7 ms·

I wouldn't mind if the state was collecting the money. Prison is a punishment and you shouldn't be able to just chit chat all day. However, letting two private

I wouldn't mind if the state was collecting the money. Prison is a punishment and you shouldn't be able to just chit chat all day. However, letting two private companies cash in is corruption.

kalleboo 10y ago
> Prison is a punishment In some other countries prison is seen as a place for rehabilitation or at worst a way to protect the public from unstable individuals.
- leesalminen 10y ago
  Exactly. It should be this way in USA as well. It sickens me how people shrug off any problems at correctional facilities as "it's punishment". We're only creating more problems for society with that thought process.
  - shawn-butler 10y ago
    Nothing is ever that simple as the people of Norway are finding with Anders Behring Breivik who as far as I can tell has converted to Nazism and is getting a bachelor's degree in political science from University of Oslo after murdering 70 people. As I recall a couple years ago he made public complaints that the prison had not yet given him a PlayStation 3 to replace his current PlayStation 2, because it offers more suitable games to his playing style. Probably has it now. Punishment should fit the crime is the model in the US but since the 90s ever since sentencing became a political football that model has broken down. I find that rehabilitation is a word that comes easy to people who have never been victims of an actual crime. Prison time should never be population control/engineering but it should be a deterrent.
    - c0nducktr 10y ago
      Do you feel that Anders Breivik would not have murdered those children if the Norwegian prison system was more punitive?
      - shawn-butler 10y ago
        I believe he is beyond rehabilitation.
        tamana 10y ago
        That wasn't the question.
        shawn-butler 10y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfactual_conditional https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfactual_conditional Some people believe they help people imagine creative solutions. I find counterfactuals, especially in history, to be devoid of any meaning and used by pseudo-intellectuals who don't really want to pursue the hard work of finding actual causality.
        yongjik 10y ago
        Huh? Actual causality is meaningless without counterfactuals. "Hitler caused Holocaust" means that if Hitler wasn't there, Holocaust wouldn't have happened.
        shawn-butler 10y ago
        Not really but sort of. Counterfactual historiography at best represents a sort of "reproducibility" for historians. They can't conduct experiments on the past. So, when someone asserts "Hitler caused Holocaust" some enterprising graduate student comes along and writes a thesis on Hitler's willing executioners and argues counterfactually that if Hitler wasn't there, Holocaust still happens. That doesn't mean at all that Hitler did not cause Holocaust or that the "eliminationist antisemitism" German culture caused Holocaust. I wish you had chose a less value-laden example.
        pop8row9 10y ago
        I believe that no one is beyond rehabilitation, with the right conditions. Further, I believe this belief to be fundamental to any functionally human rights-oriented, pan-state democracy.
    - leesalminen 10y ago
      I don't know much about Breivik, but would venture to guess that killing 70 people is a result of severe mental illness. Using prisons as a warehouse for the mentally ill is another problem. These people should be handled differently than general population in a prison. IMO, you go to prison to reflect on your choices, work on underlying issues and come out a stronger person. It's _very_ hard to do so with mentally ill roommates, rape, gangs, etc all around you. I am a "victim" of an actual crime. My younger brother was hit by a car crossing the street. The driver was distracted and going >10 mph over the limit in a residential area. This individual had no insurance. No lawsuit was ever filed.
    - nitrogen 10y ago
      Honestly why should it bother anyone if prisoners are treated well? A video game costs nothing compared to other costs of incarceration. The only thing that matters is that people can be rehabilitated if possible, and isolated if not. And the last people who should define punishments are victims of crimes, because our own instincts for revenge are wholly miscalibrated for modern society. I've had thousands of dollars of irreplaceable equipment stolen from me, some of which I designed myself, and yet I rationally accept that the perpetrators (never caught) shouldn't be strung up in the proverbial town square for all to see.
- rayiner 10y ago
  I think prison should be for rehabilitation, but I think it's a bigger departure from how we do things than you appreciate. For example, should a woman who kills her abusive husband be imprisoned? From a purely rehabilitative point of view, the answer is no. There is zero risk of recidivism there. But even most people who think prison should be about rehabilitation probably have trouble with the idea that someone should simply go free under those circumstances. I.e. they believe that prison should be at least a little bit about punishment.
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    > But even most people who think prison should be about rehabilitation probably have trouble with the idea that someone should simply go free under those circumstances. Not in my experience. But that's just an anecdote and no doubt there is a lot of data backing your assertion. I also suspect that this is different for different countries.
  - int_19h 10y ago
    It's interesting to put this in historical context. Until about two centuries ago, it was not all that common to imprison people as a punishment. It was mainly used to confine those awaiting trial, and to induce compliance (contempt of court, debtor prisons etc). Being convicted of an actual crime generally warranted some form or combination of fines, public shaming, corporal punishment, banishment, or execution. Then, during the 17th century, the society had started to increasingly reject torture in general, and death penalty for relatively minor crimes (theft etc). Conveniently, that's also when European countries acquired sparsely populated lands that they wanted to settle ASAP, and so penal colonies were born, and replaced a significant chunk of previous death penalty convictions. That system eventually inspired the creation of proper prisons as we know them today. Ironically, if you read about the prominent people behind the movement that made it happen, most of them subscribed to "prison as repentance" theory, rather than punishment. It's why it was seen as so progressive and radical for its day. We all know how well that worked out.
IvyMike 10y ago
From the article: “Personal visits and telephone calls reduce recidivism." If "chit chatting" all day means they don't come back why would anyone be against it?
- laksjd 10y ago
  The companies and people that run the prisons and the prison phone systems are both very happy with a system where a) people spend a lot of time in jail and go back frequently and b) spend a lot of money on hyper-expensive phone calls since both of those things earn them very significant money. The question should probably be: Why should any sane person in the prison industry be for it?
- Spooky23 10y ago
  They get commissions on the calls, which often directly benefit the employees.
orangecat 10y ago
I wouldn't mind if the state was collecting the money. They basically are. See "commissions": http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/prison-phone-companies-fight-for-right-to-charge-inmates-14-a-minute/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/prison-phone-comp...
- dade_ 10y ago
  This is a much better article, thank you. Essentially this is the same as hotel phone rates, they also used to be very high by adding margin to the carrier services, but were part of the profitability of running a hotel. Mobile phones disrupted that source of income for hospitality, but with a captive customer the real issue is this commission now that telco rates have collapsed. As it is a fee for accessing telecommunication services, it sounds reasonable that the FCC should be able to regulate the commission, but the jail telcos have existing contracts in place under existing rules with the prisons and the FCC failed to address this.
bksenior 10y ago
You do know the point of a prison is in fact not to punish. It is to rehabilitate and a sentence is supposed to be a reflection on how much rehabilitation is necessary. It's sad, prisons should have the same rights as eeryone else lest we create a caste of population unable to reintegrate and move beyond what is often a single poor decision.
- dlhavema 10y ago
  What about ( sometimes multiple ) lifetime sentences without release? Sure they try to rehab* the inmate but not to the point of releasing them.back out to the public. Granted this is just one scenario..
  - protomyth 10y ago
    I suspect a lot of folks would say skip rehabbing that person and try to deal effectively with a person who is getting out. There isn't an infinite amount of money and the extra little bit spent properly might make the difference between productive citizen and career criminal.
  - laksjd 10y ago
    Countries that have a very high focus on the 'rehab' part of prison usually don't issue lifetime and certainly not multiple-lifetime sentences. Instead they tend to send people into mandated psychiatric care (in practice often life-long) or, if a person is 'sane' yet still very likely to cause damage to others than they are placed in 'preventive detention' which is still just 'being in prison' but does not carry any punitive notions and needs to be actively renewed every few years.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
> Prison is a punishment Beside the points others made here that it isn't, and it shouldn't be, I'd like to invite you to think about the ethical and practical implications of punishing someone over, and over, and over again for years or even decades, for an action that usually took only a very, very small fraction of time compared to the length of "punishment". The very idea flies in the face of... well any kind of experience with people and how they learn.
- ludamad 10y ago
  It's the fear of that punishment that is desired. Most people think murderers or similar are beyond redemption
  - bdcravens 10y ago
    Yet DWI has a very high rate of recidivism, and DWI deaths are on par with murder victims. Murder has a very low rate of recidivism (most people don't realize everyone doesn't get a life sentence) Which group is really beyond redemption?
  - robryk 10y ago
    And yet we make the actual prison experience worse than how it is perceived by a typical person.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- smallnamespace 10y ago
  Retributive justice isn't for the the criminals, it's to deter other crime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retributive_justice#Principles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retributive_justice#Principles Personally, I think we've gone too far down the 'retributive' route without corresponding investments in rehabilitation, but a lot of Americans prefer to lock the door and throw away the key.
  - tamana 10y ago
koolba 10y ago
> I wouldn't mind if the state was collecting the money. Prison is a punishment and you shouldn't be able to just chit chat all day. If there's one thing we don't need, it's a fiscal incentive for the government to jail people. Prison is meant to be a punishment for crimes and (depending on who you ask) an opportunity for rehabilitation. Without the latter you're going to have way more of the former. I'm not saying that inmates should have 24/7 free phone calls, free video calls, etc but price gouging a captive (no pun intended) audience isn't right either.
- protomyth 10y ago
  > If there's one thing we don't need, it's a fiscal incentive for the government to jail people. This, public or private, the root of the problem is that private companies and unions financially benefit from a larger prison population and both have money and political power to lobby effectively. Remove the financial incentive that has bad effects and you get a better system.
- travmatt 10y ago
  Most of the exploitation is aimed at the families of the incarcerated - you already control the prisoners wages and pay them slave wages so you can extract but so much. But the families? If you move the prisoner far enough away you can bet they won't have the means to make visits, and you can charge families exorbitant rates for your captive market.
bdcravens 10y ago
Being in prison is a punishment. what goes on in prison should be designed at keeping the incarcerated in and meet their civil rights; the idea that active punishment is justified speaks to a different mentality. This mentality is the outgrowth of "us-vs-them", but most people are closer to being "them" than they really know. If you've gotten behind the wheel of a car over the limit 3 or more times, in most states, you deserve to be prisoner.
- adventurer 10y ago
  I don't think most people are as close to being "them" as you think. We're not teetering on a society about to collapse into sending a meaningful amount of people into prison.
  - int_19h 10y ago
    Are you aware of the fact that we (US) are _already_ a society that sends more people into prison, both per capita and in absolute numbers, than any other country on earth?
    - jessaustin 10y ago
      ...ever, in history.
    - adventurer 10y ago
      Looking at the statistics, it backs up my comment, that most people are not as close to being them as you said.
Fjolsvith 10y ago
I've done time in county jails, state and federal prisons. On average, the phone call length you can make is 15 minutes max. You can make them 15 minutes apart. In the Alaskan state prison system, a 15 minute phone call from me cost my dad $33. How is that punishing me?
Fjolsvith 10y ago
I've done time in county jails, state and federal prisons. On average, the phone call length you can make is 15 minutes max. You can make them 15 minutes apart. In the Alaskan state prison system, a 15 minute phone call from me cost my dad $33. How is that punishing me?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

I wouldn't mind if the state was collecting the money. Prison is a punishment and you shouldn't be able to just chit chat all day. However, letting two private companies cash in is corruption.

kalleboo 10y ago

> Prison is a punishment In some other countries prison is seen as a place for rehabilitation or at worst a way to protect the public from unstable individuals.

leesalminen 10y ago
Exactly. It should be this way in USA as well. It sickens me how people shrug off any problems at correctional facilities as "it's punishment". We're only creating more problems for society with that thought process.
- shawn-butler 10y ago
  Nothing is ever that simple as the people of Norway are finding with Anders Behring Breivik who as far as I can tell has converted to Nazism and is getting a bachelor's degree in political science from University of Oslo after murdering 70 people. As I recall a couple years ago he made public complaints that the prison had not yet given him a PlayStation 3 to replace his current PlayStation 2, because it offers more suitable games to his playing style. Probably has it now. Punishment should fit the crime is the model in the US but since the 90s ever since sentencing became a political football that model has broken down. I find that rehabilitation is a word that comes easy to people who have never been victims of an actual crime. Prison time should never be population control/engineering but it should be a deterrent.
  - c0nducktr 10y ago
    Do you feel that Anders Breivik would not have murdered those children if the Norwegian prison system was more punitive?
    - shawn-butler 10y ago
      I believe he is beyond rehabilitation.
      - tamana 10y ago
        That wasn't the question.
        shawn-butler 10y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfactual_conditional https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfactual_conditional Some people believe they help people imagine creative solutions. I find counterfactuals, especially in history, to be devoid of any meaning and used by pseudo-intellectuals who don't really want to pursue the hard work of finding actual causality.
        yongjik 10y ago
        Huh? Actual causality is meaningless without counterfactuals. "Hitler caused Holocaust" means that if Hitler wasn't there, Holocaust wouldn't have happened.
        shawn-butler 10y ago
        Not really but sort of. Counterfactual historiography at best represents a sort of "reproducibility" for historians. They can't conduct experiments on the past. So, when someone asserts "Hitler caused Holocaust" some enterprising graduate student comes along and writes a thesis on Hitler's willing executioners and argues counterfactually that if Hitler wasn't there, Holocaust still happens. That doesn't mean at all that Hitler did not cause Holocaust or that the "eliminationist antisemitism" German culture caused Holocaust. I wish you had chose a less value-laden example.
      - pop8row9 10y ago
        I believe that no one is beyond rehabilitation, with the right conditions. Further, I believe this belief to be fundamental to any functionally human rights-oriented, pan-state democracy.
  - leesalminen 10y ago
    I don't know much about Breivik, but would venture to guess that killing 70 people is a result of severe mental illness. Using prisons as a warehouse for the mentally ill is another problem. These people should be handled differently than general population in a prison. IMO, you go to prison to reflect on your choices, work on underlying issues and come out a stronger person. It's _very_ hard to do so with mentally ill roommates, rape, gangs, etc all around you. I am a "victim" of an actual crime. My younger brother was hit by a car crossing the street. The driver was distracted and going >10 mph over the limit in a residential area. This individual had no insurance. No lawsuit was ever filed.
  - nitrogen 10y ago
    Honestly why should it bother anyone if prisoners are treated well? A video game costs nothing compared to other costs of incarceration. The only thing that matters is that people can be rehabilitated if possible, and isolated if not. And the last people who should define punishments are victims of crimes, because our own instincts for revenge are wholly miscalibrated for modern society. I've had thousands of dollars of irreplaceable equipment stolen from me, some of which I designed myself, and yet I rationally accept that the perpetrators (never caught) shouldn't be strung up in the proverbial town square for all to see.
rayiner 10y ago
I think prison should be for rehabilitation, but I think it's a bigger departure from how we do things than you appreciate. For example, should a woman who kills her abusive husband be imprisoned? From a purely rehabilitative point of view, the answer is no. There is zero risk of recidivism there. But even most people who think prison should be about rehabilitation probably have trouble with the idea that someone should simply go free under those circumstances. I.e. they believe that prison should be at least a little bit about punishment.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  > But even most people who think prison should be about rehabilitation probably have trouble with the idea that someone should simply go free under those circumstances. Not in my experience. But that's just an anecdote and no doubt there is a lot of data backing your assertion. I also suspect that this is different for different countries.
- int_19h 10y ago
  It's interesting to put this in historical context. Until about two centuries ago, it was not all that common to imprison people as a punishment. It was mainly used to confine those awaiting trial, and to induce compliance (contempt of court, debtor prisons etc). Being convicted of an actual crime generally warranted some form or combination of fines, public shaming, corporal punishment, banishment, or execution. Then, during the 17th century, the society had started to increasingly reject torture in general, and death penalty for relatively minor crimes (theft etc). Conveniently, that's also when European countries acquired sparsely populated lands that they wanted to settle ASAP, and so penal colonies were born, and replaced a significant chunk of previous death penalty convictions. That system eventually inspired the creation of proper prisons as we know them today. Ironically, if you read about the prominent people behind the movement that made it happen, most of them subscribed to "prison as repentance" theory, rather than punishment. It's why it was seen as so progressive and radical for its day. We all know how well that worked out.

IvyMike 10y ago

From the article: “Personal visits and telephone calls reduce recidivism." If "chit chatting" all day means they don't come back why would anyone be against it?

laksjd 10y ago
The companies and people that run the prisons and the prison phone systems are both very happy with a system where a) people spend a lot of time in jail and go back frequently and b) spend a lot of money on hyper-expensive phone calls since both of those things earn them very significant money. The question should probably be: Why should any sane person in the prison industry be for it?
Spooky23 10y ago
They get commissions on the calls, which often directly benefit the employees.

orangecat 10y ago

I wouldn't mind if the state was collecting the money. They basically are. See "commissions": http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/prison-phone-companies-fight-for-right-to-charge-inmates-14-a-minute/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/prison-phone-comp...

dade_ 10y ago
This is a much better article, thank you. Essentially this is the same as hotel phone rates, they also used to be very high by adding margin to the carrier services, but were part of the profitability of running a hotel. Mobile phones disrupted that source of income for hospitality, but with a captive customer the real issue is this commission now that telco rates have collapsed. As it is a fee for accessing telecommunication services, it sounds reasonable that the FCC should be able to regulate the commission, but the jail telcos have existing contracts in place under existing rules with the prisons and the FCC failed to address this.

bksenior 10y ago

You do know the point of a prison is in fact not to punish. It is to rehabilitate and a sentence is supposed to be a reflection on how much rehabilitation is necessary. It's sad, prisons should have the same rights as eeryone else lest we create a caste of population unable to reintegrate and move beyond what is often a single poor decision.

dlhavema 10y ago
What about ( sometimes multiple ) lifetime sentences without release? Sure they try to rehab* the inmate but not to the point of releasing them.back out to the public. Granted this is just one scenario..
- protomyth 10y ago
  I suspect a lot of folks would say skip rehabbing that person and try to deal effectively with a person who is getting out. There isn't an infinite amount of money and the extra little bit spent properly might make the difference between productive citizen and career criminal.
- laksjd 10y ago
  Countries that have a very high focus on the 'rehab' part of prison usually don't issue lifetime and certainly not multiple-lifetime sentences. Instead they tend to send people into mandated psychiatric care (in practice often life-long) or, if a person is 'sane' yet still very likely to cause damage to others than they are placed in 'preventive detention' which is still just 'being in prison' but does not carry any punitive notions and needs to be actively renewed every few years.

TeMPOraL 10y ago

> Prison is a punishment Beside the points others made here that it isn't, and it shouldn't be, I'd like to invite you to think about the ethical and practical implications of punishing someone over, and over, and over again for years or even decades, for an action that usually took only a very, very small fraction of time compared to the length of "punishment". The very idea flies in the face of... well any kind of experience with people and how they learn.

ludamad 10y ago
It's the fear of that punishment that is desired. Most people think murderers or similar are beyond redemption
- bdcravens 10y ago
  Yet DWI has a very high rate of recidivism, and DWI deaths are on par with murder victims. Murder has a very low rate of recidivism (most people don't realize everyone doesn't get a life sentence) Which group is really beyond redemption?
- robryk 10y ago
  And yet we make the actual prison experience worse than how it is perceived by a typical person.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
smallnamespace 10y ago
Retributive justice isn't for the the criminals, it's to deter other crime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retributive_justice#Principles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retributive_justice#Principles Personally, I think we've gone too far down the 'retributive' route without corresponding investments in rehabilitation, but a lot of Americans prefer to lock the door and throw away the key.
- tamana 10y ago

koolba 10y ago

> I wouldn't mind if the state was collecting the money. Prison is a punishment and you shouldn't be able to just chit chat all day. If there's one thing we don't need, it's a fiscal incentive for the government to jail people. Prison is meant to be a punishment for crimes and (depending on who you ask) an opportunity for rehabilitation. Without the latter you're going to have way more of the former. I'm not saying that inmates should have 24/7 free phone calls, free video calls, etc but price gouging a captive (no pun intended) audience isn't right either.

protomyth 10y ago
> If there's one thing we don't need, it's a fiscal incentive for the government to jail people. This, public or private, the root of the problem is that private companies and unions financially benefit from a larger prison population and both have money and political power to lobby effectively. Remove the financial incentive that has bad effects and you get a better system.
travmatt 10y ago
Most of the exploitation is aimed at the families of the incarcerated - you already control the prisoners wages and pay them slave wages so you can extract but so much. But the families? If you move the prisoner far enough away you can bet they won't have the means to make visits, and you can charge families exorbitant rates for your captive market.

bdcravens 10y ago

Being in prison is a punishment. what goes on in prison should be designed at keeping the incarcerated in and meet their civil rights; the idea that active punishment is justified speaks to a different mentality. This mentality is the outgrowth of "us-vs-them", but most people are closer to being "them" than they really know. If you've gotten behind the wheel of a car over the limit 3 or more times, in most states, you deserve to be prisoner.

adventurer 10y ago
I don't think most people are as close to being "them" as you think. We're not teetering on a society about to collapse into sending a meaningful amount of people into prison.
- int_19h 10y ago
  Are you aware of the fact that we (US) are _already_ a society that sends more people into prison, both per capita and in absolute numbers, than any other country on earth?
  - jessaustin 10y ago
    ...ever, in history.
  - adventurer 10y ago
    Looking at the statistics, it backs up my comment, that most people are not as close to being them as you said.

Fjolsvith 10y ago

I've done time in county jails, state and federal prisons. On average, the phone call length you can make is 15 minutes max. You can make them 15 minutes apart. In the Alaskan state prison system, a 15 minute phone call from me cost my dad $33. How is that punishing me?

Fjolsvith 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]