become decent people.
We've been changing the way prisons operate around the United States and the results are that magic shit that happen in Norway suddenly happens here.
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E.g. instead of weekly visitation, do video calls a few times a week and in-person every other week or so. Would be a win-win for everyone.
They are not looking for "win-win". They are looking for lowering costs and to charge monopoly-based prices.
They used to have costs of $14/minute until an attempt to cap at 11c-22c minute. Which apparently failed, at least based on the CNN article.
The American prison system. The best tool that politicians have to manage job statistics is to increase prison population and to hire more guards.
As we automate more jobs, it will become more and more important to decrease the unemployed through more creative methods. For nearly the past century, America has produced large numbers of jobs through fear, uncertainty and doubt. So long as the people of America are convince there is a necessity to do so, politicians have a more less carte blanc to produce jobs through FUD. Prisons are some of the best.
To manage the job statistics, it is necessary to accomplish two primary things.
1) Decrease the number of people eligible to be counted as unemployed.
2) Increase the number of jobs for the remaining number of people.
Here are some methods of decreasing the number of people counted as unemployed.
1) Get the killed
2) Imprison them.
The military has been traditionally very lucrative in the sense that we can send massive numbers of children to their deaths before they have the opportunity to reproduce in a means that produces American citizens eligible to be counted as part of the employment statistics. Not only that, but if we can't get them killed, maybe we can get them boom boom in Europe or somewhere else where they can settle down and procreate on some other country's dime.
Navy is far better than army, marines or air force since we can in a single stroke kill off hundreds or thousands of children, lose a ship and massive amounts of equipment and create tons of jobs in the name of national security to create more ships, planes, equipment, etc... as a replacement. The army and marines are a nightmare since you don't have any great direct profit from getting your children killed one by one unless they get blown up in a ground vehicle like a bus or tank which will need to be replaced.
Prisons are a fantastic means of removing people from the employment statistics. If you send a person to prison, they are no longer counted as unemployed and the massive number of jobs created by sending them to prison is well worth it. All that matters is that you have to convince the American people they are safer paying to lock this person up and place them on extremely expensive welfare than to let them run lose and be in far less expensive welfare. This means however that we need to selectively choose people who we believe will be more profitable to the system as progressively hardening criminals as opposed to tax payers.
For example, if you're a wealthy male in his prime, locking that person up for more than a year or two, even if they commit a mass murder is not profitable. It shouldn't be done.
On the other hand, taking a kid from a family in the ghettos with two parents collecting welfare and generally low grades, unless you can get them to join the military as canon fodder, it's far more profitable to sentence him/her for 10 years for possession of a joint than to risk them simply collecting welfare or working a minimum wage job.
A beautiful thing is that if you convince some sucker that he could be a hero by being canon fodder and they don't die, they can come back with PTSD and knock over a 7-Eleven, kill off some minimum wage worker leaving a job open for someone else and then go to super-max which is nothing but bank for the job statistics.
See prisons are absolutely amazing because as long as the American people are scared of criminals and especially as long as we focus A LOT of effort on penalizing them as opposed to correcting them, we can increase the general temper of the American people allowing us to spend even more money on prisons and then even stress other areas of the economy causing more people to commit crimes, leave jobs open for others, be removed from the employment statistics and create jobs for others.
Consider that prisoners require prisons.
Prisons require guards.
Prisons built in or near former coal towns tak
What the fuck is a race bait dog whistle anyway? Could you perhaps try explaining this in English?
Then follow up by telling us why the post to which you replied qualifies, because I'm totally fucking lost here.
who determines what is necessary for the security of the public?
Ultimately, SCOTUS. We actually built our Nation to sort of work things out without having rigid, clear rules.
Failure to answer shows you have not thought this through.
Actually, I live in a state where the Courts ruled that alternatives to cash bail are constitutionally-required wherever possible and reasonable. Predictably, my state has had some issues with the recent development: the number of defendants who don't show up to trial increased from 10% to 14%.
Washington DC has been doing this for a lot longer--over 45 years, in fact. Their Pretrial Services Agency uses a risk-based model determining the public safety risk and the flight risk of the defendant. They actually release 80% of all defendants in DC under their own recognizance, and only 10% fail to appear for any scheduled court date, while only 9% are arrested between pretrial release and their court date. Cash bail is still legal--you'll notice I used an "except where" clause--and imposed almost never.
In other words: DC is a hell of a lot better at this than Maryland.
The purpose of prisons is to confine as punishment.
The purpose of prisons is to reduce crime. To that purpose, rehabilitation is the goal, not punishment.
You are saying let's take away the confinement part of the punishment.
Open prisons don't eliminate confinement; they establish trust. Inmates whom we believe are able to manage themselves are placed in an environment in which they have to exercise that capacity and thus essentially reinforce a behavior of not violating the trust society places with them. They're not allowed to leave.
This of course requires careful selection of inmates who we can reasonably expect to not attempt escape; and the results have been shown with the Bollate prison, among others They also seem to be more likely to get jobs after prison, but the research does not rule out other factors contributing to that particular outcome.
Spending one more year at the rehabilitating prison (and one less year at an ordinary one) reduces recidivism by between 10 and 15 percentage points (from a mean recidivism of about 40 percent). For the group of displaced inmates, which is shown to be negatively selected, the effects of rehabilitation efforts on recidivism are larger.
While we find evidence that over time Bollate inmates become more likely to work outside the prison, more than a single mechanism seem to underly these effects.
You seem to be quite an idiot.
Perhaps your world-view is deficient and excludes particular information of which I am aware.
Do you have an experience in criminal justice and with criminals? Do you have any qualifications in criminal justice? Do you have any qualifications at all?
I have a tendency to rely on subject matter experts--a habit reinforced by my study in project management--and have interviewed several, including prison guards with multiple degrees in social services. I've also examined current research from all over the world.
Persons whom I've interviewed and who have confirmed the things I've suggested here include the Director of Corrections of North Dakota, who is a member of several international programs which hold conferences, exchange metrics, and perform scientific analysis of competing factors and their outcomes in corrections systems (pretrial, parole, prison, and post-incarceration); social workers who have worked closely with the prison population in post-release services and within jails and prisons; and prison guards, including those with degrees in both social work and criminal justice.
One prison guard I spoke with concurred with my appr
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