Free prison phone calls boost family ties, rehabilitation

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2023-07-27/free-calls-restore-inmates-ties-with-the-outside-can-they-reform-californias-prisons-too

by ohjeez • 3 years ago

394 168 3 years ago

latimes.com

nameless912• 3 years ago

This is one of those findings that feels so unbelievably obvious. Of _course_ giving prisoners the ability to stay connected with the outside world helps rehabilitate them.

It also really highlights just how cruel for cruelty's sake our modern prison system is. I know there's an almost fetishistic worship of punishment in the US and many other countries with large prison populations as a method of "rehabilitation", but the data shows us that if you actually care about healing people (spoiler: the US does not), it's both not very expensive and extremely positive for society to do it right. It starts with free phone calls, work transition programs, reducing restrictions on jobs held by ex-felons, and other simple changes that cost a hell of a lot less than taking care of the broken souls our prisons churn out.

mrguyorama• 3 years ago

People always bring up that "90% of US prisons are public so it's not a private prison problem" but those public prisons all contract out things like food and communication and monitoring and anything else that's possible to private companies.

Nobody should profit off of prison, period.

ROTMetro4• 3 years ago

Don't forget the per minute charge to use kiosk computers to send electronic communication with family, or the pay to use phone app for family members to get those same communications.

Or that you have to buy any medications sold in commissary from there and won't be given them at medical (which costs $5 a visit when you don't make $5 a month) like aspirin at the for profit commissary that buys from jacked up 'prison commissary' distributors and has a way shorter than what you buy in the store expiration date. Keep in mind you are not allowed to share 'medication' and that having expired 'medication' in your locker can be a shot (writeup, potential loss of good time, potential to have your security points increased and shipped to a higher security(i.e. less safe) prison).

Avshalom2• 3 years ago

I've mentioned it before but Ruth Wilson Gilmore points out that prisons form a system of rural jobs programs. Tying together the 1980s farm crisis and the rise in incarceration

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farm_crisis#1980s_crisis

https://archive.org/details/goldengulagpriso00gilm

mcpackieh3• 3 years ago

If nobody sells food to prisons, then what will the prisoners eat? Do you propose that prisons be run as farms where prisoners are made to produce their own food? I've heard that prisons in South Korea work that way, but I've also heard that prisons in South Korea are brutal by even American standards, such that the US Military has an agreement with the South Korean government that any US servicemen put into Korean prisons will be fed more than a starvation diet. Apparently conditions in Korean prisons are such that an agreement like that is necessary.

Maybe, prisons buying food isn't the problem with American prisons.

arp242• 3 years ago

But the prison still gets to set the policy, no? Like how many minutes people can call, and what they can charge?

"Nobody should profit off of prison, period" is very simplistic: the electricity company makes a profit; the store selling bread, sausages, milk, potatoes, and whatnot makes a profit; the supplier selling books makes a profit; AT&T will make a profit from the phone lines regardless, just as they make a profit off phone lines to offices, etc. etc.

The problem isn't private companies: it's the prison officials. How much of that revenue goes back to the prison? A substantial amount I bet. That's why they do it; that a private company is involved isn't all that important. Yes, it's exploitive and counter-productive, but few seem to care as prisons are for evil people who deserve to be assraped on a daily basis anyway, and anything more than bread & water is a luxury.

This fully fits with the general attitude that exists in the US towards criminals. This is a country that puts 9-year olds in full leg and arm shackles for stealing bubble gum[1] (putting a kid like that in court is already dubious), and there are plenty of examples ranging from the existence of the "innocence project" to all the drug tests for employment, etc. etc. What is wrong with you people?

[1] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/02/courts-shackle-...

P_I_Staker3• 3 years ago

Right, the criminal industrial complex is a problem, just not private prisons... they are, I just mean insofar as being a significant factor today.

We're happy to send people to public prisons, and they're not that many private ones.

nonameiguess• 3 years ago

I'm sure it's a multifactorial problem, but I have a hard time seeing direct profit as being the original cause of this issue, as opposed to a parasitic growth that developed on top of it. The core issue has to be the basic voter fear and attitude that so harshly punished any politician of the 80s and 90s who was seen to be "soft on crime." Misdemeanors converted to felonies. Mandatory minimum sentences were introduced. Police got free military surplus gear and became more of a hostile occupying force than part of the community.

There's discord between the discussion in this thread and discussion any time the subject of San Francisco policing comes up. They're too soft and let crime happen. They ignore shoplifters. People are just shitting in the streets. Okay, well what do you want the police to do? It seems the options are you either kill petty shoplifters and homeless people or you send them to prison. But then the same people will complain about exploding prison populations.

Am I lacking in creativity? Because there are three options I can see:

- Create a society where even unskilled, somewhat antisocial people who went through great trauma as children do well enough that they don't turn to crime, and actually treat those who are so mentally ill that they'll be long-term homeless virtually no matter what.

- Allow some amount of non-lethal crime to happen and live with it.

- Put massive amounts of people in prison.

It seems like voters have converged on the third as their preference, not because they're being brainwashed by private prisons and corrupt corrections officer unions, but because the first option is too expensive and the second option would mean they need to see human shit and broken windows when they're walking around the city. At least prisons tend to be in the middle of the desert or swamp where it's out of sight, someone else's problem.

grecy• 3 years ago

Nobody should profit off of prison, period.

Of course they shouldn't, and they shouldn't profit off of healthcare, or higher education or a bunch of other things either.

Which one is actually going to get fixed?

None of them, because the goal is making money, and it's working really well.

cameldrv• 3 years ago

Having no contact with anyone except convicted criminals and prison guards for a long time has to change a person.

teeray• 3 years ago

“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with” applies here

hkt3• 3 years ago

I forget where the term comes from, but in some social science there's a conception of prisons as "universities of crime"

pie4202• 3 years ago

Now apply that logic to homeless people.

swayvil2• 3 years ago

99% of our movies involve "the good guy" beating down "the bad guy".

It's some kind of deep-rooted psychological thing. Permanent pubescent power fantasies.

Is it a plague of bad taste? A conspiracy to make everybody dumber?

fnimick3• 3 years ago

My personal take is that it's a stress response in the US. Our society and economic system has evolved to put the vast majority of people one or two paychecks away from poverty. When you feel like your life is miserable, and you have no hope of improving it, it feels good to see righteous violence done to someone lesser.

CobrastanJorji• 3 years ago

A similar example: educating prisoners reduces recidivism. Feels obvious, right? Education leads to jobs, jobs lead to money, money means less need to do crime. But then you get these "whaddya mean prisoners get free college but I have to pay, prison should be a punishment" takes, and so whenever one of these programs gets too effective and popular, it's liable to get killed. This is actually the first year Pell grants have been available to prisoners since it was banned 30 years ago.

ipcress_file• 3 years ago

I was at Millhaven, a maximum security institution in Ontario, a few years ago. The prisoners told me that only 10 of them could attend university courses at a time. The librarian confirmed it.

pohuing• 3 years ago

But then you get these...

They're not even wrong. But isn't the obvious answer to make higher education accessible to everyone, instead of just those with capital?!

amatecha• 3 years ago

"whaddya mean prisoners get free college but I have to pay"

When people say that shit (because they do), I respond: yeah, hahah, that's a good point isn't it? :) Why doesn't everyone get free college? :)

Georgelemental3• 3 years ago

The primary purpose of prisons is to keep criminals out of the streets and physically unable to re-offend. Punishment and/or rehabilitation are at most distant secondary considerations.

Tronno• 3 years ago

If that were true, then why do prison sentences have an end date?

7952• 3 years ago

It is a false dichotomy. We could have both.

yodsanklai• 3 years ago

I know there's an almost fetishistic worship of punishment in the US

Another side of the US, the idea that everything has to be a business, in that case, charging prisoners to make phone calls.

qingcharles8• 3 years ago

I spent 10 years in pretrial detention and 99% of the time there was zero to do except look at the walls. The system doesn't want to do anything to help you. You have to make your own re-education inside.

superchroma• 3 years ago

Exactly this.

falcolas• 3 years ago

This research won't matter for prisoners in the US.

We (Americans at large) send criminals to prison for punishment, not rehab. It's why we care so little about their treatment while in prison. Why we make rape jokes about prisoners. Why we rarely get angry about prisoners dying in prisons.

And that's when they aren't sources of revenue for private companies.

Yes, I'm to angry about this state of affairs to even begin to think it can be changed.

guerrilla3• 3 years ago

And that's when they aren't sources of revenue for private companies.

*slaves

ROTMetro4• 3 years ago

The Thirteenth Amendment forbade slavery and involuntary servitude, “except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/prison-...

ROTMetro4• 3 years ago

Edit: To clarify, the court interprets this statute as baring rehabilitation considerations in Federal prison. A Federal Prison sentence has zero intention of being rehabilitative, by statute and Congressional intent:

Title 18 U.S. Code § 3582 - Imposition of a sentence of imprisonment

(a)Factors To Be Considered in Imposing a Term of Imprisonment.— The court, in determining whether to impose a term of imprisonment, and, if a term of imprisonment is to be imposed, in determining the length of the term, shall consider the factors set forth in section 3553(a) to the extent that they are applicable, recognizing that imprisonment is not an appropriate means of promoting correction and rehabilitation.

cutemonster• 3 years ago

Odd interpretation, I think. To me it sounds more as if those who wrote the text, meant "Don't keep people in prison for too long, transfer them elsewhere to some place better for rehab as soon as reasonable." But not "rehab is forbidden and prisoners should get bullied by sadists"

EA-3167• 3 years ago

What research? I read the article expecting a study, but it never even mentions the word "research" so that was a dud. The title OP is using here isn't the title from the article, which may be why people only reading the headline here might assume that the article delves into some sort of study, but it doesn't.

I have no dog in this fight, but I don't like how this is being treated as something academically sound, rather than an article that is basically a collection of vox pops.

Georgelemental3• 3 years ago

We (Americans at large) send criminals to prison for punishment, not rehab.

Mostly, we send them to prison so they are out of the streets and aren't committing more crimes. Their fate doesn't matter to us beyond that; out of sight, out of mind.

enlyth• 3 years ago

I am always amazed at the amount of online discussions where masses of people cheer on about prisoners getting raped in prison, as if that is some logical consequence of getting incarcerated and should be the default punishment in addition to the time done.

These people want retribution, not justice. It's scary and I don't want to live with the same people in society who think it's okay to think like this.

PartiallyTyped• 3 years ago

It’s all just another circus to keep the masses occupied, this one also acts as a deterrent. Too many people are comfortable with the death penalty, and too many see vigilantes favourably.

majormajor• 3 years ago

This research won't matter for prisoners in the US.

From the link:

This year California became the second state in the nation, and the largest to date, to mandate free calls in state prisons.

It's news that directly contradicts you, not research.

I think this is a HN headline auto-edit that impairs understanding, sadly: "California’s free prison calls are repairing estranged relationships and aiding rehabilitation" - removing "California's" and changing "are repairing" to "boost" significantly changes what it means.

commonlisp94• 3 years ago

prison for punishment, not rehab.

Prisons are already an idealistic institution, in the interest of being more humane. The alternative before was capital punishment, work camps, or slavery (including in war). That's not to say prisons are ok in their current state, or can't be improvement. I just don't think rehab was historically the primary intent.

qingcharles8• 3 years ago

Prisons on the scale we have now are a very modern invention. In history the vast majority of crimes were punished with fines (good for the government), expulsion or fairly petty physical punishments.

This is one of the best researched books on the subject, IMO:

https://www.amazon.com/Oxford-History-Prison-Practice-Punish...

tehwebguy2• 3 years ago

Why we rarely get angry about prisoners dying in prisons.

Another reason for this one is that departments in charge of prisons try to keep prison deaths quiet[0] and refuse to perform autopsies for months[1]

[0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/06/deaths-at-rikers-cit...

The City reported on Thursday that the New York City Department of Correction will no longer notify the media when a person dies while incarcerated, ending a consistent process that has been in effect for two years. “That was a practice, not a policy,” Frank Dwyer, the department’s new spokesman, told the outlet.

[1] https://twitter.com/keribla/status/1639033487603933186?

bequanna• 3 years ago

No, we send people to prison to remove them from society so they stop harming others.

These largely aren’t people who were committing minor crimes like selling weed, they are people who have repeatedly proven themselves to be dangerous, violent and antisocial.

foogazi• 3 years ago

In June, the overall prison phone bill increased more than tenfold, to nearly $2.4 million.

They should look into getting an unlimited minutes plan

OO000oo• 3 years ago

Then how would the phone company executives be able to afford the campaign donations?

andrewstuart• 3 years ago

US prison systems appear to want to brutalize prisoners at every opportunity.

Exactly what is the punishment?

Is the punishment loss of liberty for a period of time?

Or is the idea that for a period of time you are subjected to whatever punishments and humiliations and dehumanization the system can hit you with?

AlexandrB• 3 years ago

If you watch US media it's obviously the latter. Otherwise there wouldn't be so many jokes about "pound you in the ass" prison. Prison sexual assault is often even cited as a positive when talking about criminals like rapists of pedophiles.

Georgelemental3• 3 years ago

The main goal of the prison system is to keep criminals apart from society, preventing them from re-offending as long as they are locked up. The conditions of the imprisonment don't matter at all from this perspective.

pessimizer• 3 years ago

We're not interested in rehabilitation in the US. We have parasites here who lobby against the relaxation of drug laws solely because they make money from the prison population. We elect presidents with crackhead sons that are responsible for passing unbelievably draconian drug laws.

Of course allowing phone calls with family keeps connections with family secure, and of course secure connections with family reduces recidivism. This is the biggest non-discovery since a right-wing economist discovered that people who went bankrupt due to medical debt weren't all irresponsible people, and decided to go into politics as a champion of the working class, trading on that "scholarship."

When will people stop discovering the poor and the weak, and stop voting or actively lobbying against them? Prison phone calls have been a government-granted exploitation racket since forever, but somehow they're still legal. Our progressives hire an unofficial credit card lobbyist to be president, and shed crocodile tears for black people who are poorer than they were in 1995.

edit: here's my proposal. Let's not isolate prisoners from society at all. Let's allow reporters in every prison, give them facilities within the building to work, and let them talk to whoever, whenever, and report whatever. Let's take the opportunity that we have gained from nabbing an out of control person to bring them back into society, rather than push them out farther. Let them vote. Let them do remote work to pay off their victims, the state, and to support their families.

Prison should be where we put people in order to protect society, not a torture chamber.

voisin2• 3 years ago

Let’s cut the bullshit. Prisons have nothing to do with rehabilitation and everything to do with punishment and dissuading others. If there was any desire for rehabilitation, prisons would look a lot more like in-patient therapy. Phone calls would never have cost as much as they have, and books and other self-improvement tools would be freely available.

P_I_Staker3• 3 years ago

Someone else mentioned this and I don't think it's talked about enough: They're basically there to just warehouse shady people so they can't commit more crimes.

tyingq• 3 years ago

Shady people who couldn't afford a good lawyer.

qingcharles8• 3 years ago

Having spent a decade inside, that was the conclusion I came to. It basically keeps poor people off the streets.

icecream_so_gud3• 3 years ago

Prisons don't deter crime. They might give the impression of deterrence to honest individuals. However, I think everyone in prison believed they had a scheme, process, or system in order to evade detection; believed what they were doing was on the boundary of the law, but inside it; or they committed a crime of passion.

peterfirefly4• 3 years ago

Sounds like a good argument for longer sentences. If they can't be deterred (and many of them can't) and they can't be resocialized (and many of them can't), why let them out and ruin more lives?

voisin2• 3 years ago

I think a third category exists which is the largest percentage of people in the system: people in bad situations for whom it isn’t that they thought they’d get away with it nor was it a crime of passion. I.e. it wasn’t that they were bad people conniving nor were they good people temporarily inflamed into being bad people. These are the hopeless people in terrible circumstances (poor, inner city, falling into a gang as the only place they belonged, with no role models - as an example) who did bad things.

anon-uaSh1mur• 3 years ago

It's not just the costs that get you, but also the arbitrary minutes-per-month limit.

I was in federal prison for years. One week from release, I got an email about a friend in poor health. I had to pay by the minute to access that email account at a prison kiosk, by the way. One minute of email access cost roughly the same as what I was paid for a hour's labor at my prison job as a GED instructor.

I called my friend as soon as I could get access to a phone. I had 5 minutes left of my monthly minutes budget because I'd spent nearly all of my 200 minute monthly allowance release planning with family. As we had only a few moments on the phone, they demanded I come see them the moment I was released. They had something very important they wanted to talk about.

I spent the next few days appealing to every prison official for extra phone minutes to speak with my dying friend. Several of them had phones on their desks as we spoke, and could have just picked up the phone and given me a few minutes right then and there. They all had the authority and ability to assist, and they all refused. From case manager, church chaplin to assistant warden. One said because the other person isn't direct family, they don't count as important enough to grant me an extra phone call. They took three days to consider my request before denying it. Another accused me of lying to manipulate them into giving me extra phone minutes because I'd "wasted" what I was given and they thought we all got way too many minutes anyway.

A few other prisoners offered to let me use their phone accounts to make calls, but if I had done that and been detected by prison staff who randomly monitored phone calls, I risked a disciplinary proceeding that could result in going to solitary confinement instead of going home, and throwing my release arrangements into disarray.

My friend died the day before I went home. I still don't know what they wanted to tell me.

gambiting• 3 years ago

Man, that's fucking insane. Really sorry about your friend.

sixothree• 3 years ago

I had a friend in jail for a short period of time. I couldn’t let her languish. So I did those $25 hamburgers and $13 phone calls. Everything about this was repulsive to me. But for someone so gentle I couldn’t not do these things.

Recidivism is the goal and not something we try to avoid. So sick of the way this country treats people.

jrockway• 3 years ago

the_doctah• 3 years ago

Avoiding recidivism is fine. Doing what CA does and not arrest or prosecute people at all is already a horribly failed ideology.

People do not go to jail without deserving it. So how bad was your friend's record, Lancelot?

sva_• 3 years ago

I want to say that I am sorry for what you went through. If that had happened to me, it probably would have radicalized me.

giraffe_lady• 3 years ago

You can still let it. Help us end prison.

dennis_jeeves1• 3 years ago

If that had happened to me, it probably would have radicalized me.

One can just get 'radicalized' merely by observing what going on around, like Ted Kaczynski. Version 1.0 of humans collectively don't meet the bar of standards for a civilized society, if a civilized society did exist then it's by fluke of a confluence of factors and fleeting one at that.

peterfirefly4• 3 years ago

I want to know what crime he (she?) committed. Let's hear that first before we start getting all bleedy-hearty.

qingcharles8• 3 years ago

Ugh. I had the same. I was held in pretrial detention for 10 years because I couldn't afford the small amount of bond money. My mother was dying while I was in there and I am in the USA, she was in the UK. The rates at one point were $1.50/min. I would try to call her for 5 minutes per day, that was the absolute most I could afford. It is heartbreaking to have someone dying at the other end of the phone line and you have to hang up on them.

I scheduled a bond hearing with the hope the judge would lower my bond so I could be released and be able to call her, but sadly she died two days before the bond hearing. The State found out, so as soon as we went into the hearing the prosecutor said "Judge, I don't even know why we are here, his mother is dead already. This issue is moot."

We even tried to get the jail to let me make a video call to my mother (that was her dying wish), and the British government intervened to try and persuade them, but they refused, even though they had all the equipment and let you make video calls to your kids if you played chess with them.

Incarceration, for the most part, is just fucking stupidity. As Piper Kerman's lawyer tells her, "Jail is chickenshit rules enforced by chickenshit people."

HWR_144• 3 years ago

At least there seems to be a lot of movement against pretrial detention because of financial reasons like bond. Of course, your passport would be confiscated so you still wouldn't be able to visit her, but at leas you could have spent hours on the phone with her.

Modified3019• 3 years ago

Please make sure to repeatedly bother your legislators about this kind of thing, and preferably bring others into doing so as well.

Otherwise this story will just repeat forever.

throwaway67342• 3 years ago

what were you in prison for?

weswilson• 3 years ago

There is a nonprofit that is trying to address this called Ameelio (https://www.ameelio.org/). They were hiring in the HN Who is Hiring thread. I don't know much about them, but it seems like they have some traction in a few states. Their voice call product says that it offers free voice calling, with all the monitoring/security features built in.

I hope these types of nonprofit tech companies succeed as they are not profit seeking off of the misery of other people.

ImPostingOnHN2• 3 years ago

it sounds like it doesn't satisfy the most critical requirement: allowing sadistic prison employees to torture and extort prisoners in fun and new ways with no oversight

who are they expecting to buy this, Montessori prisons?

hkt3• 3 years ago

The UK's ministry of justice has rolled out phones to quite a few prisons now and they have had an amazing impact, despite the opprobrium of idiot newspaper editors.

It is thought that this cuts recidivism by 40% and allows people to stay in touch with family. The number is good, but it is worth considering one of the less often articulated points about the system: it punishes families, too. Take away a breadwinner, an extra pair of parental hands (however active), and put a father at a distance from their kids, and what do you get? A lonely partner who can't share domestic work. Kids with only one adult to relate to, where that adult now carries responsibilities that were previously shared.

In other words, prisons incarcerate individuals but punish families. Phones in prisons lessen the blow somewhat, and it is little surprise that even this very small line of contact keeps people in touch with people they care about, instead of leaving them adrift and vulnerable to mixing with the wrong sorts on release.

Really, they ought to be abolished. Other forms of punishment and rehabilitation exist. Restorative justice exists. It would be better that we used it.

(I'm gendering the above in the way I am because in the UK, as in many other places, ten men are in prison for every one woman, give or take)

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/in-cell-phones-for-more-p...

sokoloff• 3 years ago

There are probably a lot of prisoners who could safely benefit from alternative treatments. (Safety as judged from the perspective of law-abiding members of society.)

But there is certainly a subset of them who would not be safe to treat outside of prison. And those people should remain in prison, IMO.

qingcharles8• 3 years ago

Having spent a decade inside, I agree with your overall sentiment. There are some people who are completely unable to control their criminal behavior and probably just aren't safe to be released, but they could certainly be held in more humane conditions as their issues are probably due to the DNA lottery rather than anything they brought on themselves.

But, the vast majority of those I met would be totally capable of living productive (tax-paying) lives if they had the necessary support to get their lives rebooted, employment and shelter found, etc.

retrac• 3 years ago

I am not quite a prison abolitionist but I am troubled by the same point. Punishment inflicted on an offender is transitive in its pain. Even if suffering is righteously deserved it is shared by innocent people with the capacity to love the wretched. Even if one does not wish to grant humanity to a criminal for his sake, it seems necessary for ours.

rogerthis• 3 years ago

In Brazil free phone calls would* allow criminals to manage crime from prison, through family.

* would = do; prisoners have easy access to cellphones, etc. Very common are scam calls originating from prisons. Classic real life meme is one criminal calling one person who happened to also be in another prison.

dkural• 3 years ago

It could be free calls from prison landlines, which can also be listened to fully for any criminal content.

pie4202• 3 years ago

So we have to hire trained, educated employees capable of detecting code speak and monitor every single phone conversation? Why are people so opposed to giving adults a time out with no phones, no calls, no distractions, just a book, rehabilitation classes, and job training. is it really that hard to see adult criminals as children who have misbehaved and need to be taught how to function in society? If parents punish a child, nobody blinks an eye, and even probably praises good parenting. If we punish delinquents and teach them how to operate in our hyper-complex society, it's problematic.

mickelsen• 3 years ago

Coming from LatAm as well, and wanting dangerous criminals punished as much as the next populist politician promises to do, so that we get closer to a less lenient and excessively-tolerant system, I can see where you are coming from and I agree that their set of problems are different than ours.

Especially here in Chile where recent mass immigration waves have pretty much spiked violent crimes in ways that were only common in central america, so it absolutely caught the country unprepared, where petty theft is pretty much given a slap on the wrist so as to avoid prison, even with multiple reincidences.

Even then, this would be a positive development, as calls could be completely monitored from landlines I guess, rather than the smuggled phones that make it to prison through public defenders and drops all the time, so it could actually be better as a way to prompt more frequent inspection and at least here, allowing prisons to jam mobile signal, which is something that's been proposed for years but even guards have protested against, as they rely on radio for internal comms (I'm not sure about the specifics)

nrdxp• 3 years ago

Who would have that that treating people like human beings would improve their humanity

wnc3141• 3 years ago

This feels like an intuitive conclusion. Of course sequestration from society is bad for mental health and ability to reintegrate into society. Prison phone call fees however are another example of the patronage to vendors. It was never about the interests of society.

josh_carterPDX• 3 years ago

Prisons are a money maker for both public and private entities. Everything has a cost including copays for medical and dental. Oregon is the worst when it comes to advocacy for prisoners while they tout how progressive they are. It's a racket and hopefully California is the example that motivates other states to change.

kerkeslager• 3 years ago

I'm... actually impressed by the comments in this thread. Normally when I look at the comments on a thread with a human aspect, HN can be relied upon to provide a truly horrific pro-corporate, anti-human comment upvoted to the top. But I'm genuinely and pleasantly surprised this time. Good job guys, maybe there's hope for y'all.

Meph504• 3 years ago

The prison lobby is very strong, and there is a massive money making machine ($3billion/yr in the US alone) that keeps the paywall that is access for prisoners, and for families intact.

groups like https://www.ameelio.org/ have been for years trying to make a dent in this, but I think they are only in 3 states currently. I do think it really says something when communicating with those in prison is so hard that the IRS has to use a non-profit to do it.

Like some much in this world, it is a cancerous greed that consumes makes everything worse for everyone.

IG_Semmelweiss2• 3 years ago

Seems fitting to post here.

El Salvador, a country with the highest murder rate per capita in the world, passed emergency measures to enact strict antigang policies under the leadership of the young President Bukele (same guy that legalized bitcoin). Bukele was the first 3rd party candidate to win and break the 2-party duopolicy that ruled el salvador since 1970s

The antigang policies included a strict no-phone-calls while in jail policy. Other policies included jamming cell signal in jail, no visitors, and temporary holding period (without charges) was increased from 2-3 to 10-15 days. All this was allowed under emergency measures voted by congress supermajority, which enabled special police powers for 30 days. The emergency measure has been renewed 10+ times already.

Murders have gone down 92% [1]. There are entire neighborhoods that have recently opened small shops for the first time in decades (it was impossible to open any viable business due to crime).

9 out of 10 salvadoreans is happy and plans to vote to reelect Bukele in the upcoming election [2]. el Salvador congress is updating the constitution now since it does not allow re-election.

The approval rating of ~90% is the highest of the entire western hemisphere.

[1] wsj. https://archive.vn/azpDU

solatic2• 3 years ago

Doesn't sound like a refutation of the article to me. There's a difference between using communication to keep gang ties strong, and using communication to keep family ties strong. A difference between incarceration of people who belong to organized crime syndicates (where their biological family ties are subsumed by their organized crime syndicate ties) and those who are incarcerated for armed robbery of a liquor store because they need cash to pay for their addiction. It shouldn't be a surprise that different prisoners engaged in crime for different reasons, and therefore require different strategies to rehabilitate.

thegaulofthem• 3 years ago

So how do we meaningfully sort groups out?

I’ve been to juvenile prison, loads of these teenagers were out and out proud of their being in. They would happily manipulate and game anything to their advantage, and as a result the guards are forced to be intolerant assholes for the most part. If they aren’t, they’ll be taken for suckers.

So how do you sort of the otherwise good kid who gets into a fight or thought weed wasn’t a big deal from the future career criminals of America?

downboots• 3 years ago

I thought calls from prisons were associated with scams and other bad actions. Perhaps it only takes a few bad apples to ruin it for everyone else.

jgaa• 3 years ago

Prisons are not there to rehabilitate people. Prisons are there to make profit for it's share holders.

philosopher1234• 3 years ago

Prison isnt just about rehab, its also about punishment, and thats good.

icecream_so_gud3• 3 years ago

While punishment may lead to justice it is not required for justice to take place. What is required is accountability, rehabilitation and restitution. The current focus from the public appears to be, instead, retribution. That seems to be insatiable for those who have been transgressed.

None of this requires the use of prisons. Although in the case of offenders likely to commit more violent crimes while justice is sort for previous offenses it, appears, to be our currently best way of management.

Similar to how the aim of schooling is to create citizens who can engage productively in society; the focus of prisons should be on recreating productive citizens.

Free prison phone calls boost family ties, rehabilitation

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