The Big Business of Prisoner Care Packages

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2017/12/21/the-big-business-of-prisoner-care-packages

by scarface74 • 9 years ago

86 40 9 years ago

ec109685• 9 years ago

Bleh, the worse thing in the article are examples where the same goods are 2x the cost in one jail versus the other, despite being from the same provider. Allowing the gauging of families of folks in jail is foolish.

tyingq6• 9 years ago

In the US, at least, they milk the prisoner's families every way they can. Charges for phone calls, web-to-paper letters, commissary items, and so forth. They also withhold basic necessities like soap, toilet paper, toothpaste, etc, to drive up sales. And, policies like 2 meals a day (instead of 3) on weekends. They even take the first $100 of your prison account for health care charges. It's an embarrassment for a first world country.

Combined with the now ubiquitous cheap online background checks, one felony is enough to ruin your life forever. You end up being dependant on family members for life. The justice system in the US is built around some Puritan idea of punishment, with no notion of rehabilitation.

Source: Am one of those family members supporting a felon.

drefanzor• 9 years ago

It's especially fun when they do inmate-led fundraisers, which means that they can get Subway, Pizza Hut, or other "street food", and charge the inmates triple, and then the fundraiser money goes into the yards pockets. Or the fact that they have their prison workforce doing jobs in small towns by the complex for $8 - $10 an hour and the inmate gets $0.50 - $1.00 of it. Prison labor like that is also something a "first world" country should be ashamed of. For-profit prisons should be outlawed.

anigbrowl3• 9 years ago

Not-fun fact: jpay even charges $5 every time you add credit to an account. Now they're even starting to abolish in-person visitationa t some jails and prisons and force family members to use video visitation, because they can make money out of it.

I look forward tot he day when a lot of these predators are forced to swap places with the people they were abusing.

phil21• 9 years ago

one felony is enough to ruin your life forever.

This is by far the worst part. Almost all felonies are economic death sentences these days. There is no turning over a new leaf and getting a fresh start.

hackermailman2• 9 years ago

TDCJ you get indignant inmate package of a few stamps and paper per month, baking soda to brush your teeth and for makeshift deodorant, a tiny toothbrush once every 3 years and that's it. None of the jobs you do allow you to earn money, so inmates all trade or hustle for things from commissary such as shampoo.

In contrast, Arizona prison system has outside employment contractors where inmates can earn min wage, and when they are released X years later they often have savings in the tens of thousands to support them with a soft landing so they can go to school, or just get an apartment.

snuxoll2• 9 years ago

But we as a society see prison as punishment, why should they get all of these goods in the first place? The whole thing boggles my mind personally, we supposedly want to reduce recidivism but how is treating prisoners the way we do in any way helping them return to society (save for the background check and sex offender registries doing extra damage on top).

gamechangr• 9 years ago

A rich founder should take this companies on and bleed them dry.

This is one place I would love to see Amazon undercut the competition and give real value to the people who need it most.

syedkarim• 9 years ago

The decision makers are not particularly concerned about superior alternative vendors or value for those that need it most.

tyingq6• 9 years ago

Hard to disrupt when the decision criteria is the value of the kickbacks.

JumpCrisscross• 9 years ago

Limited upside, bad press on the downside and incendiary social media reactions for any minor thing they do wrong. There are areas in which our culture does not permit risk taking.

rhcom2• 9 years ago

We could at least restore democracy to exconvicts and give them a political voice.

mcherm• 9 years ago

A rich founder should take this companies on and bleed them dry.

It can't be done. The way to win the contract is to offer the biggest kickback to the prison. One cannot pay such a big kickback without gouging prisoners and their families.

newfoundglory• 9 years ago

That's why they specified rich founder - someone who doesn't need to cover the costs through the business income.

shostack• 9 years ago

Sounds like the only option is to abolish for-profit prisons, which is obviously easier said than done.

essayist4• 9 years ago

I'm the point person for a church parish group supporting an incarcerated prisoner who'll likely be in for another eight years and this is what we deal with all the time.

Combine the ambivalence that people will feel about most offenders with legitimate security requirements (especially those designed to defeat opioid smuggling) with security BS with business profiteering, and you've got a toxic mix that, usually, whittles away the outside support and community connections most prisoners have.

We're a relatively wealthy group, with lots of retired people, and so there are people who can take the time to know the correspondence and book sending requirements, others who can make the 3 hour (each way) trip to visit with the prisoner once a month, others who can take phone calls. We reduced the cost of the calls for the calls from $25/fifteen minute call to "only" $3.50 through some Twilio VOIP call forwarding.

And I know all about Jpay. $0.40 for each email message (slightly less with the volume discount), plus the same again for each attachment (and at this point, only 40 cents for email seems cheap). The 10% fee for cash for the commissary (plus the prison takes a cut for the inmate's savings account).

We struggle to do what we need to do for our prisoner, and I can't bear to think about all the prisoners who are depending on just a few family members and friends who themselves are struggling to get by.

snuxoll2• 9 years ago

You’re a saint and make me feel incredibly guilty - I’ve got a friend who was recently sentenced to 25 years and I haven’t even bothered figuring out how to contact him or send him any money. Do you have any documentation on your twilio magic? I’d love to speak to him but I can’t stomach how much they charge for such basic things.

essayist4• 9 years ago

Thanks, and I'm so sorry about your friend. The Twilio magic is basic: buy a Twilio number that's as local as possible to the prison (say 999-#######), have it forward to the contact's real landline or cell (say 444-#######), then pay through connectnetwork.com for the 999 number to receive what are basically "collect" calls.

If you're just doing it for yourself, and you're not already using Google Voice (GV) or have a Google user id to spare, you can get the 999 local number through GV, and then have it forward to your landline/cell. That's a little cheaper than Twilio.

For Twilio, I use a "Twimlbin" for each number, see below. An added benefit is that the callee (the outside person taking the call) always sees the same caller id, and so can put that in their address book with a suitable label.

Connectnetwork also has a protocol (a little more complex and finicky than unattended collect calls) which require the callee to press the right keys to accept the calls (or to reject them). I sometimes get that wrong (one out of three times) and sometime the system seems finicky (I thought I did it right, but it still treats me as if I rejected the call). So our prisoner knows to call a few times.

If this is still complex, hit me up on email (in profile) or comment here. I'd be happy to help.

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <Response>
  <Dial timeout="20" callerId="1999#######">
  <Number>+1444#######</Number>
  </Dial>
  </Response>

Khelavaster• 9 years ago

Why not use investor money to fund lawyers to break into the system with a pre-baked highly competitive business model? Silicon Valley investors could legally bleed most correctional facilities dry and into submission.

anigbrowl3• 9 years ago

Why do you think this is an open market? where consumers have meaningful choices?

sandworm101• 9 years ago

Anyone else want one of the clear neo-steampunk typewriters?

peterburkimsher• 9 years ago

I'm curious to know more about the clear electronics. Are iPods allowed? What if they have their hard drives replaced by an iFlash SD adaptor, and run Rockbox?

hackermailman2• 9 years ago

Yes the massive fees of Jpay/iCare and all the other schemes like Union Supply Direct. I've always assumed no cheaper alternatives because you'd need to lobby some senator massive money to get your service allowed inside a state's prison system.

One thing I do is send prisoners things they can trade instead of Jpay account load fees, for example in a women's prison any magazine subscription that includes a lot of perfume samples they are worth their weight in gold inside the walls for trading. Good math books as well, such as Sheldon Axler's Pre-Calc book because it includes fully worked out answers instead of just magic answers, but unfortunately I can only find hardcover and some prisons still don't allow hardcover. You also have to use certain book companies, like Books A Million since they include invoices and you can be sure they are new books instead of Amazon where I've been screwed many times sending to inmates where even if it says 'fulfilled by Amazon' it ends up being a 3rd party vendor.

Best things you can have in jail is a radio to pick up local stations, something to trade with such as coffee, and letters from the outside on mail call because everybody waits for mail call. They have Jpay mp3 players now in some states which are of course ridiculously expensive.

If you know somebody in jail doing hard time, a good idea is learn something with them. Send them math books, do the books with them and trade letters. It's motivation because often I'd lapse behind and find out the friend I was writing had already slayed the next chapter and I didn't even start. My next Saturday morning was spent catching up. Math education has a half life of hundreds of years, perfect for prisoners.

I found vet books on animal care a great idea for prisoners who need a job upon release. Lot's of kennel companies will hire ex cons to start at the bottom cleaning kennels and administering meds, and they can take vet tech exams from there to move up. I sent Saunder's guides since most vet tech exams use these. Another good book is Kernighan's book 'D is for Digital' (renamed in recent editions), it's an excellent book to teach inmates how technology works when they've been in for a long time.

dogruck• 9 years ago

This article, and the comments to it here on HN, are written from a perspective that seems to ignore:

1. These prisoners are in prison for a reason, and

2. The severe, of then horribly violent, result of contraband in prisons.

This isn’t an article about care packages to nursing homes.

I await your immediate downvotes.

saryant• 9 years ago

Many of these prisoners will eventually be released back into society.

As their future neighbors, employers, coworkers, customers, seems like it's in our best interest for them to be somewhat ready for that transition. As taxpayers, it's in our best interest to keep the recidivism rate low, as prison is expensive. As humans, we should want our fellow humans treated with some basic standard of respect, even if they are someone we're scared of.

chillwaves• 9 years ago

Being whiny about downvotes doesn't excuse how dull and meritless your post is. People go to prison for all kinds of reasons, your blanket statement contributes nothing to the conversation and does not address the reality of gouging the loved ones of prisoners who are only trying to have some level of basic human contact, such as letters or phonecalls.

wungsten• 9 years ago

That may be true, but this system punishes the families trying to support their loved ones as much as it does the prisoners themselves.

mythrwy• 9 years ago

The fact that some persons in jail are truly awful doesn't justify monopolistic price gouging though.

The sentence was to be locked up. Not to be ripped off.

essayist4• 9 years ago

Let's argue in the realm of "should" for a bit.

Justice: What should a society permit itself in punishing prisoners (and let's stipulate that the ones we're talking about are guilty as charged, even though many many many are not.)

Is it ok to malnourish them? Is it ok to punish their families and friends, who haven't been convicted of crimes? Is it ok to deprive prisoners of outside contact? In other words, where to you draw the line? (And if you don't draw the line, Abu Ghraib is the next stop.)

Pragmatism: As others have noted, if you're going to admit a prisoner back into society in, say, five years, does it make sense to reduce their coping and job skills in prison so that they will likely do worse when they get out? And again, where do you draw the line?

Regarding contraband: it's even worse than you hint at, today. Prisons are taking all sorts of measures to keep opioids from getting in. You can soak a greeting card or letter paper in water soluble drugs which can then be extracted once the document is inside. So my friend now only get printed out scans of letters and cards, not the cards themselves.

So, yeah, security is an issue, too, but I don't think that justifies $25/fifteen minute phone calls, do you?

dang• 9 years ago

I await your immediate downvotes.

This breaks the HN guidelines. Doing that leads to HN prison. Please don't do that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The Big Business of Prisoner Care Packages

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