Re: A Dystopian New Initiative Will Charge Inmates by the
Ted, you make a crucial distinction that is often overlooked (or just unknown) by many who are outraged by the relationship between the private sector and the (white supremacist) carceral state. The vast majority (more than 90%) of all people locked up in the US are in wholly state-managed facilities. Most of those held in corporate-managed facilities are in federal custody, and many of those are held in âimmigrant detentionâ facilities (may of which are managed by non-profit orgs). https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-prisons-united-states/ As you point out, US prisons are currently more a form of wealth extraction than labor extraction--a form of gross redistribution of both what little wealth the poor have and the vast resources of the state (aka tax dollars). Of course, this is simply an updated political economy founded on forced labor camps (aka plantations) and the exponential growth of the racist carceral state following emancipation and the successes of white supremacy in fighting any potential Reconstruction might have had. https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520250031/emancipation-betrayed The private sector may collect, but itâs the state that (still) provides pretext and enforcement. https://www.propublica.org/article/digital-jail-how-electronic-monitoring-drives-defendants-into-debt https://www.propublica.org/article/why-small-debts-matter-so-much-to-black-lives Best, Ryan > On Dec 5, 2019, at 5:00 AM, nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org wrote: > > The bad news: There's a difference, which gets lost in the outrage of > this Hyperallergic piece, between prisons and the services they rely on: > construction, infrastructure maintenance, healthcare, food, etc. Huge <> # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: A Dystopian New Initiative Will Charge Inmates by the
Perhaps the laws may benefit refurbishment or demolition labor, not to mention logistics and decommissioning, etc. There seem to be a few of these facilities to deal with: https://concentrationcamps.us/ On 04/12/2019 19:26, tbyfield wrote: > The good news: "States are passing laws abolishing private prisons and > businesses are cutting ties with the facilities. And private prison > companies are planning for a future in which their core service is > illegal." <> # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: A Dystopian New Initiative Will Charge Inmates by the
The good news: "States are passing laws abolishing private prisons and
businesses are cutting ties with the facilities. And private prison
companies are planning for a future in which their core service is
illegal."
=>
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/12/1/20989336/private-prisons-states-bans-califonia-nevada-colorado
The bad news: There's a difference, which gets lost in the outrage of
this Hyperallergic piece, between prisons and the services they rely on:
construction, infrastructure maintenance, healthcare, food, etc. Huge
swaths of those services are provided by for-profit contractors, of
course; so even if privately run prisons go away, that immense apparatus
of commercial services continues. That's why it's helpful to understand
prisons, private and public, in terms of *state economic planning* —
or "economic development," as we like to call it in the US. Many other
prison systems (notably the Nazi death camps and Soviet gulags) have
been structured around extracting labor from prisoners; the US system
— which also extracts labor from prisoners — is more heavily
oriented around prisoners as consumers.
=> See Andrea Pitzer's history of the concentration camp, _One Long
Night_: https://andreapitzer.com/
As for this metered e-reader "initiative" is awful, but on a certain
level all it's really doing is making reading like phone calls. Under
Obama the FCC capped prisoners' long-distance charges at around
$0.25/minute, but Trump's FCC made rescinding those caps a high
priority, so charges may have risen back to what they were before, often
in excess of $1/minute. Extortionate fees like that shock the
conscience; but if you add up the countless ways "us" non-prisoners pay
to read — mobile data charges, ubiquitous logins for paid or "free"
(as in "you are the product") services, ridiculously overreaching DRM
claims, and all the rest — it's pretty shocking as well.
=> Just search something like {prison phone charges}
None of this is meant to defend or soften metering prisoners' use of
e-readers. Just the opposite: the clarity of this example should remind
us just how pervasive and normalized these abuses have become. That's
why it's easy to imagine an activist push defeating this initiative but
impossible to imagine anything other than metered reading being a nearly
universal norm in some arbitrary near future — say, 10 or 20 years.
Ted
On 3 Dec 2019, at 17:49, nettime's avid reader wrote:
A Dystopian New Initiative Will Charge Inmates by the Minute to Read
e-Books
https://hyperallergic.com/530216/a-dystopian-new-initiative-will-charge-inmates-by-the-minute-to-read-e-books/
If you’re not already on board with the ways in which for-profit
prisons
are a moral and civic affront and the outrageous and racially-biased
incarceration rate in the United States amounts to a new form of
slavery, I’m not sure what might convince you, but try this on for
size:
prisons in West Virginia are introducing a new e-literacy initiative
that will charge prisoners to read.
<...>
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A Dystopian New Initiative Will Charge Inmates by the Minute to Read
A Dystopian New Initiative Will Charge Inmates by the Minute to Read e-Books https://hyperallergic.com/530216/a-dystopian-new-initiative-will-charge-inmates-by-the-minute-to-read-e-books/ If you’re not already on board with the ways in which for-profit prisons are a moral and civic affront and the outrageous and racially-biased incarceration rate in the United States amounts to a new form of slavery, I’m not sure what might convince you, but try this on for size: prisons in West Virginia are introducing a new e-literacy initiative that will charge prisoners to read. According to a report by reason.com, the plan is to offer inmates at West Virginia prisons access to “free” electronic tablets, and then charge for their use. The contract, administrated by Global Tel Link (GTL) in 10 West Virginia prisons, and detailed by Appalachian Prison Book Project, offers tablet use at $0.05 per minute (with an introductory rate discounted to $0.03) to read books, listen to music, or play games; $0.25 per minute for video visitations; $0.25 per written message; and $0.50 to send a photo with a message. Based on information tabulated by Prison Policy Initiative in 2017, wages in West Virginia prisons range between $0.04 and $0.58 an hour, meaning a single minute of screen time might be commensurate with an hour of an inmate’s insultingly underpaid labor. [see: https://appalachianprisonbookproject.org/2019/11/20/how-much-does-it-cost-to-read-a-free-book-on-a-free-tablet/] The United States currently boasts the largest prison population in the world, as well as the highest incarceration rate per capita. The introduction of privatized prisons in the 1980s as a way of meeting demand driven by racist Reagan-era policies added a profit motive to system that had previously, at least in theory, prioritized rehabilitation over quarterly earnings. In fact, rehabilitation is unprofitable in the prison business, so why would it want to make resources available to help inmates get degrees, assist in their own legal defense, or have viable options upon release? The impact of incarceration on earning potential was summarized in a devastating 2010 Pew Research study, but why wait until people are out of prison to start screwing them out of their meager paychecks? That’s clearly the question on the mind of Global Tel Link and the West Virginia prison system. But hey, GTL is providing content, some 60,000 e-books on these tablets, so surely the money they are charging goes toward defraying that cost, right? Nope! All the tablets are running books available for free through Project Gutenberg. You just know whichever morally bankrupt GTL executive came up with that one is high-fiving himself all the way to the Corvette dealership. Stealing labor for content AND labor for readership! If the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future are available, I’ve got some ideas for who they should be visiting this coming Christmas. Appalachian Book Project (APBP) also notes that “most of the books we receive requests for at APBP — how-to guides (carpentry, starting a business, repairing small engines, etc.), contemporary fiction, popular mysteries and sci-fi, African American literature, Native studies, recent autobiographies — will not be available.” While the tablets being introduced at the 10 correctional centers are being met with anticipation for their potentional to enhance communication with loved ones and increase access to entertainment media, it is impossible to view the arrangement from the outside with anything but anger and disdain at the ways that the cultural prioritization of profits over basic human decency continues to rot our society at its fundament. I guess on one point, they have it right: there’s no need for access to fictional dystopian narratives anymore. Such ideas are no longer in the realm of science fiction, but a grim statement of fact. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
