Massachusetts becomes fifth state to make prison calls free

I once attended an internal presentation while working for the UK's Ministry of Justice.

A large number of contraband mobile phones had been confiscated, and a team performed some data analysis to see what they'd been used for.

The overwhelming conclusion was that the phones had been primarily used to keen in touch with family.

There's also a whole bunch of research that showed that maintaining ties with the outside world while incarcerated led to reduced rates of reoffending (and the inverse was also true - isolation led to increased rates).

Allowing free phone calls in and out of prisons makes a lot of sense both socially and economically.

But the purpose of the prison system isn't to improve society and economics.

For a well-functioning prison system it is.

This is an absolutely bizarre take. Even if you’re all for the pure punitive aspect of it, why would you not want to improve society and the economics? Are you Kim Jong Un or something? I’m genuinely confused how any reasonable argument can be made here, regardless on your stance towards the prisoners themselves.

They didn’t say they support the status quo.

Then they should elaborate on their point because their comment sounds like they do.

your snark is obscuring any point that you might be trying to make here...

Even if you're into the pure punishment angle, prolonged isolation is a factory for mental instability. And you're releasing most of these people back into society at some point.

The US is really big on making sure criminals never stop paying for their crimes.

Improving society in a way that helps anyone who hasn’t earned it is contrary to the goals way too many voters.

There is no logic that a good thing should be free. In fact it should likely cost prisoners something if it is good for them. Just like breakfast is good for you but it is not free.

I'm hoping the comment you're replying to was sardonic.

If you're a retributivist, you believe the point of prison is to punish the guilty. Therefore you will be uncomfortable with the idea of prison as a means to "improve society or economics".

Kant:

> [Punishment] can never be inflicted merely as a means to promote some other good for the criminal himself or for civil society. It must always be inflicted upon him only because he has committed a crime. For a human being can never be treated merely as a means to the purposes of another or be put among the objects of rights to things

“If it’s good for you, it shouldn’t be free” is a very strange hill to die on, even if we weren’t even specifically talking about attempting to rehabilitate criminals.

That’s precisely what it’s for.

Make take a reflecting break.

What about clean air

I would guess that there are many cases where it reduces the burden on the prisoner's family - a burden that should never be a purpose of incarceration, and which may lead to follow-on social dysfunction.

In the libertarian ideal, a clean ecosystem should be monetized to incentivize the production of value by those who think they need a clean ecosystem. In theory, we would all be richer for it.

At the same time, there's no logic that says that a good thing should cost money. A walk in the woods is good for you, should we charge for that?

Breakfast is literally free for prisoners

Ah, you're thinking of the American prison system. We were talking more about a prison system that is functional and beneficial.

Easy mistake to make, I know.

> reduced rates of reoffending

Sounds like something bad for business when you run for-profit prisons.

The lack of basic logic training in the responses are hilarious, and some of them can’t even notice there is a damn “likely” there.

The fact that A does not imply B, and A often implies not B does not mean that you cannot find an example that show both A and B. But it is sufficient to weaken the argument to support B using A.

Also in your particular example, if you walking in a woods that is private or requires hiring people to maintain, you will likely need to pay it. You don’t need to pay it if you walk in the wilderness, but even that you still indirectly paying it via tax if there are any work needs to be done to keep the wilderness looks good to you.

A terrible theory. Business owners can increase profits by X% by polluting more, and they can just live in the clean air areas that have higher property values and make the poor live in the polluted areas. Weather patterns move pollution in specific directions.

Don't believe me? Look at industrial cities like Cleveland where the poor areas are concentrated phyiscally downwind of the factories, and the wealthy areas are either upstream on the West side or further away on the East side, where they built a private train for themselves that allowed them to be further from the city while keeping commuting distance. This line is now the RTA Blue/Green line, and if you do a street view of the line in Shaker Heights you'll see that it runs straight down a boulevard of period mansions.

The wealthy can avoid almost every negative externality they create:

Underfunded public transit in NYC? Just take a helicopter to work.

Too many people are poor and crime is high? Hire private security and live in a gated community.

The poor are mad at you every time you go out in public and have their pitchforks at the ready? Fly private, have your assistant pick up your coffee, dine out in a private room, spend time in places the poor can't afford to go like your yacht or Monaco.

In Science Fiction, they go as far as moving off-planet, like in Elysium.

If things that were good for society were profitable we'd be living in a Star Trek utopia by now.

Can you find a “shouldn’t“ part in my response?

This is silly. Non-prisoners are paying out the nose for prisoners' "free" stuff already, and worrying about some pennies on top of that is petty.

Offering prisoners free phone access is very likely to save non-prisoners shittons of money, so we should do it.

While it may improve the outcome for prisoners wouldn't it be abused by criminals at a large scale? In my country at least phones are smuggled by criminals to continue running their enterprises from behind the bars.

According to whatever study the parent comment cites, most of them are used to contact family. Seems the solution to allow free calls from monitored prison phones is a good compromise.

Yes, it's implied.

I interpreted it as snarking on the current state of affairs. By and large, in the US the point of the prison system is *not* rehabilitation or providing benefit to society. It's about lining the pockets of wealthy people and keeping the downtrodden in that position. And that sucks, but stating it as a matter of fact doesn't mean one supports it.

But if I’m a retributivist, why do I want to be less efficient with money and also make MY life worse, just to inflict more punishment on some prisoner? That just genuinely makes no sense. I can understand the logic of wanting to punish them for the sake of it, but I would also want to be efficient about it, and not make my life worse in the process.

Prison should be about aggregate improvement of society while minimizing dehumanization. Sure, a drug kingpin might keep running their empire from within prison. But we might buy safer prisons and improved reintegration with this cost.

This is the same type of logic used by police to justify civil forfeiture of cash in the USA. Drug dealers carry a lot of cash because they can't use banks, so anybody carrying a lot of cash must be a drug dealer and the cash must be illegal proceeds from drug dealing.

Not only has this logic severely damaged public trust in police, but it's been incrementally extended to seize money and property from many innocent and/or uninvolved people.

I'm not saying it will never happen, but we should not be punishing everyone for the misdeeds of the few. We should not be attributing anything to criminal activity that has not yet been proven to be criminal activity.

You don't want to be "less efficient with money" or "make your life worse". Factors like that don't come into it. Neither does "making society better," "reforming the guilty party," or deterrence. And "inflicting more punishment" isn't the goal either -- that's just cruelty.

The basic point is simple. If a person commits a crime, they should be punished in proportion to the crime. Full stop. Within that simple framework, efficiency is fine, but it shouldn't be the goal.

Seems great to allow it through monitored devices for free, you might gather more evidence this way and convict others.

That is do everything possible to prevent smuggled non monitored devices so that the only communication is through sanctioned monitored devices.

Obviously the right to privacy (4th amendment) is lost in prison among other rights so there shouldn't be any issue with the surveillance.

What snark? These are the goals of the USA prison system.

And the country we're talking about is run by retributivists, and even further, whatever that is called - people who just want to see other people punished.

Sorry omitted /s

Most inmates probably don't have a criminal enterprise they can run.

Those are the odd cases, yes, maybe you should be able to make exceptions.

But the vast majority of inmates are not kingpins.

That's definitely how I interpreted it also, but the comment definitely buries the lede at least

> Seems great to allow it through monitored devices for free, you might gather more evidence this way and convict others.

The conviction already happened. Continuing to gathering evidence (for any purpose other than exoneration in cases of suspected wrongful convictions) - and without new warrants - violates the spirit of double jeopardy (Fifth Amendment).

> Obviously the right to privacy (4th amendment) is lost in prison among other rights so there shouldn't be any issue with the surveillance.

When you say "Obviously" do you mean what things are like, or do you mean what things should be like? If you mean the latter only, then I would agree with you. (Although, I'm not sure whether the US constitution implicitly supports a right to privacy.) The chilling effect means that both the convict and the loved one on the other end can't freely express themselves in a private conversation with each other. If your family member gets prison for life then should you lose your First Amendment rights whenever you want to talk with the convicted family member? By default, criminals shouldn't have zero speech rights and zero privacy either. Whether someone is dangerous or has done immoral things is on its own not enough reason to take away constitutional rights. One possible reading of the 13th Amendment allows slavery and involuntary servitude "as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted" [1], but the same doesn't apply to other rights.

In the context of prison, freedom of expression and privacy are about as important to me as voting, and I'm not a fan of felony disenfranchisement [1]. In my opinion, US citizens in prison shouldn't lose their voting rights for any period of time, especially considering that vote by mail exists.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement_in_t...

In an earlier comment you wrote:

> In fact it should likely cost prisoners something if it is good for them.

Which is equivalent to "if it is good for them it should likely cost prisoners something" i.e. "if it is good for them it likely should not be free for prisoners".

I'm aware that the hnarn's comment said "you" instead of "prisoners", but the principle of charity leads me to assume that hnarn meant specifically a prisoner rather than any person. And regardless, the answer to the question "Can you find a “shouldn’t“ part in my response?" is yes.

Haha, you got me

>“Which is equivalent to "if it is good for them it should likely cost prisoners something" i.e. "if it is good for them it likely should not be free for prisoners".”

You will have the same conclusion if there is no “likely” in the sentence, so you are obviously trying to pretend it is not there or you likely need basic logic course. (Don’t ignore likely here again, though)

This is totally stupid and illogical. The fact that you already paid some money for the other people doesn’t necessarily give you any reason why you should pay more for another expense, big or small.

Again, none of you guys seems to care about the reason and just want the conclusion.

You do pay for that through tax. And yes it costs money to maintain clean air, at least in urban settings.

A lot of what makes sense socially and economically doesn't happen (esp. in the US) when the alternative is a very profitable business, often an oligopoly. E.g. free prison phone calls hurt the >$1B "inmate telephone business."

Prisons themselves can be a profitable business, which (if you own a for-profit prison) provides strong incentive for reducing rehabilitation and increasing recidivism.

I know you just threw that in, but there is considerable evidence that breakfast is not good for you (unless perhaps you're out working in the fields), and the modern concept that "breakfast is the most important meal of the day" was invented by ad agencies.

On the topic of meal timing, I recommend anything by Salk Institute researcher Dr. Satchin Panda.

If I say "you likely should give me 1 dollar" then in my interpretation there is a "should give" part in my response, even if there were also a "should not give" part or an "I don't know" part.

hnarn:

>> “If it’s good for you, it shouldn’t be free” is a very strange hill to die on, even if we weren’t even specifically talking about attempting to rehabilitate criminals.

up2isomorphism:

> Can you find a “shouldn’t“ part in my response?

In your case, you said "should likely cost". You took issue with the "shouldn't be free" part in hnarn's comment, so in the context of hnarn's comment, your first comment in the thread can be expressed as "should likely not be free". To me, there is a "should not" part in "should likely not be free", and I am not claiming that the "should not" part is the whole.

There's more to it though. Here's what you, up2isomorphism, wrote in full:

> There is no logic that a good thing should be free. In fact it should likely cost prisoners something if it is good for them. Just like breakfast is good for you but it is not free.

My natural interpretation is going to be one of the following:

1. up2isomorphism wants calls to cost something for prisoners (should not be free for prisoners)

2. up2isomorphism thinks that calls should cost something for prisoners regardless of which outcome up2isomorphism personally wants (should not be free for prisoners)

3. up2isomorphism is not sure about what they want or what should be the case regarding whether calls should cost something for prisoners, but they are leaning toward "should cost something" (should not be free for prisoners)

If all three of those interpretations are wrong then I'm just wrong about what you said. If so, sorry.

>When you say "Obviously" do you mean what things are like, or do you mean what things should be like?

I mean thats what things are like based on previous Supreme Court rulings [1].

You have no privacy or expectation of privacy in prison, this includes communication with the outside world.

There as with all things of this nature some nuance to this, but bottom line telephone communications are allowed to be tapped without a warrant so long as the phone isn't given under false pretense of being unmonitored, which leads to expectation of privacy [2].

Its seems odd to be debating this since at it base prison is an act of depriving rights. You cannot have a private conversation with your family nor can you have dinner with them or go anywhere because you are in prison...

It basically in the 5th amendment: "nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law".

You have been deprived of liberty through due process of law...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_v._Palmer

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectation_of_privacy_(United...

I know it is your "natural" interpretation, but it does not automatically make you correct. In this case, I did not give anything particular stance of if prisoner should be given free calls or not. I merely state that being a good thing for somebody is really not an supporting cause why it should be free. There might other valid reasons to provide it free or not free, but being a good thing for prisoner is just a poor argument. The same goes for things like since non-prisoner are already paying bunch of things for the prisoners they should not be bothered to pay another thing.

> The fact that you already paid some money for the other people doesn’t necessarily give you any reason why you should pay more for another expense, big or small.

You're right, but in the wrong place.

You're paying for another big expense when the person commits another offense and ends up with another round of prison. BIG bucks. If you'd just paid for their phone calls when they were in the last time, you'd have had a much better chance of not needing to spend that additional money.

People that become incarcerated have also paid for their phone calls and prison sentences by virtue of having been part of the public. They also don't cease producing value while incarcerated, but the prison system captures that, not the public.

Think of it like health insurance. Everyone pays, it's a service available to all of us, but not everyone uses it.

Incarcerations should be harsh and life-ending. Look at North Korea, they have way less crime than even Tokyo. In comparions to Chicago look like a mess mafia gangland. When you reward the prisoners with a lot of benefits, you simply tell everyone crime pays. The focus should be on expediting justice and ensuring correct justice to be dispense. Prisoners that committed crimes should be left for them to be in miserable states to discourage them to do crime. Reoffending one can be liquidated. I really dont want my tax going to feed this kind of inhumans.