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U.S. prisons mull AI to analyze inmate phone calls
- dotcoma 5y agoExactly the kind of thing you’d expect China to be doing…
- jdavis703 5y agoCurrently this is done by humans, one of the reasons prison phone calls are ridiculously priced. Unfortunately I imagine the AI just means more profit for the telco, not cheaper phone calls.
- dotcoma 5y agoSo we take it as a given that a prisoner has no right to privacy?
- chronic2703 5y ago> So we take it as a given that a prisoner has no right to privacy? Right to privacy has been gone since the iPhone was invented.
- dotcoma 5y agoThen maybe it’s time to move to something different, like https://calyxos.org/ https://calyxos.org/ or https://e.foundation/ https://e.foundation/
- tablespoon 5y ago> So we take it as a given that a prisoner has no right to privacy? Yeah, they're in prison. It comes with the territory. IIRC, the only person they have any right to privacy with is their lawyer, and only about legal matters. It's not ideal, but it's a common enough problem that prisoners try to coordinate criminal activities with the outside while in prison (e.g. give orders to their gang, coordinate an escape, get orders to shank someone one the inside, etc).
- jasonwatkinspdx 5y agoPrison isn't a Sopranos episode. The number of instances of what you're talking about are vanishingly rare and nearly impossible to stop anyhow if people are even remotely clever.
- jdavis703 5y agoIt doesn’t have to be organized crime. It can be as petty as someone trying to get someone to smuggle in contraband for personal consumption (e.g. a cigarette or drugs or a weapon.)
- scarecrowbob 5y agoMore like, "kind of thing I'd expect the states of Texas or Alabama to be doing".
- kiba 5y agoThere are beneficial uses mentioned, but this system seems to increase the power differential between the authority and the inmate and their family, not to mention potential abuses.
- lindseymysse 5y agoLegalize drugs, fewer people in prison. And, yes, they should have privacy when talking to family members. And the right to vote.
- hamburgerwah 5y agoBut how will the people that profit from prisons buy big yachts?
- gruez 5y agoAFAIK most prisons in the us are not privately owned, so the people doing the lobbying probably aren't private prison owners with yachts, it's prison guard unions.
- jakelazaroff 5y agoThere are plenty of people in the US who profit from prisons but have nothing to do with private prisons. Prison labor is significantly cheaper than “normal” labor, for example. And in states like Florida, felons are effectively banned from voting, so politicians can “profit” by criminalizing their opponents’ constituencies.
- jasonwatkinspdx 5y agoPublicly owned prisons all contract out to the same pool of extremely abusive vendors. Private prisons are worse but not by much. The entire system is in dire need of reform, but too many voters absolutely love the cruelty of the existing system.
- cik 5y agoSorry... prisoners don't have the right to vote? What country is this?
- nnx 5y agoThis would also remove a big part if not the most part justification for all the AML/KYC financial surveillance nonsense.
- tyingq 5y agoGoogle is quite good at speech to text, and still manages to get things wildly wrong pretty often. Trying to imagine how well some random government contractor will do this.
- bpodgursky 5y agoThe government contractors are doing it right now. Badly, presumably.
- pmorici 5y agoThe vendor they cite as an example of providing this service in the article says they use AWS on their website. Presumable they Speech to text is being done by AWS's Transcribe service.
- tyingq 5y agoA good start, I suppose. Though I don't know how well even that will fare with 300-3500hz landlines, busted prison quality phone equipment and a pretty broad variety of speakers, languages, slang, etc.
- TeeMassive 5y agoI know since they are inmates this might seem like this is a legitimate use of AI surveillance. But there is a benefice to protecting inmates from this kind of surveillance: it sets a very strong standard for privacy by saying that even inmates aren't subjecting to this.
- arminiusreturns 5y agoHow about we start by not overcharging exorbitant amounts and gouging prisoners and their families before we increase the 1984 levels in prisons?! The whole US prison industry is so damn corrupt its infuriating.
- hermannj314 5y agoI did foster care briefly. Children were in my care after mom was charged with a crime and in jail awaiting trial. One of the kids needed a medical authorization approved by the parent so I naively waltz into the local jail and say, "I have a piece of paper for so-and-so to review and sign" Oh boy, they laughed and laughed at me. You idiot, only lawyers can do that. And her lawyer for her criminal case isn't going to be here for awhile. They said we could talk to her for like $10/min on a video conference system (she still couldn't sign anything) I was like, yeah but I am here face to face, they laughed again. That isn't safe. Only lawyers can talk face to face, you must talk through a video chat system located on site for a nominal fee. Screw this. So we played the song and dance that involves shuffling papers to court appointed lawyers, waiting several weeks, and this latency made every tiny insignificant element of us providing the best care to these children absolutely impossible. We quit foster care after 3 months.
- watwut 5y agoI think this is also fault of courts/foster system that did not appointed person able to sign and put the kid into impossible situation.
- shadilay 5y agoThis seems an awful lot like a solution to a problem that shouldn't exist.
- dredmorbius 5y ago"Responsibilty without authority."' Incidentally, an excellent question to add to your interview repetoire: - What are the responsibilities of this position? - What are the authorities of this position? Plugging the phrase into Google Ngram Viewer and Google Book Search is interesting. Big bump at about 1920: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=responsibility+without+authority&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cresponsibility%20without%20authority%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=responsibility... Responsibility without authoirty is unfair, as well as dangerous, because it risks a sort of shifting blame. You may have seen this state of things among workmen, or between foremen and workmen, but any executive who is worthy of the name will be very careful to delegate both the responsibility for the results and the necessary authority to carry it through. https://books.google.com/books?id=DT61kZUpxTsC&pg=PA63&dq=%22responsibility+without+authority%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi0nez7oqjyAhWPQs0KHcRlCSwQ6AF6BAgDEAM https://books.google.com/books?id=DT61kZUpxTsC&pg=PA63&dq=%2... Well known is the fact that responsibility without authority, like authority without responsibility, is doomed to failure. https://books.google.com/books?id=IGpOAQAAIAAJ&pg=RA2-PA9&dq=%22responsibility+without+authority%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwionqmJpKjyAhXaZc0KHfaWDlwQ6AF6BAgLEAM https://books.google.com/books?id=IGpOAQAAIAAJ&pg=RA2-PA9&dq...
- Causality1 5y agoWhat's even the point of this? If you know anyone in prison you know that secret cell phone access isn't exactly hard to get on the inside. Making legitimate calls harder is like DRM: it only hurts people following the rules.
- unixhero 5y agoIn US prisons, hurting people is the point.
- eurasiantiger 5y agoHow else could they keep up the recidivism?
- Animats 5y agoRoblox is working on that for in-game censorship. They want to be able to block bad words within 100ms.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- orthecreedence 5y agoIt's fine that prisoners are raped all the time, but we should definitely make sure they aren't talking about anything naughty on the phones.
- pmorici 5y agoThis kind of reads like this company has come up with this scheme and now they are trying to sell it by forcing prisons to use it through legislation or at least pressure from congress. Notice that even though the headline says "U.S. Prisons mull AI" the article actually says an unspecified congressional panel and an unnamed Democratic congressional aide are pushing for it to be "studied" there are zero mentions of prisons asking for it beyond a note that a sheriff in a town of 21,000 people claims to have solved a crime using it. Feels like the real story here is corruption.
- anigbrowl 5y agoCorrect, and anyone who works on this is similarly corrupt.
- scarecrowbob 5y agoUS prisons are liberating in a certain sense... I don't feel so bad about thinking that the folks who run them are probably the bad guys and are literally evil. Kind of like reading histories of the CIA. And the more evil they create the less I feel bad about not being okay with the larger governmental entities that operate them. For a long, long time, I felt like a whiny teenager, being pissed at my parents. As I get older (I'm 45 ish), the more I feel like my disgust at the folks who run these things is an actual ethical stance. The people who run prisons in the US are literally evil. There may be literally nothing to be done about that. But that fact doesn't make the people running those prisons less evil.
- whoknowswhat11 5y agoHuh? 3 daily calls is evil?
- DantesKite 5y agoWhat a naive and cynical perspective.
- kome 5y agoyes, it's just pseudo-ethical garbage to justify doing nothing politically
- hulitu 5y agoWhy naive ? Never heard of CIA experiments on inmates ?
- eurasiantiger 5y agoWhat a lackadaisical comfortist non-effort.
- egwynn 5y agoYou are capable of more productive discussion than this.
- ohazi 5y ago> For a long, long time, I felt like a whiny teenager, being pissed at my parents. As I get older (I'm 45 ish), the more I feel like my disgust at the folks who run these things is an actual ethical stance. Same. They say that you get more conservative with age, but instead I've found that it has only got easier to hold the same principles I think I've always held. Lately it seems like people have stopped trying to sugar coat their shitty immoral ideas, and now it's really easy to see when someone is motivated by greed or hatred or is just an all around bad person. They used to dress these ideas up as "pragmatism" or "fiscal responsibility" and then you'd have to debate them and second guess yourself. But now they pretty much just tell you that they have no principles. It doesn't even have to be political... You wouldn't believe how casually people will suggest doing immoral things at work: cutting corners (and lying about it), lying to customers, lying to coworkers, hiding things that make the company look bad (even if people could get hurt as a result), or even committing outright fraud. It boggles the mind.
- conradev 5y agoWhile we’re calling out the literal evil the US prison system, this company in particular is terrible: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securus_Technologies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securus_Technologies The first paragraph: “The company has been criticized for developing phone tracking technologies that can be used outside prisons and for charging very high rates for calls, in addition to pushing to mandate the removal of in-person meetings of inmates with their families.“ My family uses their subsidiary, JPay, which is just as evil.
- duskwuff 5y agoThey're applying the same principle to other prisoner amenities as well. Part of Securus's strategy is renting a locked-down tablet to prisoners which can provide them with (expensive) paid access to music, books, etc -- then lobbying prisons to stop allowing prisoners to receive physical equivalents of these items in care packages. Their primary competitor, GTL, is doing the exact same thing. https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/blogs/the-scoop/prisoners-pay-to-read-prison-tablets/ https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/blogs/the-scoop/prison... https://www.pittsburghcurrent.com/fahrenheit-412-new-rule-bans-allegheny-county-jail-inmates-from-receiving-books-reading-limited-to-214-select-e-books/ https://www.pittsburghcurrent.com/fahrenheit-412-new-rule-ba...
- sterlind 5y agoAccess to books - or knowledge, more broadly - should be a human right. It's sickening that these companies can strip the rights of prisoners for such an obvious profit motive, and get away with it - probably because prisons are human wastebaskets, and the prisoners seen as garbage. How do I get involved in dismantling these companies and their contracts?
- jka 5y ago"Prison reform" is probably the search term to begin with, and then look for advocacy groups that align with your interests and abilities to contribute from there. You might also be curious to learn about some of the Scandinavian prison models and the approaches that apply there.