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$11M Worth of Legally-Purchased Music Will Be Confiscated From Florida's Prisoners (tampabay.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the Tampa Bay Times:
In April last year, the Florida Department of Corrections struck a deal with JPay. The private company, spearheading a push to sell profit-driven multimedia tablets to incarcerated people across the country, would be allowed to bring the technology to every facility in the nation's third-largest prison system. But there was a catch. Inmates had already been purchasing electronic entertainment for the last seven years -- an MP3 player program run by a different company: Access Corrections. For around $100, Access sold various models of MP3 players that inmates could then use to download songs for $1.70 each, and keep them in their dorms.... More than 30,299 players were sold, and 6.7 million songs were downloaded over the life of the Access contract, according to the Department of Corrections. That's about $11.3 million worth of music.
Because of the tablets, inmates will have to return the players, and they can't transfer the music they already purchased onto their new devices... The Department of Corrections, meanwhile, has collected $1.4 million in commissions on each song downloaded and other related sales since July 2011... JPay already operates banking accounts and facilitates phone calls at the state-run prisons, charging inmates and their loved ones steep fees for the services. With the introduction of tablets, JPay will add a wide swath of new spending incentives for its incarcerated customers, offering purchases of music, emailing and other virtual fare.
As a compromise, prison officials offered to download the already-purchased music to a CD, and then mail that CD to someone outside the prison. For a $25 fee.
Because of the tablets, inmates will have to return the players, and they can't transfer the music they already purchased onto their new devices... The Department of Corrections, meanwhile, has collected $1.4 million in commissions on each song downloaded and other related sales since July 2011... JPay already operates banking accounts and facilitates phone calls at the state-run prisons, charging inmates and their loved ones steep fees for the services. With the introduction of tablets, JPay will add a wide swath of new spending incentives for its incarcerated customers, offering purchases of music, emailing and other virtual fare.
As a compromise, prison officials offered to download the already-purchased music to a CD, and then mail that CD to someone outside the prison. For a $25 fee.
Since bought tracks on itunes dont have DRM, yes.
Especially, the ones horribly disfigured by random US bombings.
There's no point trying to win the support of prisoners - they can't vote,.
They're trying to change that here in California.
https://ballotpedia.org/Califo...
No. I do not agree with this and plan on voting against it.
-- Will program for bandwidth
It would stop the DA from throwing every charge at you hoping something sticks. When I was arrested for my crimes one of the charged was 'kidnapping' it was added to try to scare me, and to make sure bail was higher than any normal person could ever afford. That should be illegal.
Wouldn't this end up with MORE time stacked onto the these prisoner's sentence? Wouldn't this end up with MORE cost to the U.S. taxpayers for court time and incarceration time?
No. Instead you'd see people getting a sensible tariff for their crimes, including freedom for those that committed none.
"80 years if you fight or 8 years if you plea guilty to this lesser crime" isn't justice. Either they committed crimes society deemed worthy of an 80 year jail term or they did not. The one thing that's pretty fucking certain is that they didn't commit a crime worth an 8 year punishment.
So try them for the crimes they're alleged to have committed. If you only want them in prison for 8 years, change the tariffs for those crimes so that a judge can give them 8 years.
Right now people plead guilty because of coercion, fear and the cost of fighting to prove their innocence. That's not justice, and "justice is too expensive" is if anything worse.