Prisons are a cash cow [View all]

[damnedifIknow]

Rampant privatization is wreaking havoc on our society.

Case in point: what’s happened over the past few decades with prison phone services.

It used to be that if you were incarcerated at, say, the state penitentiary or the local jail you could call your family collect for as little as $4 an hour.

But then, states began signing contracts with private phone companies like AT&T, who, in turn, began charging sky-high rates for phone calls between prisoners and their families.

A 15-minute phone call that used to cost just a few bucks soon started costing as much as $17, which is a lot to ask from people in jail and prison, who generally have little to no income or from their families, who often live in poverty.

Of course, while prisoners struggled to find a way to talk to their loved ones without breaking the bank, the phone companies got – and have stayed – very, very rich. The prison phone service industry now rakes in around $1.2 billion every year.

And it’s not just the phone companies that are getting rich off prisoners’ phone calls.

Thanks to so-called “commissions” that can account for as much as 94 percent of the cost of a call, prison phone contracts have become a major source of revenue for state and local governments all across the country."

*Luckily, though, the government is starting to take action against some of the worst excesses of the phone service-industrial complex."

*Law enforcement, though, is having none of it.

The National Sheriffs’ Association says that if the government cuts back on the kickbacks prisons get from prisoners’ phone calls, they could just stop providing phone call services altogether."

http://www.salon.com/2015/05/10/prisons_are_a_cash_cow_how_privatization_forged_an_incarceration_industrial_complex_partner/