Massachusetts becomes fifth state to make prison calls free

When I first went to jail (for being poor) it was costing me $1.50/min to call my family.

Six years later, when I was still locked up, my mother was dying of cancer and I could only afford to call her for five minutes a day.

Illinois at least dropped the prices of its prison calls to 1¢/min.

Amazing that this bill includes the county jails. Often jail and prison regulations are totally separate and jails usually get the short end of the stick.

And remember, it is never the prisoners that pay for the calls. It is always the friends and family having to put money onto the phone or commissary accounts. Often a male prisoner has left behind a woman and children and they have lost their primary income, but now they are being burdened with paying for phone calls, hygiene products, clothing and food for their loved one too.

In case anyone else wants to "call BS" on this:

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_r...

I just read the link you sent. Unfathomable

As if every story were so simple.

Systems fail people. People make mistakes. I hope you never have to face the same lack of sympathy you're displaying.

qingcharles I keep running into you in HN threads, I'm just gonna leave this here:

preston@unlockedlabs.org

hit me up sometime

I'm sure there are examples of abuse.

But I honestly don't see the problem in principle.

If a court issues you a fine and you simply ignore it, that's not a situation society can just ignore. If you are truly unable to pay, that's more complicated, but should not just simply magically resolve you of responsibility.

There has to be other measures to ensure that money is paid or an equivalent cost is beared. Garnishing wages being an obvious first step.

(This is especially true if fines were to scale with income/wealth)

Somehow I don't think it is that hard for the judge to find out if you're really poor and can't pay or you don't want to pay and take reasonable action. Jailing people for being poor is catch 22 with people's lives.

I do agree that something needs to be extracted and it’s probably better to require community service than being locked up. If you can’t or won’t pay your debt to society through money then society can hire you to repay the debt.

People are not jailed for being poor. People make philosophical arguments for why that’s actually the case when people are arrested for breaking actual laws. None of the laws that send people to jail state it’s illegal to be poor. Getting arrested for trespassing isn’t getting arrested for being poor.

Not paying a fine? You committed a crime that led to the fine. The not paying is an after effect.

Do you have a need for volunteers for non-training software development work?

We get a lot of interest from universities with students that want to intern/volunteer but most of it seems to be UI/UX stuff which I recently found out, doesn't usually include front-end work.

I can talk to my boss, there may be an upcoming need for front-end so feel free to either email me or https://www.unlockedlabs.org/#contact

All of the support we have received is so appreciated <3

Jaywalking and other insane laws prove your wrong.

Making anyone who jaywalks go to jail is a miscarriage of justice.

Any need for backend work? At a glance it wasn't clear what your software solution facilitated or if it was an existing platform.

There is an existing platform in production right now in a few different facilities. We are currently re-writing it from scratch.

It's almost an LMS, more of a UI that allows a portal for students to access many other LMS's, all the while storing and logging the data and building a transcript.

As crazy as it sounds, prisons can tell you that I didn't stand up for count (roll-call) in 2014, but can't tell you what classes, if any, that i have taken over the years or anything about my educational progress.

The only thing I can say is to reach out, hopefully we can figure something out :)

I'd love to hear the details of your situation.

When a judge sets bail bond (which is what you're referring to in your prior comments - yes I read back because I was curious), it is either to ensure the accused returns for trial, or they set it very high to keep them in jail because they are a significant flight-risk.

I suspect you being a UK citizen was a big factor there - but I'm very surprised that your case is taking TEN YEARS and that you've been in jail the majority of that time. How does that happen? Are you appealing a prior case outcome?

You also got 1.5 additional years for violating a court gag order on your own case? Is that right?

What did the poster say? He deleted his comment now.

10 years. And the prosecutor called me to court and dropped all the charges a week or so ago.

The bail amount was set simply because I was a UK citizen, despite handing the court my passport, despite owning a house, despite being married to a US citizen.

Illinois just became the first state to abolish cash bail, so this problem will be less frequent now as the bar is higher.

Courts have been routinely ruling lately that cash bail was always constitutionally invalid, which makes sense, because it distinguishes rich from poor.

You can set your account option|preferences to "Show Dead".

In any case, he quoted your "Often a male prisoner has left behind a ..." and made the suggestion that you

    Dont be a criminal?

which suggests they lack any understanding of the US 'justice' system.

It was only five months for posting on Twitter. I can probably link to the main Tweet at this point:

https://twitter.com/CookCoDefender/status/153495695650234778...

https://nitter.net/CookCoDefender/status/1534956956502347784

I reposted the above Tweet and the judge freaked out about it. The newspaper article is about the fact I was getting arrested every day when I was on house arrest for a short time in 2021/2022 due to the monitoring system being a piece of crap. The judge said I shouldn't be posted under a fake name. My name is Charles and the link is to a newspaper article written about me under my real name.

The other one that was at issue looked almost exactly like this, but wasn't this exact one:

https://twitter.com/OneKingCharles/status/152697261340637593...

https://nitter.net/OneKingCharles/status/1526972613406375936

The judge said I should not be Tweeting about police misconduct.

All the people I was locked up with for "being poor" who were serving a sentence of conviction (as opposed to those in pretrial detention for inability to pay bond) were there because of child support payments.

Basically what happens is that often the court makes a poor determination of how much a person can afford to pay each month, and when they can't make the payments they are jailed for contempt of court (for violating a court order). Often the first thing states do is take away the person's driver's license as a warning before jailing them. This makes them unable to get to/from work and usually results in their unemployment.

Done :)