Captive Audience: How Companies Make Millions Charging Prisoners to Send An Email
Privatization of the penal system has been very good for our Predator Class.
Captive Audience: How Companies Make Millions Charging Prisoners to Send An Email
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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.*
In the outside world there are numerous companies offering free email accounts—Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Mail.com—but inside prisons companies charge a fee, a token JPay calls a “stamp,” to send each message. Each “stamp” covers only one page of writing. Want to send photos of a nephew’s graduation, a niece’s prom dress or a new baby? Each picture costs an additional stamp. A short video clip? That’ll be three stamps. With the postal service, stamp prices are fixed, but JPay’s stamp prices fluctuate. Shortly before Mother’s Day, for instance, a stamp cost 35 cents; the price rose to 47 cents the following week. For a few hundred dollars, prisoners can skip kiosk lines by buying a tablet—a relatively expensive purchase that tends to lock them into JPay’s services.
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Prison commissaries have always turned a small profit by selling paper, envelopes, and stamps. But with few recurring costs, e-messaging is a much more lucrative enterprise—and not just for JPay. In 2014, more than 14.2 million e-messages were sent over the service. With many prisons reaping a roughly 5-cent commission per message, prison systems that use JPay stand to collect $710,000 on e-messages alone. As use of e-messaging increases, these numbers stand to balloon. In Michigan, for example, imprisoned users send 800,000 to one million messages through JPay each month.
We’re an Anything-For-A-Buck nation. The predators have pretty much decided that everything is up for grabs and their ruthless asses have taken over everything.
And this is NOT something that only started since Cheeto was elected.
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Comments
It is really easy to hate the US for what it does
to its own people. I try to not to, but it is hard. Thanks for that essay. How much longer til this system will collapse? I can't wait for it to do.
https://www.euronews.com/live
Great summary! Send it off to
Great summary! Send it off to Nakedcapilism.com, Zerohedge, Jimmy Dore etc. because this succinct evaluation needs to reach a much wider audience. Thank You!!