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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.
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.
Is Apple as accommodating when you chose to quit using iTunes?
Will your local cable company burn your 'legally purchased' movies to DVD when you switch to Sattelite TV?
Ken
Americans are horrible. Iraqis are horrible. Prisoners are horrible. The public are horrible. Because at the end, *people* are horrible. It's their instinctual nature: Care for your family, care for your friends, and everyone else is either an enemy or doesn't exist. Everything we have built and call society over ten thousand years of civilisation is devoted to managing this fundamental problem.
It's the new/old plan. Some people want to take the USA back to the days before 1863, but with some improvements. Here is the gameplan:
1. Pass laws to make several harmless activities illegal.
2. Incarcerate people under the above laws (bonus if the implementation of those laws tends to disproportionately incarcerate darker-skinned people)
3. Obtain the benefits of slavery of the incarcerated people.
4. Get the middle class to pay for the housing costs that in pre-1863 days the slave owner would have to pay.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
So, simple logic... if the number of prisoners is reasonable, allowing them to vote makes no difference on election outcomes. And if the number of prisoners is unreasonable, holy shit, we're disenfranchising a big set of society-- not letting them have any influence on the laws that have been used against them.
IMO "not letting prisoners/felons/etc" vote is a huge fuck-up/back door to democracy. All you need to do to erode the political influence of a class is criminalize things associated with that class.
Remember, 95% of inmates in the federal Gulag were coerced into making a false confession ("plea bargain"). They were NOT convicted by a jury of their peers. Their convictions are ipso facto illegitimate, and the kangaroo courts that sentenced them are contemptible.