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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.
the wrong people are in prison.
How is it that being incarcerated time and again turns out to make you a legal target for scamming?
This is stupid on so many levels. The simplest of which is that if you want to correct inmates' behaviour, it does make a difference what sort of example you're setting. Or hire others to set.
So the lawful purchases they made should be taken away and then they should be charged again to keep it? That's not justice. That's right up there with the RIAA policy/opinion that if I have my house burglarized, I'm legally obligated to delete the legal MP3's I have in my itunes library just because the physical CD's were stolen.
I had a sucky sig.
it's that nobody cares. For one thing politicians are terrified being soft on them will backfire ever since Willie Horton. And to be blunt "tough on crime" plays very well with the dog whistle crowd while disproportionately impacting the poor. As an added bonus incarcerating all those people takes them out of the voter poll (usually permanently, since most states make it really hard to get your rights back). That puts a lot of political pressure on politicians to come down like a ton of bricks.
Me? It's 2018 for God's sake. There is no excuse for punishment anymore. We're adults. Either rehabilitate the person or keep them locked up and in reasonable comfort until they die. Vengeance has no place in a modern society, if for no other reason than it will eventually be turned on us all.
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The punishment is their immobility, as well as the lifelong criminal record that permanently eliminates most of their job opportunities.
Torture, however, is not part of the punishment. Since we are keeping them prisoner, regardless of what they have done, it is on us to ensure that they are kept healthy, which includes mental health, which includes access to music.
While true, it isn't supposed to be a luxury resort, that is a clear fallacy of excluded middle. The goal isn't to make them suffer as much as we can get away with, that's petty and wrong.
How a society treats its criminals serves as a testament to how morally and culturally advanced that society is.
It just teaches these people that right or wrong does not matter, what matters is who has more power. The message does not get more problematic than this.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Is the government going to forcibly make me give up my current cable company?
I understand the sentiment that this is prison and this is a 'first world' sort of prison problem, but it's part of a pattern of private sector exploitation of prisoners. Prisoners should not be seen as a profit engine. There's debate about reform versus punitive, but in either case I don't see it as a good thing for private corps to have financial incentive to wish for more prisoners.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I've had the misfortune of experiencing the system and left it a few years ago. Torture is an inevitable part of it. There is no way that I can communicate to you the damaging effects of years of isolation from society, from human contact, and from information. After about 3 years in prison, even if I could have gotten a decent job back after getting out, I could not have recovered from the effects of the isolation and constant threat of violence even though I managed to avoid being beat up at any point. The PTSD that resulted has lessened now, but will always be there.
Occupying a place in society requires skills that don't get practiced in prison. Some of them are even physical. It took years after getting out for my brain to readjust to being able to process the visual and auditory complexity of shopping in a WalMart without suffering a severe panic attack. Years of absolute uniformity in my environment had atrophied my brain's ability to process my environment. After four years, I have regained a functional level of processing, but it is far below the environmental awareness that I had before. I know that I am not as safe a driver and I still get a bit of brain fog due to overload when facing large crowds.
The system could work to minimize this, but they actually work to maximize it. No matter the feelings of those voting for the system, the people who actually choose to work in prisons are usually there with the belief that those in prison are worthless, should never get out, and that their families are better off if they cut all ties.
The result is that visitation has plummeted over the last few decades. Decades ago, people understood that prisoners needed community contact. In the case of the medium security facility I'm familiar with, vocation programs in prison actually went into communities and performed charity work. The prison ball teams often played on community leagues. When prisoners got out, they often had a place to go to. Today, the community interaction has been stopped and prisoners from that institution are often dropped off at the steps of the courthouse they were convicted at with a couple hundred dollars they managed to save while in prison working at less than $1 an hour and a single set of clothes on their backs.
On top of that, yeh, families routinely pay as much as $1 a minute to talk to their loved ones over the phone. The menus of the food in prison are never followed. If a recipe calls for 180 pounds of meat to make the volume required, the cook will typically be handed 50 pounds instead. The items in commissary are routinely over priced. A $0.10 pouch of Ramen noodles sells for $0.50 to inmates who make $25 / month as janitors. Guards will let people steal what little you've acquired if you ever complain. Book donations to the library by the public were stopped years ago. Medical care is often too risky to use. Teeth are routinely pulled instead of filled. Pulling teeth involves simply smashing the tooth with a hammer and chisel and pulling out the pieces. Tylenol is what you get for the pain afterwards. And on and on.
I could go on forever, but I doubt I could get anyone to understand who hasn't been through it. I am a lucky one who had a family that never abandoned me. I survive. I will never again be able to be the productive member of society I was, nobody will give me a chance to actually return to real engineering, even at the bottom, and even though I would gladly work for less than twice minimum wage. Liability insurance doesn't usually allow it. But, I at least survive.