it’s 2022. donald trump has died in disgrace days after being impeached and jailed. my chemical romance’s new album is coming out the same day as the new spiderverse movie. the lizzo and janelle monaé collab song is blowing up the radio. lil nas x has a verse in it. you and your partner have time and energy for dates after work after jeff bezos’ assets have been seized and distributed to the public in the wake of his arrest for keeping employees in unsafe working conditions.
oh what a life
Like to charge, reblog to cast.
What if a lactating person is locked in a room with a dog indefinitely? Should they let the dog starve?
In an age of disappearing prison libraries, jail profiteers provide “free” crapgadget tablets that charge prisoners by the minute to read Project Gutenberg ebooks
The past couple years has seen a rise in prison profiteers who strike deals with state corrections departments to provide “free” tablets
to prisoners (these being the flimsiest, cheapest, least reliable
hardware imaginable), and then profiting by charging exorbitant sums for
prisoners to send emails (selling “digital postage stamps” that have to be affixed to each “page” of email), videoconference with family members, and provide media, charging prisoners for music that they lose every time a prison changes suppliers.
At the same time, these companies lobby prisons to eliminate in-person
visits, paper mail, and even libraries in the name of safety, contraband
interdiction, and cost-savings. This replaces the prison-administered
systems that encourage rehabilitation and smooth re-entry with private
systems designed to extract large sums from prisoners’ families. As bad
as prison-administered systems are, the private systems can be worse –
and when you combine them, you get the worst of both worlds: prisoners
who violate the vendors’ terms of service get sent to solitary.
A recent presentation by Katy Ryan from the Appalachian Book Project
describes in gruesome detail how this affects in-prison reading. In West
Virginia, a company called Global Tel Link has the contract to provide
prisoners in ten prisons with “free” tablets, for which they charge
$0.05/minute for reading ebooks, primarily drawn from Project Gutenberg,
a free online service of volunteer-produced, public domain and
CC-licensed ebooks.
Not only does this deprive prisoners of more recent titles, including
“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” – it also
makes prison reading fantastically expensive: they estimate that a quick
read of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four would clock in at
$19.80, while a used paperback would cost the prisoner less than a
dollar (and a copy checked out of the prison library would be free).
The prison system receives a 5% kickback on the revenues from this
program (GTL also charges prisoners $0.25/min for videoconferencing,
$0.25/message for IM, and $0.50 for every photo and $1.00 for every
video sent to prisoners). GTL’s contract allows it to raise prices at
its sole discretion, and to recoup any shortfalls from its expected
minimum profits by billing the state department of corrections.
Many prisons will no longer let you send or gift books to prisoners, but instead force you to buy the prisoner the book, at an exorbitant price, if that book is available from the 300 or so title vendor library…
Anonymous
