Capitalist innovation comes up with a new, pointless way to be cruel to incarcerated people!
The printed scans I collected were low-quality, including blurry, darkened family photos that left incarcerated people unable to make out their loved ones’ faces. Even the more readable scans left much to be desired—because, after all, physical mail is rarely just about reading. Incarcerated people couldn’t run their fingers over their loved ones’ handwriting, or grasp a piece of paper that had been held by someone familiar.
. . .
Thus, it’s doubly alarming that more facilities are moving toward restricting traditional physical correspondence in favor of scanning and printing or electronically delivering letters. The Florida Department of Corrections, for example, is considering adopting a policy that would digitize incoming (nonlegal) mail, forcing incarcerated people pay for printouts or to view their correspondence on a tablet or kiosk operated by the private company JPay, the Gainesville Sun recently reported. The Smart Communications’ MailGuard program, launched in Pennsylvania prisons in 2018, now operates in more than 110 facilities in 25 states, according to the current listing of facilities on the program’s portal for family members.
. . .
While physical mail has long been subject to surveillance by corrections officers, bringing in a private company to process correspondence, and storing that correspondence in electronic databases, changes the game.
And this surveillance is part of the point—”MailGuard® creates a searchable database and opens a whole new field of intelligence for your agency,” notes the Smart Communications website.
Death to America.
forcing incarcerated people pay for printouts or to view their correspondence on a tablet or kiosk operated by the private company JPay
holy shit what the fuck is wrong with you people death to america
Wait until you hear about how much we charge inmates to make telephone calls.
But in Illinois jails — which are run not by the state but by individual cities and counties — phone calls cost 52 times more, with a typical 15-minute call home from a jail in Illinois costing $7. In other states, the families of people in jail have to pay even more: A call from a Michigan jail costs about $12 on average, and can go as high as $22 for 15 minutes (compared to $2.40 from the state’s prison system).
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/phones/state_of_phone_justice.html
why the fuck are they charging inmates ANYTHING to use the basic functions of the facilities they're forced to live in
Because the prisoners have no other choice and in America convicts are about as socially well-regarded as homeless people.
wait until you hear about all the labour they are forced to do, including fighting fires
:liberalism: "why would anyone want prisons outright abolished???????"
If we decide that prisoners aren't people, then there are no longer any incarcerated people. Mission accomplished!
Liberal voice: Prisons serve a vital purpose, they keep the super predators away from me and keep the value of my home high.
There are tons of cloistered suburbanites who are terrified of venturing out of their gated communities lest they see anyone with even a heavy tan. But at the same time, there are people who live in actually dangerous areas, who may have personal experience with crime, and who have legitimate concerns about experiencing crime in the future. I think prison abolition really falls flat with those people, as does the left's focus on long-term, structural solutions to crime (over how to handle crime that's happening right now).
In many places, the people I'm talking about have already elected politicians to the left of mainstream Democrats, too, so it's not like they're impossible to move left. But if we want to keep them moving left, we have to speak to their material conditions right now, and prison abolition doesn't do that.
A good book on this is James Forman, Jr.,'s Locking Up Our Own : https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/books/review-locking-up-our-own-james-forman-jr.html
“Far from ignoring the issue of crime by blacks against other blacks,” Forman writes, “African-American officials and their constituents have been consumed by it.”
Forman does not minimize the influence of racism on mass incarceration. And he takes great pains to emphasize that African-Americans almost inevitably agitated for more than just law-enforcement solutions to the problems facing their neighborhoods — they argued for job and housing programs, improvements in education. But their timing in stumping for social programs was terrible. “Such efforts had become an object of ridicule by 1975, a symbol of the hopeless naïveté of 1960s liberalism,” Forman writes.
One result: A wide range of African-American leaders championed tougher penalties for drug crimes and gun possession in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. It was the one option they consistently had, and it seemed a perfectly responsible, moral position. Wasn’t the safety of black law-abiding citizens a basic civil right?
The Article references an event that happened in 2018 where a "Mass-sickening" happened of LEO staff handling mail I guess?
https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/pennsylvania-department-corrections-prison-lockdown-drugs-k2-fentanyl-guards-sickness-20180907.html
An actual toxicologist doesn't agree and this is sounding more and more like Havana Syndrome
Here's another weird one with that kind of fearmongering - a San Diego County video that pretends that you can overdose from fentanyl just by looking at the stuff. Archive link followed by the original:
https://archive.is/oJlDi
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-08-08/im-not-going-to-let-you-die-deputy-overdoses-after-coming-in-contact-with-fentanyl
Edit:
Good Lord, cops are cowards. From your link:
"Mass psychogenic illness happens all the time. We see it all the time with law enforcement," Perrone said. "Police pull someone over and find an unknown substance. Suddenly their heart's racing, they're nauseated and sweaty. They say, 'I'm sick. I'm gonna pass out.' That is your normal physiological response to potential danger."
From the LA Times story:
"I have never once seen a toxicology report from any of these [first responder] cases that showed that the ‘victim’ had actual fentanyl in their system.” The San Diego video, Faust said, is “not diagnostic of anything. It shows that someone had an altered level of consciousness and got better but not why.”
https://www.ems1.com/opioids/articles/toxicologist-you-cant-just-touch-fentanyl-and-overdose-qCP7P9puLCouxYbr/
This toxicologist takes it a step farther and says "You can't just touch fentanyl and overdose"
The privatization of services in public prisons is at least as large a problem as the existence of private prisons themselves. Everyone's focused on ending the latter, but the industry has already moved on to cashing in on the former.
(the exception is immigration detention, which is almost entirely run by for-profit corporations)
From an American Bar Association report on privatized services (warning - large PDF): https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/legal_aid_indigent_defendants/ls-sclaid-def-aba-privatizaton-report-final-june-2020.pdf
In 2015, police pulled South Carolina resident Antonio G. over for failing to use a turn signal, arrested him, and took him to the local jail. The next day his mother posted the $2,100 bail and the judge ordered, as a condition of Mr. G’s release on bail, that he wear and pay for an electronic monitoring device. The for-profit company that provided the monitor charged Mr. G a monitor set-up fee of $179.50 and $9.25 per day–almost $300 per month. After nine months of wearing the device, and still waiting for his trial, Mr. G had paid over $2,500 for his monitor. “I gave up...I was falling apart. It felt like being on a chain gang. Those bills were getting out of hand. I said, ‘They’re just going to have to lock me up.’” On August 4, 2015, Green turned himself in. He’d simply run out of money.”
What's that thing... that "theory" thing... where capital finds ways of using captive populations as a way to make money?
I'm sure there's a name for it? :thinkin-lenin:
Finally, a convenient way to make The New Jim Crow be a book about a lack of "intellectual diversity" on college campuses.
Yankeeland is just straight up the worst fucking country
just pure, concentrated evil, for no other reason than to be pointlessly cruel
Cruelty is a defense mechanism. If guards and administrators and prison profiteers had the capacity to look at what they're doing objectively, they would break. The only way to stay sane in their positions, the only way to sleep at night, is to tell themselves that what they are doing is justified, and who they are doing it to, deserves it. Cruelty is justice, justice is desitable, cruelty is desirsble.
Whenever I read about U.S. systems doing evil, heinous, monstrous and ultimately petty shit like this, the only comfort I can imagine is knowing that this country's in a death spiral of its own creation. And every story like this adds a little more torque.
