Prison-tech company bribed jails to ban in-person visits

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in BOSTON with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then PROVIDENCE (Apr 12), and beyond!

Beware of geeks bearing gifts. When prison-tech companies started offering "free" tablets to America's vast army of prisoners, it set off alarm-bells for prison reform advocates – but not for the law-enforcement agencies that manage the great American carceral enterprise.

The pitch from these prison-tech companies was that they could cut the costs of locking people up while making jails and prisons safer. Hell, they'd even make life better for prisoners. And they'd do it for free!

These prison tablets would give every prisoner their own phone and their own video-conferencing terminal. They'd supply email, of course, and all the world's books, music, movies and games. Prisoners could maintain connections with the outside world, from family to continuing education. Sounds too good to be true, huh?

Here's the catch: all of these services are blisteringly expensive. Prisoners are accustomed to being gouged on phone calls – for years, prisons have done deals with private telcos that charge a fortune for prisoners' calls and split the take with prison administrators – but even by those standards, the calls you make on a tablet are still a ripoff.

Sure, there are some prisoners for whom money is no object – wealthy people who screwed up so bad they can't get bail and are stewing in a county lockup, along with the odd rich murderer or scammer serving a long bid. But most prisoners are poor. They start poor – the cops are more likely to arrest poor people than rich people, even for the same crime, and the poorer you are, the more likely you are to get convicted or be suckered into a plea bargain with a long sentence. State legislatures are easy to whip up into a froth about minimum sentences for shoplifters who steal $7 deodorant sticks, but they are wildly indifferent to the store owner's rampant wage-theft. Wage theft is by far the most costly form of property crime in America and it is almost entirely ignored:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/15/wage-theft-us-workers-employees

So America's prisons are heaving with its poorest citizens, and they're certainly not getting any richer while they're inside. While many prisoners hold jobs – prisoners produce $2b/year in goods and $9b/year in services – the average prison wage is $0.52/hour:

https://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2024/0324bowman.html

(In six states, prisoners get nothing; North Carolina law bans paying prisoners more than $1/day, the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution explicitly permits slavery – forced labor without pay – for prisoners.)

Likewise, prisoners' families are poor. They start poor – being poor is a strong correlate of being an American prisoner – and then one of their breadwinners is put behind bars, taking their income with them. The family savings go to paying a lawyer.

Prison-tech is a bet that these poor people, locked up and paid $1/day or less; or their families, deprived of an earner and in debt to a lawyer; will somehow come up with cash to pay $13 for a 20-minute phone call, $3 for an MP3, or double the Kindle price for an ebook.

How do you convince a prisoner earning $0.52/hour to spend $13 on a phone-call?

Well, for Securus and Viapath (AKA Global Tellink) – a pair of private equity backed prison monopolists who have swallowed nearly all their competitors – the answer was simple: they bribed prison officials to get rid of the prison phones.

Not just the phones, either: a pair of Michigan suits brought by the Civil Rights Corps accuse sheriffs and the state Department of Corrections of ending in-person visits in exchange for kickbacks from the money that prisoners' families would pay once the only way to reach their loved ones was over the "free" tablets:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/jails-banned-family-visits-to-make-more-money-on-video-calls-lawsuits-claim/

These two cases are just the tip of the iceberg; Civil Rights Corps says there are hundreds of jails and prisons where Securus and Viapath have struck similar corrupt bargains:

https://civilrightscorps.org/case/port-huron-michigan-right2hug/

And it's not just visits and calls. Prison-tech companies have convinced jails and prisons to eliminate mail and parcels. Letters to prisoners are scanned and delivered their tablets, at a price. Prisoners – and their loved ones – have to buy virtual "postage stamps" and pay one stamp per "page" of email. Scanned letters (say, hand-drawn birthday cards from your kids) cost several stamps:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/14/minnesota-nice/#shitty-technology-adoption-curve

Prisons and jails have also been convinced to eliminate their libraries and continuing education programs, and to get rid of TVs and recreational equipment. That way, prisoners will pay vastly inflated prices for streaming videos and DRM-locked music.

The icing on the cake? If the prison changes providers, all that data is wiped out – a prisoner serving decades of time will lose their music library, their kids' letters, the books they love. They can get some of that back – by working for $1/day – but the personal stuff? It's just gone.

Readers of my novels know all this. A prison-tech scam just like the one described in the Civil Rights Corps suits is at the center of my latest novel The Bezzle:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

Prison-tech has haunted me for years. At first, it was just the normal horror anyone with a shred of empathy would feel for prisoners and their families, captive customers for sadistic "businesses" that have figured out how to get the poorest, most desperate people in the country to make them billions. In the novel, I call prison-tech "a machine":

a million-­armed robot whose every limb was tipped with a needle that sank itself into a different place on prisoners and their families and drew out a few more cc’s of blood.

But over time, that furious empathy gave way to dread. Prisoners are at the bottom of the shitty technology adoption curve. They endure the technological torments that haven't yet been sanded down on their bodies, normalized enough to impose them on people with a little more privilege and agency. I'm a long way up the curve from prisoners, but while the shitty technology curve may grind slow, it grinds fine:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

The future isn't here, it's just not evenly distributed. Prisoners are the ultimate early adopters of the technology that the richest, most powerful, most sadistic people in the country's corporate board-rooms would like to force us all to use.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

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The bodies of two men who died while incarcerated in Alabama's prison system were missing their hearts or other organs when returned to their families, a federal lawsuit alleges.

The family of Brandon Clay Dotson, who died in a state prison in November, filed a federal lawsuit last month against the Alabama Department of Corrections and others saying his body was decomposing and his heart was missing when his remains were returned to his family.

In a court filing in the case last week, the daughter of Charles Edward Singleton, another deceased inmate, said her father's body was missing all of his internal organs when it was returned in 2021.

Lauren Faraino, an attorney representing Dotson's family, said via email Wednesday that the experience of multiple families shows this is “absolutely part of a pattern.”

The Associated Press sent an email seeking comment late Wednesday afternoon to the Alabama Department of Corrections.

Dotson, 43, was found dead on Nov. 16 at Ventress Correctional Facility. His family, suspecting foul play was involved in his death, hired a pathologist to do a second autopsy and discovered his heart was missing, according to the lawsuit. His family filed a lawsuit seeking to find out why his heart was removed and to have it returned to them.

(continue reading)

punitive "justice" (ex: carceral system) will not save us and is a quite depressing stance on human nature and life. people can change. people can grow. people deserve basic rights, period. none of us benefit from a world where people who have done wrong are given no option but severe (and often permanent) punishment... especially not on a sociopolitical level. this is a bad thing, even putting aside the fact many of the people punished have not done anything wrong, or "wrong enough." people shouldn't have to be innocent for you to care, or at least acknowledge punitive measures don't actually change anything.

It's really not necessary for white people to weigh in on anti-psychiatry and prison abolition. We get it, you're the least impacted, you didn't do the reading, and maintaining violent colonial power structures is essential to your sense of safety and stability. We know. Shut the fuck up.

Those courtrooms now are being used for drug-sale cases that they can’t even secure convictions in. In fact, they’ve done three trials, that I’m aware of, maybe more in which the primary charge was a drug sale. And in all of them, they failed to secure a conviction. And you think about the wasted resources, and the ways in which that approach, rather than negotiating plea bargains, rather than putting people on probation, rather than, making diversion and treatment programs accessible.

Chesa Boudin talks crime, justice—and what’s happened to SF under Brooke Jenkins

this is an infrastructure problem.

Loving how the Jan 6 folks now in jail for years have been tough-on-crime lock-em-up types and now they in jail and all like “hey it’s awful here, the food is trash”. Yeah, dog. We’ve been telling y’all this!

Newest video essay is out!!!

It's called "Vinland Saga Season 2 is God Damn Peak"

Or alternatively it's called: The Carceral State of Vinland Saga Season 2.

The video idea came to me when I did my first Vinland Saga on how the manga tackles Violence and I wanted to make this right after, but I wait until season 2 came out and it was worth the wait.

The underlining idea is Carceral cultures that the Viking World imposes on its young. Through imposing such a culture those who "deviate" from the norms of violence are shunned from society or they are turned into slaves.

Thus simply being "weak" is criminalized but the Farmland arc does an interesting thing as it serves as method for Thorfinn to self-reflect but this is doing through the use of a Haunting.

However, Vinland goes further as it demonstrates a liberation from Carceral Cultures and from "viking realism" as Thorfinn imagines a place that is free from the fires of war, from enslavement and suffering.

So that's how this video came into being

I then had to stich anime clips and make a video essay

So if you're interested check out my video essay and throw me a comment :)

Greedflation, but for prisoners

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW (Apr 21) in TORINO, then Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

Today in "Capitalists Hate Capitalism" news: The Appeal has published the first-ever survey of national prison commissary prices, revealing just how badly the prison profiteer system gouges American's all-time, world-record-beating prison population:

https://theappeal.org/locked-in-priced-out-how-much-prison-commissary-prices/

Like every aspect of the prison contracting system, prison commissaries – the stores where prisoners are able to buy food, sundries, toiletries and other items – are dominated by private equity funds that have bought out all the smaller players. Private equity deals always involve gigantic amounts of debt (typically, the first thing PE companies do after acquiring a company is to borrow heavily against it and then pay themselves a hefty dividend).

The need to service this debt drives PE companies to cut quality, squeeze suppliers, and raise prices. That's why PE loves to buy up the kinds of businesses you must spend your money at: dialysis clinics, long-term care facilities, funeral homes, and prison services.

Prisoners, after all, are a literal captive market. Unlike capitalist ventures, which involve the risk that a customer will take their business elsewhere, prison commissary providers have the most airtight of monopolies over prisoners' shopping.

Not that prisoners have a lot of money to spend. The 13th Amendment specifically allows for the enslavement of convicted criminals, and so even though many prisoners are subject to forced labor, they aren't necessarily paid for it:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

Six states ban paying prisoners anything. North Carolina caps prisoners' pay at one dollar per day. Nationally, prisoners earn $0.52/hour, while producing $11b/year in goods and services:

https://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2024/0324bowman.html

So there's a double cruelty to prison commissary price-gouging. Prisoners earn far less than any other kind of worker, and they pay vastly inflated prices for the necessities of life. There's also a triple cruelty: prisoners' families – deprived of an incarcerated breadwinner's earnings – are called upon to make up the difference for jacked up commissary prices out of their own strained finances.

So what does prison profiteering look like, in dollars and sense? Here's the first-of-its-kind database tracking the costs of food, hygiene items and religious items in 46 states:

https://theappeal.org/commissary-database/

Prisoners rely heavily on commissaries for food. Prisons serve spoiled, inedible food, and often there isn't enough to go around – prisoners who rely on the food provided by their institutions literally starve. This is worst in prisons where private equity funds have taken over the cafeteria, which is inevitable accompanied by swingeing cuts to food quality and portions:

https://theappeal.org/prison-food-virginia-fluvanna-correctional-center/

So you have one private equity fund starving prisoners, and another that's gouging them on food. Or sometimes it's the same company. Keefe Group, owned by HIG Capital, provides commissaries to prisons whose cafeterias are managed by other HIG Capital portfolio companies like Trinity Services Group. HIG also owns the prison health-care company Wellpath – so if they give you food poisoning, they get paid twice.

Wellpath delivers "grossly inadequate healthcare":

https://theappeal.org/massachusetts-prisons-wellpath-dentures-teeth/

And Trinity serves "meager portions of inedible food":

https://theappeal.org/clayton-county-jail-sheriff-election/

When prison commissaries gouge on food, no part of the inventory is spared, even the cheapest items. In Florida, a packet of ramen costs $1.06, 300% more inside the prison than it does at the Target down the street:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24444312-fl_doc_combined_commissary_lists#document/p6/a2444049

America's prisoners aren't just hungry, they're also hot. The climate emergency is sending temperatures in America's largely un-air-conditioned prisons soaring to dangerous levels. Commissaries capitalize on this, too: an 8" fan costs $40 in Delaware's Sussex Correctional Institution. In Georgia, that fan goes for $32 (but prisoners are not paid for their labor in Georgia pens). And in scorching Texas, the commissary raised the price of water by 50% last summer:

https://www.tpr.org/criminal-justice/2023-07-20/texas-charges-prisoners-50-more-for-water-for-as-heat-wave-continues

Toiletries are also sold at prices that would make an airport gift-shop blush. Need denture adhesive? That's $12.28 in an Idaho pen, triple the retail price. 15% of America's prisoners are over 55. The Keefe Group – sister company to the "grossly inadequate" healthcare company Wellpath – operates that commissary. In Oregon, the commissary charges a 200% markup on hearing-aid batteries. Vermont charges a 500% markup on reading glasses. Imagine spending decades in prison: toothless, blind, and deaf.

Then there's the religious items. Bibles and Christmas cards are surprisingly reasonable, but a Qaran will run you $26 in Vermont, where a Bible is a mere $4.55. Kufi caps – which cost $3 or less in the free world – go for $12 in Indiana prisons. A Virginia prisoner needs to work for 8 hours to earn enough to buy a commissary Ramadan card (you can buy a Christmas card after three hours' labor).

Prison price-gougers are finally facing a comeuppance. California's new BASIC Act caps prison commissary markups at 35% (California commissaries used to charge 63-200% markups):

https://theappeal.org/price-gouging-in-california-prisons-newsom-signature/

Last year, Nevada banned any markup on hygiene items:

https://www.leg.state.nv.us/App/NELIS/REL/82nd2023/Bill/10425/Overview

And prison tech monopolist Securus has been driven to the brink of bankruptcy, thanks to the activism of Worth Rises and its coalition partners:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/08/money-talks/

When someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time. Prisons show us how businesses would treat us if they could get away with it.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/20/captive-market/#locked-in

CAPTIVITY IS A CONSTITUTIVE PART of Palestinian life under occupation. Prior to Hamas’s attack on October 7th, Israel incarcerated more than 5,200 Palestinians—most of them residents of the West Bank and East Jerusalem—across two dozen prisons and detention centers. Some West Bank residents are incarcerated due to a still-operant military order issued following the 1967 War that effectively criminalized civic activities (e.g. gatherings of more than ten people without a permit, distributing political materials, displaying flags) as “incitement and hostile propaganda actions.” There are currently hundreds of such military orders, which criminalize anything that might be construed as resistance to the occupation. This surfeit of activities made illegal for Palestinians authorizes mass imprisonment: According to a recent estimate by the United Nations, one million Palestinians have at one time been incarcerated by Israel, “including tens of thousands of children.” One in five Palestinians, and two in five Palestinian men, have been arrested at some point in their lives, and, as of 2021, more than 100 Palestinian children faced up to 20 years in prison for throwing stones. Not all who are arrested face charges. Israel often and increasingly makes use of “administrative detention,” a relic of the British Mandate era, which allows for indefinite incarceration without a charge or trial, ostensibly for the purpose of gathering evidence. It was a hallmark of apartheid South Africa and has been used to repress opposition in Egypt, England, India, the United States, and elsewhere, especially in the context of anti-immigration and “counter-terrorism” programs. “Since March 2002, not a single month has gone by without Israel holding at least 100 Palestinians in administrative detention,” the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem notes; often the number is much higher. Prior to October 7th, more than 20% of Palestinian prisoners were administrative detainees; 233 of the 300 Palestinians on Israel’s release list negotiated last week were administrative detainees, Al Jazeera noted. According to the Palestinian prisoner organization Addameer, imprisoned Palestinians report being beaten, threatened, strip searched, and denied healthcare and contact with their families. Palestinians currently incarcerated, as well as those freed in recent days, report that conditions have worsened since October 7th. Meanwhile, even as this prisoner release proceeds, Israel continues to ramp up arrests: As of Tuesday, 180 Palestinian prisoners have been released as part of the ceasefire exchange, but during the same period, it arrested Palestinians at nearly the same rate. Today, more than 7,000 Palestinians are incarcerated in Israeli prisons. Nowhere is Israel’s carceral regime clearer than in Gaza, the 140-square-mile area often described as an “open-air prison.” Gaza’s residents, now an estimated 2.2 million people—80% of whom are refugees or descendents of refugees forced to flee in the mass expulsions surrounding the founding of the State of Israel that Palestinians call the Nakba—have been hemmed in by a land, air, and sea blockade since 2006. As with Palestinians incarcerated in Israeli prisons, who for years have waged hunger strikes, protested, and written about the horrors of incarceration, Gazans have struggled mightily against their confinement. In 2018–19, they held weekly nonviolent protests at the border under the name Great March of Return. Israel responded with brutal violence, killing 260 people and wounding 20,000 others, many of whom were permanently disabled. A week into Israel’s current assault on Gaza, Ahmed Abu Artema, one of the co-founders of the Great March of Return, wrote an impassioned plea in The Nation, calling for the world to “help us tear down the wall, end our imprisonment, and fulfill our dreams of liberation.” On October 24th, an Israeli airstrike severely wounded Artema and killed five members of his family, including his 13-year-old son.

The Abolitionist Logic of “Everyone for Everyone” A call from the families of hostages contains the seed of true safety. Dan Berger December 1, 2023

Image Description: A screenshot from page 12 of Sick Of It*, Vol.1 with a graphic of a flower with a twelve in the center in the bottom right-hand corner with text above reading:

“Disabled liberation and prison abolition must go hand in hand. Not only are disabled people imprisoned at higher rates, not only do prisons directly create disability trauma and medical neglect, but the prison and the institution (emergency room, psychiatric hospital, “group home”, nursing facility) are both a means of controlling those who are deemed deviant and whose bodies are noncompliant, and who are systematically denied support at every turn.

Society has conflated treatment and punishment. 

As Steph Kaufman says in Carceral Ableism: “Incarceration isn’t just something that exists in prisons and jails: it’s a web that encapsulates psychiatric institutions...Group “homes”; nursing facilities, ...these systems of what we’re taught to think of as care and healing and recovery and treatment are actually part of what we would refer to as the carceral state or setting. Where somebody’s ability to be free is limited. Your decisions are limited, you’re being monitored, surveilled, coerced into taking medications to get privileges or leave.””

END ID

*https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5f6e2cb91c54695c0e5d12db/t/5f887e15d0fde146efa6356b/1602780718648/SickOfIt_Vol1_Final.pdf   <------ PDF for Sick Of It, Vol.1

How to Draw a Perfect Circle, by Terrance Hayes (2014)

I can imitate the spheres of the model’s body, her head, Her mouth, the chin she rests at the bend of her elbow But nothing tells me how to make the pupils spiral

From her gaze. Everything the eye sees enters a circle, The world is connected to a circle: breath spools from the nostrils And any love to be open becomes an O. The shape inside the circle

Is a circle, the egg fallen outside the nest the serpent circles Rests in the serpent’s gaze the way my gaze rests on the model. In a blind contour drawing the eye tracks the subject

Without observing what the hand is doing. Everything is connected By a line curling and canceling itself like the shape of a snake Swallowing its own decadent tail or a mind that means to destroy itself,

A man circling a railway underpass before attacking a policeman. To draw the model’s nipples I have to let myself be carried away. I love all the parts of the body. There are as many curves

As there are jewels of matrimony, as many whirls as there are teeth In the mouth of the future: the mute pearls a bride wears to her wedding, The sleeping ovaries like the heads of riders bunched in a tunnel.

The doors of the subway car imitate an O opening and closing, In the blood the O spirals its helix of defects, genetic shadows, But there are no instructions for identifying loved ones who go crazy.

When one morning a black man stabs a black transit cop in the face And the cop, bleeding from his eye, kills the assailant, no one traveling To the subway sees it quickly enough to make a camera phone witness.

The scene must be carried on the tongue, it must be carried On the news into the future where it will distract the eyes working Lines into paper. This is what blind contour drawing conjures in me.

At the center of God looms an O, the devil believes justice is shaped Like a zero, a militant helmet or war drum, a fist or gun barrel, A barrel of ruined eggs or skulls. To lift anything from a field

The lifter bends like a broken O. The weight of the body Lowered into a hole can make anyone say Oh: the onlookers, The mother, the brothers and sisters. Omen begins with an O.

When I looked into my past I saw the boy I had not seen in years Do a standing backflip so daring the onlookers called him crazy. I did not see a moon as white as an onion but I saw a paper plate

Upon which the boy held a plastic knife and sopping meat. An assailant is a man with history. His mother struggles To cut an onion preparing a meal to be served after the funeral.

The onion is the best symbol of the O. Sliced, a volatile gas stings The slicer’s eyes like a punishment clouding them until they see What someone trapped beneath a lid of water sees:

A soft-edged world, a blur of blooms holding a coffin afloat. The onion is pungent, its scent infects the air with sadness, All the pallbearers smell it. The mourners watch each other,

They watch the pastor’s ambivalence, they wait for the doors to open, They wait for the appearance of the wounded one-eyed victim And his advocates, strangers who do not consider the assailant’s funeral

Appeasement. Before that day the officer had never fired his gun In the line of duty. He was chatting with a cabdriver Beneath the tracks when my cousin circled him holding a knife.

The wound caused no brain damage though his eyeball was severed. I am not sure how a man with no eye weeps. In the Odyssey Pink water descends the Cyclops’s cratered face after Odysseus

Drives a burning log into it. Anyone could do it. Anyone could Begin the day with his eyes and end it blind or deceased, Anyone could lose his mind or his vision. When I go crazy

I am afraid I will walk the streets naked, I am afraid I will shout Every fucked up thing that troubles or enchants me, I will try to murder Or make love to everybody before the police handcuff or murder me.

Though the bullet exits a perfect hole it does not leave perfect holes In the body. A wound is a cell and portal. Without it the blood runs With no outlet. It is possible to draw handcuffs using loops

Shaped like the symbol for infinity, from the Latin infinitas Meaning unboundedness. The way you get to anything Is context. In a blind contour it is not possible to give your subject

A disconnected gaze. Separated from the hand the artist’s eye Begins its own journey. It could have been the same for the Cyclops, A giant whose gouged eye socket was so large a whole onion

Could fit into it. Separated from the body the eye begins Its own journey. The world comes full circle: the hours, the harvests, When the part of the body that holds the soul is finally decomposed

It becomes a circle, a hole that holds everything: blemish, cell, Womb, parts of the body no one can see. I watched the model Pull a button loose on her jeans and step out of them

As one might out of a hole in a blue valley, a sea. I found myself In the dark, I found myself entering her body like a delicate shell Or soft pill, like this curved thumb of mine against her lips.

You must look without looking to make the perfect circle. The line, the mind must be a blind continuous liquid Until the drawing is complete.

Context: 18 year old settler activist refuses to join the IOF and accepts 30 day jail term, to be renewed each month if he keeps refusing. This can go on for over a year. Western allies fall over themselves calling him a hero.

Palestinians object to this, saying refusal to help murder their families is the bare minimum. Conscientious objectors have always existed but they rarely take the extra step to educate themselves about Palestinian liberation instead of indulging in empty feel-good rhetoric about "peace" instead of justice. Choosing jail is more often than not about expunging their own guilt and going on with their lives instead of being active allies to the Palestinian cause. Exceptionalising settlers for voluntarily accepting the lightest punishment of a carceral system designed to break Palestinians simply for existing, is to decenter and erase their own struggle.

Cue "allies" losing their entire shit.