Yep, that's about it. The prison has to seek a vendor for the service so they solicit quotes and get a vendor. Because the vendor has to perform maintenance on the physical equipment (although just TRY to get a broken phone fixed!), they have to have staff willing and able to enter the prison, generally in the presence of the inmates. I suspect this is the main reason that the local phone company is never the provider.
It's a little more subtle than that. Privatized prisons and jails account for less than 10% of current facilities. The exorbitant fees charged for calls are down to the private vendors that run the jail/prison phone systems. These systems are MONITORED by the facility but are OPERATED by the vendor.
The vendor provides the equipment and performs maintenance and they set the fees for calls. They have no incentive to provide inexpensive service.
The facility sets use policy and chooses vendors. They have little to no incentive to choose an inexpensive vendor.
This is simplicity itself. In most prisons and jails every cell has a light fixture and generally on outlet. There's your source. When I was a Federal Low, we had a charging station for the mp3 players they sold us on the Comissary. It used a USB micro, same as the phone I have now.
In the jails and prisons I was in, the money for the call goes to an outside vendor, not the facility.
Monitoring the prisoners call was done by the facility staff, not the vendor. Staff were expected to listen to (well, check in on), I think, four hours of telephone conversations during their 8 hour shift. They could fast forward through dull parts. there were only a couple of phones on each unit, so there was easily enough guard-hours to listen to everything a couple of times over. Not that many of the guards took this duty seriously.
Well, we're not very good at figuring out who is guilty and who isn't, so you're going to be shooting at least some innocent people. See the Innocence Project as background.
Also, violent criminals who think they are candidates for this are less likely to surrender peacefully, so we can look forward to more shootouts and hostage situations (in prison this is referred to as "holding court right out in the street"). Additionally, it makes less sense to leave witnesses alive so we'll have fewer surviving victims of crime.
While this would certainly deter some criminals, there are some police who are going to see this as a tool to get rid of some of those stinking $ETHNICITY, so that sucks.
How we treat our offenders is a better indicator of our natures than of our offenders' natures.
In the prisons I was in, it would be extremely hard to seal the facility. There were extensive outdoor areas and there were civilian residences and roads in the immediate vicinity. It would be hard, though not impossible, to draw those lines at the carrier level. For example, I passed through Federal Penitentiary Atlanta, which is literally inside Atlanta.
Even worse, inmates could spoof the GPS in the phone to move its precise location a little bit to be on the other side of the line.
I think a simpler answer is to put direction finding scanners in the facility and triangulate devices that make connections (obviously whitelist staff phones). Then have the Goon Squad bum rush the area where the phone is and strip search everybody. This is something that the guards are actually kind of good at. When the confiscation rate gets high enough and the cost of getting access to phones gets high enough, the problem will mostly go away.
Unfortunately, this requires spending money on new systems (not more barbed wire) and more actual work by administration and corrections officers.
Well, I think you should be trying to rehabilitate everybody in any prison, but I am biased. If someone has veered far enough outside the lines that we feel the need to incarcerate them, shouldn't we be trying to correct that?
Mostly, the segregation you are talking about happens by putting people in facilities with different security levels. Low level offenders go to low level facilities and hard guys go to higher level facilities. Guys with super low level crimes (Pub. Intox, single pill, personal consump. possession charges, etc.) usually do their time in jails rather than prisons, per se.
Actually, I think there was a drive toward rehabilitation in prison from the 60's to the late 80's, especially at the federal level. They claimed three purposes of incarceration; the three R's: Restraint (I'm not robbing more banks while I'm locked up), Retribution (punishment to help victims feel closure and serve as a deterrent to other), Rehabilitation (changing me so I am less likely to break the law after my eventual release).
Restraint clearly works. I robbed 0 banks during the entire time I was in prison. Retribution seems to work. I can't tell you how many people have told me they have always wanted to rob a bank but were too scared of the punishment. Rehabilitation pretty much left the federal system in 1987. Reagan and a couple of Supreme Court decisions effectively removed both the expectation and the reality of rehabilitative efforts. They gutted the the programming available to inmates, which had been quite extensive in some places.
In two county jails and two federal prisons I was in, the facility itself makes no money directly from phone calls. The phone services are provided by outside vendors/contractors. There is an argument to be made that there is nepotism and corruption in play, but I think you would have to examine that on a case by case basis.
I suspect the kickback model is the most popular. In the insider model, the Bush family is the most common suspect.
From my personal experience, most facilities' motivation not to seek a better deal for their inmates is a combination of laziness and a feeling that they need/want to punish the prisoners.
Your first two paragraphs are really about transfer pricing used for tax avoidance. That would be fixable if there were sufficient political will, but there isn't. Most transfer pricing used for this is immediately apparent when you examine common ownership of the licensor and licensee. This is not hidden because it is not illegal, in fact it is usually listed on the 10k forms public corps file with SEC in the US. This is why stock prices do not reflect the low profit levels of companies using this tactic (I'm looking at you, Nike).
Changing the tax structure to lure companies to repatriate their money is absolutely the wrong answer. Period. The government either has authority over those companies, or it doesn't. If it does, they should pay the tax demanded. If it doesn't, why should they pay any tax at all?
If the tax rate is fair, then the companies dodging it are wrong to do so. If the tax rate is unfair, then the appropriate answer is to change it, not cheat.
Importantly, the corporations are not the ones to determine if it is fair, that is the province of the elected representatives of the PEOPLE. Unfortunately, our legislatures are far more responsive to corporate input than the people right now, mostly because the people do not pay sufficient attention and have little patience with subtle factors. We respond to complex situations based on soundbites that resonate with us.
Finally, I hate the flat tax idea. Because of the law of diminishing marginal utility (too much to go into here) flat taxes are very regressive in outcome. This is just a fancy way of saying that x% tax hits a poor person harder than a rich person. It may slow the rate of growth of a rich person but will actually degrade a poor person's standard of living.
Beyond that, as far as simplifying the tax system, I'm with you. It is a mess.
Normally this is not one of my issues, but I felt compelled to offer a different interpretation. People in the United States are not powerless, they just THINK they are. When the electorate makes their wishes known to the leaders and then consistently punishes those leaders that will not attend them, the leaders soon start paying meaningful attention. As long as American voters believe they have no power, however, they do not act, and the leaders get whatever they want. This is important because the only countervailing force to corporate empowerment is governmental legislation.
Sad anecdote - Two millennials with whom I work were complaining bitterly about Trump's victory. Later in the conversation I asked them about where they voted and both innocently admitted that they had not voted.
No, we're not mostly talking about private prisons. We're talking about almost every jail and prison in this country, and private facilities are a TINY minority. The telephone service is provided by a private vendor who contracts with the prison system in question and THEY are for profit, and HUGELY profitable. They are monopoly providers of a desperately desired service. They are blood sucking leaches. But they have nothing to do with the private prisons per se.
I see others have mentioned the federal law against cell jamming, but I don't think that's the best solution,either. There is a company selling cell phone signal detection systems to prisons, I saw some of their press stuff while I was locked up. This system learns which calls are from staff phones and ignores them while finding others. With multiple antennas it can triangulate and ignores phones outside the prison. This way you know immediately when and where an inmate is using a cell phone. Then the guards bum-rush the area and strip search everybody. When the inmates lose so many phones so fast it stops being worth getting them in and the problem goes away. Expensive to start but effective and inexpensive to run.
I suspect the point was that if you are calling your facility "maximum security," then that implies certain things about it, i.e., it's hard to escape from. For an inmate to escape from a max with no tools other than a pair of wire-cutters is farcical. It's like the Keystone Kops running a prison. We're talking Fisher-Price security, here. That's why he said the drone wasn't the problem.
Security can be what I call "policy security" (what you train your people to do) or what I call "infrastructural security" (how you build the facility and how you use technology). They are clearly relying on policy security and neglecting infrastructural security. Maybe this is a funding problem that is beyond their control, but that prison should probably not be designated as maximum security. That's the problem.
I see others have mentioned the federal law against cell jamming, but I don't think that's the best solution,either. There is a company selling cell phone signal detection systems to prisons, I saw some of their press stuff while I was locked up. This system learns which calls are from staff phones and ignores them while finding others. With multiple antennas it can triangulate and ignores phones outside the prison. This way you know immediately when and where an inmate is using a cell phone. Then the guards bum-rush the area and strip search everybody. When the inmates lose so many phones so fast it stops being worth getting them in and the problem goes away. Expensive to start but effective and inexpensive to run.
In the Feds you can be convicted even if there is no 'actual' harm. If the victim of your hate-speech 'reasonably' felt threatened, you are at risk of conviction. Note that this depends on a state existing in the head of someone who heard your speech.
Um, actually, you might be. There are people in prison for speech that was ruled as intended to precipitate illegal acts. Often without the illegal acts ever occurring.
If you make a speech saying "Someone ought to shoot that stupid SOB!" and then someone DOES actually shoot him, you are at the mercy of the prosecutor, especially in the Feds. Especially if the 'victim' is a member of a protected class.
I remember a guy who was convicted for preaching on some private church Facebook page that someone should kill his ex-wife. One of the appeals courts overturned the conviction because he had previously unfriended everyone on the page in question - he thought nobody was reading it. He still spent a couple of years in jail/prison, though.
This is a bit off-topic, but oddly sometimes you can pick your jail. Kind of. This is important because if you get arrested and go to prison, THE WORST TIME YOU WILL DO IS IN COUNTY.
There are two jails in my city*. If you get arrested by the Feds, you can ask them to take you to whichever you prefer (one is miles better). Sometimes they will.
When you're in jail, you can call your Atty and tell him that the 'Bloods' (or, you know, Crips, whatever) are threatening you. Often they will transfer you to a different jail.
Often, you can fake a suicide attempt and get sent to the nearest secure psychiatric facility. I knew a guy who did this, it was like magic.
Finally, in the Feds, just calling the Marshals** to complain about the facility can sometimes trigger a move.
*1 - County jail run by the Sherrif's Office. Staffed by deputies. Basically a steel and concrete dungeon with lots of violence.
2 - Private jail run by CCA. Staffed by "corrections officers". Immensely frustrating, but clean and pretty safe.
** In addition to chasing fugitives, the U. S. Marshals are responsible for most of the movement of Federal Prison inmates. They are who run the Con Air flights (on which I flew once - not as cool as the movie).
In the Feds at least, inmates cannot call 1-800 numbers. They can only call numbers on a pre-approved list, each assigned to a particular person. Numbers that can go to multiple people introduces the risk of what they call third-party communication. That's a non-starter.
Also, they cannot use calling cards of any type. All phone traffic for inmates is carried by the approved vendor and is charged at their rates.
Finally, the dial pad no longer works on (at least some) inmate phones once the call is connected. Attempting to dial additional digits can result in your call being disconnected, although I think this is not standard at all prisons.
State prisons and county jails each have their own arrangements, but many are similar to the Feds'.
In all Federal Prisons and some states the prisoners do pay for their own calls using money in their commissary account. Having said that, most prisoners in my prison did rely on their families sending them money for calls.
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Yes, that's what I was pointing out to the comment I was replying to.
Yep, that's about it. The prison has to seek a vendor for the service so they solicit quotes and get a vendor. Because the vendor has to perform maintenance on the physical equipment (although just TRY to get a broken phone fixed!), they have to have staff willing and able to enter the prison, generally in the presence of the inmates. I suspect this is the main reason that the local phone company is never the provider.
It's a little more subtle than that. Privatized prisons and jails account for less than 10% of current facilities. The exorbitant fees charged for calls are down to the private vendors that run the jail/prison phone systems. These systems are MONITORED by the facility but are OPERATED by the vendor.
The vendor provides the equipment and performs maintenance and they set the fees for calls. They have no incentive to provide inexpensive service.
The facility sets use policy and chooses vendors. They have little to no incentive to choose an inexpensive vendor.
This is simplicity itself. In most prisons and jails every cell has a light fixture and generally on outlet. There's your source. When I was a Federal Low, we had a charging station for the mp3 players they sold us on the Comissary. It used a USB micro, same as the phone I have now.
Turns out it's pretty hard. Don't think they haven't tried.
In the jails and prisons I was in, the money for the call goes to an outside vendor, not the facility.
Monitoring the prisoners call was done by the facility staff, not the vendor. Staff were expected to listen to (well, check in on), I think, four hours of telephone conversations during their 8 hour shift. They could fast forward through dull parts. there were only a couple of phones on each unit, so there was easily enough guard-hours to listen to everything a couple of times over. Not that many of the guards took this duty seriously.
Well, we're not very good at figuring out who is guilty and who isn't, so you're going to be shooting at least some innocent people. See the Innocence Project as background.
Also, violent criminals who think they are candidates for this are less likely to surrender peacefully, so we can look forward to more shootouts and hostage situations (in prison this is referred to as "holding court right out in the street"). Additionally, it makes less sense to leave witnesses alive so we'll have fewer surviving victims of crime.
While this would certainly deter some criminals, there are some police who are going to see this as a tool to get rid of some of those stinking $ETHNICITY, so that sucks.
How we treat our offenders is a better indicator of our natures than of our offenders' natures.
In the prisons I was in, it would be extremely hard to seal the facility. There were extensive outdoor areas and there were civilian residences and roads in the immediate vicinity. It would be hard, though not impossible, to draw those lines at the carrier level. For example, I passed through Federal Penitentiary Atlanta, which is literally inside Atlanta.
Even worse, inmates could spoof the GPS in the phone to move its precise location a little bit to be on the other side of the line.
I think a simpler answer is to put direction finding scanners in the facility and triangulate devices that make connections (obviously whitelist staff phones). Then have the Goon Squad bum rush the area where the phone is and strip search everybody. This is something that the guards are actually kind of good at. When the confiscation rate gets high enough and the cost of getting access to phones gets high enough, the problem will mostly go away.
Unfortunately, this requires spending money on new systems (not more barbed wire) and more actual work by administration and corrections officers.
Also, it attracts a certain personality type that enjoys having immense power over helpless people.
Well, I think you should be trying to rehabilitate everybody in any prison, but I am biased. If someone has veered far enough outside the lines that we feel the need to incarcerate them, shouldn't we be trying to correct that?
Mostly, the segregation you are talking about happens by putting people in facilities with different security levels. Low level offenders go to low level facilities and hard guys go to higher level facilities. Guys with super low level crimes (Pub. Intox, single pill, personal consump. possession charges, etc.) usually do their time in jails rather than prisons, per se.
Actually, I think there was a drive toward rehabilitation in prison from the 60's to the late 80's, especially at the federal level. They claimed three purposes of incarceration; the three R's: Restraint (I'm not robbing more banks while I'm locked up), Retribution (punishment to help victims feel closure and serve as a deterrent to other), Rehabilitation (changing me so I am less likely to break the law after my eventual release).
Restraint clearly works. I robbed 0 banks during the entire time I was in prison.
Retribution seems to work. I can't tell you how many people have told me they have always wanted to rob a bank but were too scared of the punishment.
Rehabilitation pretty much left the federal system in 1987. Reagan and a couple of Supreme Court decisions effectively removed both the expectation and the reality of rehabilitative efforts. They gutted the the programming available to inmates, which had been quite extensive in some places.
Convicted felon here.
In two county jails and two federal prisons I was in, the facility itself makes no money directly from phone calls. The phone services are provided by outside vendors/contractors. There is an argument to be made that there is nepotism and corruption in play, but I think you would have to examine that on a case by case basis.
I suspect the kickback model is the most popular. In the insider model, the Bush family is the most common suspect.
From my personal experience, most facilities' motivation not to seek a better deal for their inmates is a combination of laziness and a feeling that they need/want to punish the prisoners.
Your first two paragraphs are really about transfer pricing used for tax avoidance. That would be fixable if there were sufficient political will, but there isn't. Most transfer pricing used for this is immediately apparent when you examine common ownership of the licensor and licensee. This is not hidden because it is not illegal, in fact it is usually listed on the 10k forms public corps file with SEC in the US. This is why stock prices do not reflect the low profit levels of companies using this tactic (I'm looking at you, Nike).
Changing the tax structure to lure companies to repatriate their money is absolutely the wrong answer. Period. The government either has authority over those companies, or it doesn't. If it does, they should pay the tax demanded. If it doesn't, why should they pay any tax at all?
If the tax rate is fair, then the companies dodging it are wrong to do so. If the tax rate is unfair, then the appropriate answer is to change it, not cheat.
Importantly, the corporations are not the ones to determine if it is fair, that is the province of the elected representatives of the PEOPLE. Unfortunately, our legislatures are far more responsive to corporate input than the people right now, mostly because the people do not pay sufficient attention and have little patience with subtle factors. We respond to complex situations based on soundbites that resonate with us.
Finally, I hate the flat tax idea. Because of the law of diminishing marginal utility (too much to go into here) flat taxes are very regressive in outcome. This is just a fancy way of saying that x% tax hits a poor person harder than a rich person. It may slow the rate of growth of a rich person but will actually degrade a poor person's standard of living.
Beyond that, as far as simplifying the tax system, I'm with you. It is a mess.
Normally this is not one of my issues, but I felt compelled to offer a different interpretation. People in the United States are not powerless, they just THINK they are. When the electorate makes their wishes known to the leaders and then consistently punishes those leaders that will not attend them, the leaders soon start paying meaningful attention.
As long as American voters believe they have no power, however, they do not act, and the leaders get whatever they want.
This is important because the only countervailing force to corporate empowerment is governmental legislation.
Sad anecdote - Two millennials with whom I work were complaining bitterly about Trump's victory. Later in the conversation I asked them about where they voted and both innocently admitted that they had not voted.
In the Feds many of the Pens (Maximum Security prisons) are putting netting over the Recreation Yards
No, we're not mostly talking about private prisons. We're talking about almost every jail and prison in this country, and private facilities are a TINY minority. The telephone service is provided by a private vendor who contracts with the prison system in question and THEY are for profit, and HUGELY profitable. They are monopoly providers of a desperately desired service. They are blood sucking leaches. But they have nothing to do with the private prisons per se.
May I suggest you use Google maps to look up United States Penitentiary Atlanta
I see others have mentioned the federal law against cell jamming, but I don't think that's the best solution,either. There is a company selling cell phone signal detection systems to prisons, I saw some of their press stuff while I was locked up. This system learns which calls are from staff phones and ignores them while finding others. With multiple antennas it can triangulate and ignores phones outside the prison. This way you know immediately when and where an inmate is using a cell phone. Then the guards bum-rush the area and strip search everybody. When the inmates lose so many phones so fast it stops being worth getting them in and the problem goes away. Expensive to start but effective and inexpensive to run.
I suspect the point was that if you are calling your facility "maximum security," then that implies certain things about it, i.e., it's hard to escape from. For an inmate to escape from a max with no tools other than a pair of wire-cutters is farcical. It's like the Keystone Kops running a prison. We're talking Fisher-Price security, here. That's why he said the drone wasn't the problem.
Security can be what I call "policy security" (what you train your people to do) or what I call "infrastructural security" (how you build the facility and how you use technology). They are clearly relying on policy security and neglecting infrastructural security. Maybe this is a funding problem that is beyond their control, but that prison should probably not be designated as maximum security. That's the problem.
I see others have mentioned the federal law against cell jamming, but I don't think that's the best solution,either. There is a company selling cell phone signal detection systems to prisons, I saw some of their press stuff while I was locked up. This system learns which calls are from staff phones and ignores them while finding others. With multiple antennas it can triangulate and ignores phones outside the prison. This way you know immediately when and where an inmate is using a cell phone. Then the guards bum-rush the area and strip search everybody. When the inmates lose so many phones so fast it stops being worth getting them in and the problem goes away. Expensive to start but effective and inexpensive to run.
In the Feds you can be convicted even if there is no 'actual' harm. If the victim of your hate-speech 'reasonably' felt threatened, you are at risk of conviction. Note that this depends on a state existing in the head of someone who heard your speech.
Um, actually, you might be. There are people in prison for speech that was ruled as intended to precipitate illegal acts. Often without the illegal acts ever occurring.
If you make a speech saying "Someone ought to shoot that stupid SOB!" and then someone DOES actually shoot him, you are at the mercy of the prosecutor, especially in the Feds. Especially if the 'victim' is a member of a protected class.
I remember a guy who was convicted for preaching on some private church Facebook page that someone should kill his ex-wife. One of the appeals courts overturned the conviction because he had previously unfriended everyone on the page in question - he thought nobody was reading it. He still spent a couple of years in jail/prison, though.
This is a bit off-topic, but oddly sometimes you can pick your jail. Kind of. This is important because if you get arrested and go to prison, THE WORST TIME YOU WILL DO IS IN COUNTY.
There are two jails in my city*. If you get arrested by the Feds, you can ask them to take you to whichever you prefer (one is miles better). Sometimes they will.
When you're in jail, you can call your Atty and tell him that the 'Bloods' (or, you know, Crips, whatever) are threatening you. Often they will transfer you to a different jail.
Often, you can fake a suicide attempt and get sent to the nearest secure psychiatric facility. I knew a guy who did this, it was like magic.
Finally, in the Feds, just calling the Marshals** to complain about the facility can sometimes trigger a move.
*1 - County jail run by the Sherrif's Office. Staffed by deputies. Basically a steel and concrete dungeon with lots of violence.
2 - Private jail run by CCA. Staffed by "corrections officers". Immensely frustrating, but clean and pretty safe.
** In addition to chasing fugitives, the U. S. Marshals are responsible for most of the movement of Federal Prison inmates. They are who run the Con Air flights (on which I flew once - not as cool as the movie).
In the Feds at least, inmates cannot call 1-800 numbers. They can only call numbers on a pre-approved list, each assigned to a particular person. Numbers that can go to multiple people introduces the risk of what they call third-party communication. That's a non-starter.
Also, they cannot use calling cards of any type. All phone traffic for inmates is carried by the approved vendor and is charged at their rates.
Finally, the dial pad no longer works on (at least some) inmate phones once the call is connected. Attempting to dial additional digits can result in your call being disconnected, although I think this is not standard at all prisons.
State prisons and county jails each have their own arrangements, but many are similar to the Feds'.
In all Federal Prisons and some states the prisoners do pay for their own calls using money in their commissary account. Having said that, most prisoners in my prison did rely on their families sending them money for calls.
Thank you.