A Boring Dystopia

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Jails banned in-person visits in order to maximize revenue from voice and video calls as part of a "quid pro quo kickback scheme" with prison phone companies (arstechnica.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/aboringdystopia

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Across the United States, hundreds of jails have eliminated in-person family visits over the last decade. Why has this happened? The answer highlights a profound flaw in how decisions too often get made in our legal system: for-profit jail telecom companies realized that they could earn more profit from phone and video calls if jails eliminated free in-person visits for families. So the companies offered sheriffs and county jails across the country a deal: if you eliminate family visits, we'll give you a cut of the increased profits from the larger number of calls. This led to a wave across the country, as local jails sought to supplement their budgets with hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from some of the poorest families in our society.

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[–] [email protected] -1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I feel like we've got a good bare minimum framework. Right to trial is a human right in the USA, attorney can be provided by the state if one cannot be afforded, in most of the USA execution is illegal and sentencing limits keep excessive punishments to a minimum. Appeals can overturn literally any decision. Lots of avenues for exoneration. The people in prisons are not all bad people, far from it, but statistically most of them belong there. Especially rapists and murderers, none of those people need to be set free.

A destruction of that system for some imaginary perfect system that everybody will immediately agree to implement sounds like idiocy funded by foreign powers to stoke flames.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

We also charge people a ton of money to imprison them, intentionally keep prisoners in inhumane conditions, and imprison a larger portion of our population than any other medium or large country, and allow prisoners and defendants to be exploited for profit, and subject prisoners to literal slavery (as explicitly allowed by the 13th amendment).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

So those other countries, their justice systems aren't inherently corrupt?