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More Jails Replace In-Person Visits With Awful Video Chat Products 260

Posted by BeauHD from the nationwide-trends dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After April 15, inmates at the Adult Detention Center in Lowndes County, Mississippi will no longer be allowed to visit with family members face to face. Newton County, Missouri, implemented an in-person visitor ban last month. The Allen County Jail in Indiana phased out in-person visits earlier this year. All three changes are part of a nationwide trend toward "video visitation" services. Instead of seeing their loved ones face to face, inmates are increasingly limited to talking to them through video terminals. Most jails give family members a choice between using video terminals at the jail -- which are free -- or paying fees to make calls from home using a PC or mobile device.

Even some advocates of the change admit that it has downsides for inmates and their families. Ryan Rickert, jail administrator at the Lowndes County Adult Detention Center, acknowledged to The Commercial Dispatch that inmates were disappointed they wouldn't get to see family members anymore. Advocates of this approach point to an upside for families: they can now make video calls to loved ones from home instead of having to physically travel to the jail. These services are ludicrously expensive. Video calls cost 40 cents per minute in Newton County, 50 cents per minute in Lowndes County, and $10 per call in Allen County. Outside of prison, of course, video calls on Skype or FaceTime are free. These "visitation" services are often "grainy and jerky, periodically freezing up altogether," reports Ars. As for why so many jails are adopting them, it has a lot to do with money. "In-person visits are labor intensive. Prison guards need to escort inmates to and from visitation rooms, supervise the visits, and in some cases pat down visitors for contraband. In contrast, video terminals can be installed inside each cell block, minimizing the need to move inmates around the jail." The video-visitation systems also directly generate revenue for jails.
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More Jails Replace In-Person Visits With Awful Video Chat Products More

More Jails Replace In-Person Visits With Awful Video Chat Products

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  • attorneys still get real vists

    • Where. In the facility I was in, attorney visits were also conducted over the video call system. Staff were supposed to disable the recording of those but who knows how often they remember to.

  • US prisons = labour camps (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Quakeulf ( 2650167 ) on Monday April 08, 2019 @04:47PM (#58406352)
    They're all private labour camps at this point. Not that they never were either (chaingangs etc. building roads and railways), they just got more corporate.

    • Re:US prisons = labour camps (Score:5, Insightful)

      by whoever57 ( 658626 ) on Monday April 08, 2019 @05:23PM (#58406576) Journal

      They're all private labour camps at this point.

      Use the right word: slavery. Yes, slavery was not abolished by the 13th amendment, merely limited.

      • Re:US prisons = labour camps (Score:5, Informative)

        by ghoul ( 157158 ) on Monday April 08, 2019 @07:57PM (#58407258)

        The 13th amendment had a very clear exemption called out for convicts.

        The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution declared that "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted , shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

        Enslaving convicts is totally constitutional in the US

        • That was my point.

          A limited form of slavery is legal in the USA -- it's false to make the claim that slavery was abolished, because it still exists and is legal.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Shaitan ( 22585 )

          That covers public service as a punishment for crime but it doesn't cover using people given a punishment of incarceration as labor. The very fact there is a separate distinct punishment of labor makes that very clear.

      • Except no one is forced to work in prison and prisoners get paid with room and board deducted from their pay. You are an ignorant fool.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Its the latest version of slave labour in the USA.

      The USA is one of the last countries that should talk about human rights to any other nation.

    • With the separation from the real, live person, they'll also be able to introduce the modern equivalent of another innovation pioneered in Germany and Russia about eighty-odd years ago, the video form of the pre-printed postcard telling your loved ones that all is fine and everyone's having a great old time here in Dachau or Balaganskoe.
  • Complain until they replace Awful Video Chats with Better Quality Video Chats.

  • You know what would save f--king money? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by b0s0z0ku ( 752509 ) on Monday April 08, 2019 @04:50PM (#58406372)
    Know what would save money? Not locking up almost 1% of your adult population, often for victimless crimes or for being unable to pay excessive fines. Start treating addiction as a disease. If it doesn't pose a danger to yourself or others, it shouldn't be the government's business what you put into your body. If it endangers yourself or others, then you should be committed for treatment, same as any other psych illness. Same goes for criminalization of sex workers (instead of going after pimps or customers). End excessive fines and policing for profit. Require fines to be proportional to income. For someone who's a poor working Joe or Jane, a $500 speeding ticket can be a week's income. For a rich person, it's pocket change, and they can probably take a few hours off of work to fight it as well.

    • There's no profit margin on decency, apparently...

    • I agree that a lot of police activity these days has become about revenue collusion from those who can least afford the losses.

      Fines proportional to income may be a good idea, the only concern I have there is someone with no job at all should not be able to live consequence free... I just think there are a lot of things that are illegal now, that we need to make not illegal any longer.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Income can be flexible. Quite a few people manage to be mega-rich while having no income on paper, for tax reasons. There's an impressive trick used by the leaders of mega-churches where their church actually owns all their property, as a tax-exempt organization, and they rent it for $1 a year.

    • Know what would save money? Not locking up almost 1% of your adult population, often for victimless crimes or for being unable to pay excessive fines. Start treating addiction as a disease. If it doesn't pose a danger to yourself or others, it shouldn't be the government's business what you put into your body. If it endangers yourself or others, then you should be committed for treatment, same as any other psych illness. Same goes for criminalization of sex workers (instead of going after pimps or customers). End excessive fines and policing for profit. Require fines to be proportional to income. For someone who's a poor working Joe or Jane, a $500 speeding ticket can be a week's income. For a rich person, it's pocket change, and they can probably take a few hours off of work to fight it as well.

      Requiring fines to be proportional to income is a slippery slope, you might want to stay away from that one. Going after pimps also seems like a bad choice on your list. I see you have a rich / poor world view. There's this thing called the middle class. It's shrinking to be sure but you still need to account for it. When the poor get a break because the middle class gets shafting due to some notion that they're rich - that's what breeds anger.

      • The poor get a break, but the middle class also gets a break compared to the rich Wall Street types in their Bentleys who have to pay $50,000 for a speeding ticket. Couch it as making the richies pay their fair share...

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Bert64 ( 520050 )

          The rich wall street types typically have very low "income" because it results in lower tax payments (and lower fines if they're income based)... For instance that bentley might legally be owned by the company and their minimum wage employee just has use of it for "business purposes".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      The problem is a lot of prisons are for-profit. While the rightful goal of jail is to rehabilitate prisoners so they can be productive members of society (and thus become taxpayers and raise families and more taxpayers) this is not the case for profit based prisons.

      Here the goal is to house as many prisoners as possible, so their goal is to keep recidivism rates high - you get let out of jail, you'll get arrested doing something and go back in, and $$$$ goes to the CEO's bank account for that.

      That's the rea

    • /Oblg. I'm reminded of this quote from Atlas Shrugged (as much as I am loathe to quote Ayn Rand, it is applicable ):

      "Did you really think we want those laws observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them to be broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against... We're after power and we mean it... There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One decl

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bert64 ( 520050 )

      That requires personal responsibility...
      And while i'm all for letting people do whatever they want provided it doesn't affect others, i wouldn't consider most addicts to be victims... The addictive effects of various things are well known and documented, so at some point they made a conscious decision to take a substance which they knew to be addictive.

      Things like "policing for profit" are partly due to flawed performance criteria, if you judge a police force's performance by the number of arrests made then

    • Not locking up almost 1% of your adult population

      simultaneously. The total percentage of people who have spent time in jail is much larger

  • Prison Industrial Complex (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jargonburn ( 1950578 ) on Monday April 08, 2019 @04:51PM (#58406386)

    The video-visitation systems also directly generate revenue for jails.

    And that, right there, summarizes one of the greatest problems with our penal system. The pursuit of profit. That is not their role. Well, I mean, we've allowed that to become a part of their role, but it's utterly reprehensible.

    I hate that about this country.

    • The pursuit of profit is one thing, but it thrives on the dehumanization of part of the population. If you want to measure the health of a society look at what they do to their prisoners.

  • Cruel and unusual (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RickyShade ( 5419186 ) on Monday April 08, 2019 @04:51PM (#58406388)

    Cruel and unusual punishment is carried out in American jails on a daily basis. I wish prison reform was a bigger point of focus for people.

    • Prison reform
      AND
      Reform of prisoners.

      Seems like nobody who can do anything about either one gives a damn.

  • Big problem I see is lack of privacy (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Monday April 08, 2019 @04:52PM (#58406400)

    I read the article but it didn't talk about my biggest concern - are these video calls monitored/recorded? I expect that they are...

    Even if they were not, there's no way I'd want to tay things over this service that I might want to say in person.

    I think it's a great idea to offer this as an additional service, maybe curtailing personal visits or making that a charge - but it seems really wrong to do away with in-person visits altogether.

    I also wonder if it would have a dehumanizing aspect on inmates not to see friends and families in person on a regular basis....

    • Don't curtail personal visits. Reduce prison sentencing, get rid of victimless crimes and excessive fines for profit. Jails are only so expensive to run because they're over-crowded with people who shouldn't be locked up in the first place!

    • I read the article but it didn't talk about my biggest concern - are these video calls monitored/recorded? I expect that they are...

      Of course they are. So are live visits; with the exception of conjugal visits, the guard's going to be right there.

    • Re:Big problem I see is lack of privacy (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jeff4747 ( 256583 ) on Monday April 08, 2019 @05:25PM (#58406592)

      I read the article but it didn't talk about my biggest concern - are these video calls monitored/recorded?

      In-person visits are also monitored. So are phone calls.

      There is no right to privacy in prison, unless you're speaking with your attorney.

      • Inmates do have a right to privacy, it is just greatly 'diminished'. That's the term used by the SCOTUS, 'diminished'.

        Correctional facilities are generally prohibited from releasing any details from your medical record, cannot place cameras in cells and bathrooms, and should not monitor communications between inmates and counsel. I suspect there are also special requirements for body cavity searches, but I don't know it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ken McE ( 599217 )

      I read the article but it didn't talk about my biggest concern - are these video calls monitored/recorded? I expect that they are...

      You would never know, no matter what they said. Every time you spoke on the phone you'd have to worry about if you were building a new case against yourself or the people you're speaking to. You'd have to worry about guards passing around your intimate conversations for laughs or for "training purposes." Eventually A.I.s would be brought in to listen to everything and call i

      • In the feds, at least, there is an explicit policy that ALL INMATE TELEPHONE CALLS will be monitored (only exception is calls to your lawyers).

        One of the tasks guards in the residence units are tasked with is to sit and listen to hours of inmate calls. Some are monitored in real time, some are monitored after the fact as recordings.

        The guards are lazy, so they fast-forward through the dull parts, but every call gets listened to. This is one reason they limit the amount of telephone minutes in the feds. T

  • The video-visitation systems also directly generate revenue for jails.

    A most important consideration for a sponging house.

  • No shit. Private prisons are only about one thing. Actual rehabilitation is a looong way down the list of priorities.

  • Will this change how anyone votes? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday April 08, 2019 @05:54PM (#58406774)
    I'm guessing no, but it'd be nice if it did. Bernie Sanders just came out in favor of universal suffrage. Meaning even prisoners get to vote. I like that. Folks say "We can't have rapists and murders swinging elections" but if you ask me if you've got so many rapists and murders they're swinging elections maybe fix that.

    • >"Meaning even prisoners get to vote. I like that."

      Quite a topic change, but... seriously? We lock people up, they lose their rights to freedom, but they should be able to continue to vote? To me, that sounds utterly ridiculous and not at all about swinging a vote. Those who can't play by the rules, should not participate in making the rules while they are in "time out".

      Now, I do think once you have "paid your debt to society", all your rights should be restored. But that is quite a different matter.

      • and give them healthcare, they get to vote. Some rights are so absolutely fundamental that they should never be taken away.

        And that's ignoring the fact that we know that Nixon started the drug war specifically to attack and disenfranchise voters he disagreed. This isn't up for debate, it's well documented [youtube.com]

        Finally, the concept of "paying debt to society" is nonsensical. You're either a continued danger or you're not. Prison must exist either for rehabilitation or containment.

        Punishment doesn't wor
        • that even if you're OK with torture as a means to force compliance with the law you should very much not be. In such a time and place it's only a matter of time before a law's passed you can't or don't want to follow, and you and your family will be on the receiving end of that torture. It's not a question of if, it's when.

          A fundamentally unjust society will, all things being equal, deteriorate further. At a certain point only a massive external event (plague, world war, etc) will snap it out of the cyc

          • >"that even if you're OK with torture as a means to force compliance with the law"

            I am certainly not in favor of torture (nor implied any such thing).

            >"you should very much not be. In such a time and place it's only a matter of time before a law's passed you can't or don't want to follow, and you and your family will be on the receiving end of that torture. It's not a question of if, it's when. "

            And you make my case for a smaller government, and that which remains being more local, fewer laws in gener

        • >Yes, for the same reason we feed them and give them healthcare, they get to vote"

          ? The first two are like shelter- survival. Voting is not necessary for survival. It is a right that is very much like freedom; something that is forefitted by committing a crime in such a significant way as to find yourself incarcerated.

          >"And that's ignoring the fact that we know that Nixon started the drug war specifically to attack and disenfranchise voters he disagreed. This isn't up for debate"

          You are kinda straw

          • if you can't control something as powerful as a government then you're not going to survive long. We already have tons of laws on the books written by and for private prisons to incarcerate minor offenders for longer and to make sure their lives are and stay hell so they're forced back into a revolving door. Minor offenders being the most profitable to confine.

            And I didn't leave off deterrent. You're suggesting pain of one kind or another can and should be used for a deterrent. That is patently wrong. A
            • A Strawman is a weak, unrelated and easily refuted argument brought up in a debate so that the debater can distract from a point he cannot address. Nixon's phony war on drugs is anything but.

              It's not weak, because the fact that Nixon used the criminal justice system to attack his political opponents and disenfranchise them is very, very well documented. Nixon is only a single example of this trend in Republicans. Florida is famous for not giving back voting rights under GOP governorship. So much so thei
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Uberbah ( 647458 )

        We lock people up, they lose their rights to freedom, but they should be able to continue to vote? To me, that sounds utterly ridiculous and not at all about swinging a vote.

        What's ridiculous is that when given a choice between being tough and being effective on crime, so many Americans choose to be tough. Punitive for the sake of being punitive. But when it comes to voting:

        1) What do you think prisoners are going to do if they can vote? Elect Lex Luthor as president?

        2) Do you love recidivism? Treat peopl

        • What do you think prisoners are going to do if they can vote? Elect Lex Luthor as president?

          Yeah, pretty much. As a quick web search demonstrates, it's well known that most convicts vote Democrat [mic.com] by large margins [washingtonexaminer.com], which is why they want to get them to be able to vote as soon as possible.

          • Most blacks vote democrat so lock them up as much as you can to strip them from their right to vote.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by xtal ( 49134 )

        It works this way in the rest of the (civilized) western world.

        If you're a citizen, you get to vote. Period.

  • De-humanize convicts even more (Score:3)

    by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Monday April 08, 2019 @06:25PM (#58406940) Journal
    Sure, sure. Cut prisoners off from normal, well-adjusted people as much as possible. Ensure they are only exposed to other prisoners, and guards. Great way to dehumanize them even more, drive them ever farther away from what is mentally and emotionally considered 'normal'. Then be sure to never, ever do anything positive to rehabilitate them, and you ensure that when they're done serving their current sentence, they'll be back in prison soonest. Rinse, repeat. Guaranteed slave labor force. I'd sooner shoot all convicts in the head straightaway rather than subject them to an environment that is guaranteed to make them into worse monsters, or make them into monsters if they weren't already.

    Pre-emptive strike: Racist assholes who say "blacks are all criminals and deserve what they get", and small-minded, short-sighted myopians who will say "criminals don't deserve to be treated like human beings" can go fuck themselves. Likewise greedy corporate assholes who profit off privately-owned prisons, or who think we should have such a thing as 'for profit' prisons. Also likewise so-called 'conservatives' who will insult me for being a 'bleeding heart liberal' or whatever the hell you people say this week. If you're not going to even TRY to rehabilitate criminals into decent citizens and human beings then you may as well just kill everyone immediately who commits any felony and be done with it, rather than demonstrate that you're as much a violent animal as THEY are. Plain and simple.

    For FUCK'S SAKE, it's the 21st century and we still do shit like this? Really, humans? Seriously!?
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • I've been reading science fiction and fantasy novels, watching scifi and fantasy movies and TV shows (especially all things Star Trek) my entire life, and while I'm not always the most open-minded person about everything myself (who is?) I do know that our species is capable of so much more than we know -- yet way too often way too many of us just act like animals instead of thinking. And now here we are, on the brink of the Point Of No Return in several different ways, yet we still can't get our of our own

        • I've been reading science fiction and fantasy novels, watching scifi and fantasy movies and TV shows (especially all things Star Trek) my entire life,

          I notice you haven't read anything about criminology, crime, criminals, or criminal psychology. You are the poster child for Dunning-Kruger.

    • Human's aren't exactly the sharpest species in the galaxy. More like the dumbest. As one alien said:

      "You mean you have to PAY to live on the planet you were BORN on???"

      Yet somehow, "dumb animals" have lived for millions of years without money. Go figure.

    • You are a joke.

      Cut prisoners off from normal, well-adjusted people as much as possible.

      You mean their gang member friends and enabling and criminal family and friends who smuggle them drugs, cell phones, etc? You don't know shit about jails and prisons

      Pre-emptive Strike: Your own racism is showing. YOU are the only one who said that and that is because you believe "blacks are all criminals"

      You are probably one of the idiots who knows nothing about criminals and criminal psychology, like the people who decided that criminals have low self-esteem and wasted money on self-esteem

  • Status quo updated to newer technology (Score:4, Informative)

    by doubledown00 ( 2767069 ) on Monday April 08, 2019 @09:34PM (#58407668)
    Criminal lawyer here. This isn't surprising, it's mission creep.
    The vast majority of county jails already use sponsored VOIP calling systems. And they too are AWFUL. A 10 - 15 minute phone call will cost $20. The audio quality sucks. It sounds far away, it has popping sounds. It randomly disconnects.

    And it was only a matter of time before the vultures came up with ways to further infiltrate the jails.

    There is no technical reason why it should cost as much as it does. The reason is because the vendors give revenue kickbacks to the counties. Additionally they give subsidies to the jails in the form of free equipment. What they don't do is upgrade the ISP. Jails are still technologically low tech places and many (especially in rural areas) have bare minimum internet connections that are quickly saturated by even a few video sessions.

    This is exploitation and revenue generation from a desperate and generally poor population.

  • what? (Score:2)

    by sad_ ( 7868 )

    "Most jails give family members a choice between using video terminals at the jail -- which are free -- or paying fees to make calls from home using a PC or mobile device."

    even if you're there in person, you still need to use the video system, that's just plain mean.

  • point to an upside for families: they can now make video calls to loved ones from home instead of having to physically travel to the jail.

    Why not both?

    (because...)

    it has a lot to do with money.

  • Well, if the criminals and their criminal visitors would not commit crimes by trying to criminally smuggle in banned and illegal items then this would be happening. Stop blaming the jail and start blaming the criminals for the consequences of their own actions.

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