Captive Audience: How Companies Make Millions Charging Prisoners to Send An Email
via Wired
by Victoria Law
Last July, as she has for the past 10 years, Dianne Jones spent 45 minutes on a city bus heading to the local WalMart. There, under fluorescent lights, she scanned rows of brightly colored birthday cards to pick out the perfect greeting for her son—let’s call him Tim—who is imprisoned more than 100 miles from his mother’s home just outside New Orleans. The card she settled on was dark brown with trees and a birthday message that read, “For the best son in the world.”
Tim was in his 10th year of a 30-year prison sentence for an armed robbery he committed at age 17; he would not be able to see, let alone sit under or touch, a tree for the next 20 years. (Citing safety concerns, Jones asked that her son’s name not be used.) After Jones, her daughter, and her three grandchildren signed the card, she mailed it off, happy that Tim would know that his family was thinking of him.
Days later, the card was returned. Puzzled, she called the prison where she learned the facility had instituted a prohibition on greeting cards. If she wanted to send a card, a prison official told her, Jones would have to pass along her greeting electronically using JPay, a company bringing email into prison systems across the nation.
Prisons are notoriously low-tech places. But urged on by privately owned companies, like JPay, facilities across the country are adding e-messaging, a rudimentary form of email that remains disconnected from the larger web. Nearly half of all state prison systems now have some form of e-messaging: JPay’s services are available to prisoners in 20 states, including Louisiana.
This story goes on at some length, read it here.
A society can be judged by how it treats its criminals.
When it executes them, it gets criminals with no reason to give quarter to their victims.
Society can't kill you twice.
Might as well kill a victim, then they can't testify against you.
Here in the united snakes, we treat you them as one more resource to pad the corporation's bottom line.
Just more slave labor.