This political scientist spent a year in #prison. Here’s what he learned. - The Washington Post
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/10/29/this-political-scientist-spent-a-year-in-prison-heres-what-he-learne
I have looked at this subject from more angles than most. I’ve been a state senator. I’ve been a federal prisoner. I’m now a public policy professor with a new book on the subject.
here’s how prisoners’ families are still being fleeced
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/10/26/phone-calls-wont-cost-up-to-14-a-minute-anymore-but-heres-how-prison
Securus Technologies (the firm which is protesting the FCC rule) has made a lot of money from providing a different service – video-visitation for prisoners’ families. It has contracts in 2,600 correctional facilities. Advertised as a boon to families, video visitation presumably allows persons in prison to connect with their families from anywhere on the globe by live video. This “service,” however, is financed largely by poor families. Seventy percent of the contracts, according to one report, require that the video visitation replace in-person visitation. Indeed the family member in prison may be only one room away, but the family visitor is often barred by contract from actually making an in-person visit under this new video arrangement. In addition to the often significant financial costs incurred to visit their loved ones in prison, what was once free visitation now costs family members about a dollar per minute to utilize the new video system.