Originally published at: Pluralistic: FCC strikes a blow against prison profiteering (19 Jul 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Today's links
- FCC strikes a blow against prison profiteering: The cost of a prison phone-call drops from $11.35 to $0.90.
- Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
- This day in history: 2004, 2014, 2019, 2024
- Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
- Recent appearances: Where I've been.
- Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
- Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
- Colophon: All the rest.
FCC strikes a blow against prison profiteering (permalink)
Here's a tip for policymakers hoping to improve the lives of the most Americans with the least effort: help prisoners.
After all, America is the most prolific imprisoner of its own people of any country in world history. We lock up more people than Stalin, than Mao, more than Botha, de Klerk or any other Apartheid-era South African president. And it's not just America's vast army of the incarcerated who are afflicted by our passion for imprisonment: their families and friends suffer, too.
That familial suffering isn't merely the constant pain of life without a loved one, either. America's prison profiteers treat prisoners' families as ATMs who can be made to pay and pay and pay.
This may seem like a losing strategy. After all, prison sentences are strongly correlated with poverty, and even if your family wasn't desperate before the state kidnapped one of its number and locked them behind bars, that loved one's legal defense and the loss of their income is a reliable predictor of downward social mobility.
Decent people don't view poor people as a source of riches. But for a certain kind of depraved sadist, the poor are an irresistible target. Sure, poor people don't have much money, but what they lack even more is protection under the law ("conservativism consists of the principle that there is an in-group whom the law protects but does not bind, and an out-group whom the law binds but does not protect" -Wilhoit). You can enjoy total impunity as you torment poor people, make them so miserable and afraid for their lives and safety that they will find some money, somewhere, and give it to you.
Mexican cartels understand this. They do a brisk trade in kidnapping asylum seekers whom the US has illegally forced to wait in Mexico to have their claims processed. The families of refugees – either in their home countries or in the USA – are typically badly off but they understand that Mexico will not lift a finger to protect a kidnapped refugee, and so when the kidnappers threaten the most grisly tortures as a means of extracting ransom, those desperate family members do whatever it takes to scrape up the blood-money.
What's more, the families of asylum seekers are not much better off than their kidnapped loved ones when it comes to seeking official protection. Family members who stayed behind in human rights hellholes like Bukele's El Salvador can't get their government to lodge official complaints with the Mexican ambassador, and family members who made it to the USA are in no position to get their Congressjerk to intercede with ICE or the Mexican consulate. This gives Mexico's crime syndicates total latitude to kidnap, torture, and grow rich by targeting the poorest, most desperate people in the world.
The private contractors that supply services to America's prisons are basically Mexican refugee-kidnappers with pretensions and shares listed on the NYSE. After decades of consolidation, the prison contracting sector has shrunk to two gigantic companies: Securus and Viapath (formerly Global Tellink). These private-equity backed behemoths dominate their sector, and have diversified, providing all kinds of services, from prison cafeteria meals to commissary, the prison stores where prisoners can buy food and other items.
If you're following closely, this is one of those places where the hair on the back of your neck starts to rise. These companies make money when prisoners buy food from the commissary, and they're also in charge of the quality of the food in the mess hall. If the food in the mess hall is adequate and nutritious, there's no reason to buy food from the commissary.
This is what economists call a "moral hazard." You can think of it as the reason that prison ramen costs 300% more than ramen in the free world:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/20/captive-market/#locked-in
(Not just ramen: in America's sweltering prisons, an 8" fan costs $40, and the price of water went up in Texas prisons by 50% during last summer's heatwave.)
It's actually worse than that: if you get sick from eating bad prison food, the same company that poisoned you gets paid to operate the infirmary where you're treated:
https://theappeal.org/massachusetts-prisons-wellpath-dentures-teeth/
Now, the scam of abusing prisoners to extract desperate pennies from their families is hardly new. There's written records of this stretching back to the middle ages. Nor is this pattern a unique one: making an unavoidable situation as miserable as possible and then upcharging people who have the ability to pay to get free of the torture is basically how the airlines work. Making coach as miserable as possible isn't merely about shaving pennies by shaving inches off your legroom: it's a way to "incentivize" anyone who can afford it to pay for an upgrade to business-class. The worse coach is, the more people you can convince to dip into their savings or fight with their boss to move classes. The torments visited upon everyone else in coach are economically valuable to the airlines: their groans and miseries translate directly into windfall profits, by convincing better-off passengers to pay not to have the same thing done to them.
Of course, with rare exceptions (flying to get an organ transplant, say) plane tickets are typically discretionary. Housing, on the other hand, is a human right and a prerequisite for human thriving. The worse things are for tenants, the more debt and privation people will endure to become home-owners, so it follows that making renters worse off makes homeowners richer:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/
For Securus and Viapath, the path to profitability is to lobby for mandatory, long prison sentences and then make things inside the prison as miserable as possible. Any prisoner whose family can find the funds can escape the worst of it, and all the prisoners who can't afford it serve the economically important function of showing the prisoners whose families can afford it how bad things will be if they don't pay.
If you're thinking that prisoners might pay Securus, Viapath and their competitors out of their own prison earnings, forget it. These companies have decided that the can make more by pocketing the difference between the vast sums paid by third parties for prisoners' labor and the pennies the prisoners get from their work. Remember, the 13th Amendment specifically allows for the enslavement of incarcerated people! Six states ban paying prisoners at all. North Carolina caps prisoners' wages at one dollar per day. The national average prison wage is $0.52/hour. Prisoners' labor produces $11b/year in goods and services:
https://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2024/0324bowman.html
Forced labor and extortion are a long and dishonorable tradition in incarceration, but this century saw the introduction of a novel, exciting way of extracting wealth from prisoners and their families. It started when private telcos took over prison telephones and raised the price of a prison phone call. These phone companies found willing collaborators in local jail and prison systems: all they had to do was offer to split the take with the jailers.
With the advent of the internet, things got far worse. Digitalization meant that prisons could replace the library, adult educations, commissary accounts, letter-mail, parcels, in-person visits and phone calls with a single tablet. These cheaply made tablets were offered for free to prisoners, who lost access to everything from their kids' handmade birthday cards to in-person visits with those kids.
In their place, prisoners' families had to pay huge premiums to have their letters scanned so that prisoners could pay (again) to view those scans on their tablets. Instead of in-person visits, prisoners families had to pay $3-10/minute for a janky, postage-stamp sized video. Perversely, jails and prisons replaced their in-person visitation rooms with rooms filled with shitty tablets where family members could sit and videoconference with their incarcerated loved ones who were just a few feet away:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/14/minnesota-nice/#shitty-technology-adoption-curve
Capitalists hate capitalism. The capital classes are on a relentless search for markets with captive customers and no competitors. The prison-tech industry was catnip for private equity funds, who bought and "rolled" up prison contractors, concentrating the sector into a duopoly of debt-laden companies whose ability to pay off their leveraged buyouts was contingent on their ability to terrorize prisoners' families into paying for their overpriced, low-quality products and services.
One particularly awful consequence of these rollups was the way that prisoners could lose access to their data when their prison's service-provider was merged with a rival. When that happened, the IT systems would be consolidated, with the frequent outcome that all prisoners' data was lost. Imagine working for two weeks to pay for a song or a book, or a scan of your child's handmade Father's Day card, only to have the file deleted in an IT merger. Now imagine that you're stuck inside for another 20 years.
This is a subject I've followed off and on for years. It's such a perfect bit of end-stage capitalist cruelty, combining mass incarceration with monopolies. Even if you're not imprisoned, this story is haunting, because on the one hand, America keeps thinking of new reasons to put more people behind bars, and on the other hand, every technological nightmare we dream up for prisoners eventually works its way out to the rest of us in a process I call the "shitty technology adoption curve." As William Gibson says, "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed" – but the future sure pools up thick and dystopian around America's prisoners:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware
My background interest in the subject got sharper a few years ago when I started working on The Bezzle, my 2024 high-tech crime thriller about prison-tech grifters:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle
One of the things that was on my mind when I got to work on that book was the 2017 court-case that killed the FCC's rules limit interstate prison-call gouging. The FCC could have won that case, but Trump's FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, dropped it:
With that bad precedent on the books, the only hope prisoners had for relief from the FCC was for Congress to enact legislation specifically granting the agency the power to regulate prison telephony. Incredibly, Congress did just that, with Biden signing the "Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act" in early 2023:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/1541/text
With the new law in place, it fell to the FCC use those newfound powers. Compared to agencies like the FTC and the NLRB, Biden's FCC has been relatively weak, thanks in large part to the Biden administration's refusal to defend its FCC nomination for Gigi Sohn, a brilliant and accomplished telecoms expert. You can tell that Sohn would have been a brilliant FCC commissioner because of the way that America's telco monopolists and their allies in the senate (mostly Republicans, but some Democrats, too) went on an all-out offensive against her, using the fact that she is gay to smear her and ultimately defeat her nomination:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/19/culture-war-bullshit-stole-your-broadband/
But even without Sohn, the FCC has managed to do something genuinely great for America's army of the imprisoned. This week, the FCC voted in price-caps on prison calls, so that call rates will drop from $11.35 for 15 minutes to just $0.90. Both interstate and intrastate calls will be capped at $0.06-0.12/minute, with a phased rollout starting in January:
It's hard to imagine a policy that will get more bang for a regulator's buck than this one. Not only does this represent a huge savings for prisoners and their families, those savings are even larger in proportion to their desperate, meager finances.
It shows you how important a competent, qualified regulator is. When it comes to political differences between Republicans and Democrats, regulatory competence is a grossly underrated trait. Trump's FCC Chair Ajit Pai handed out tens of billions of dollars in public money to monopoly carriers to improve telephone networks in underserved areas, but did so without first making accurate maps to tell him where the carriers should invest. As a result, that money was devoured by executive bonuses and publicly financed dividends and millions of Americans entered the pandemic lockdowns with broadband that couldn't support work-from-home or Zoom school. When Biden's FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel took over, one of her first official acts was to commission a national study and survey of broadband quality. Republicans howled in outrage:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/10/digital-redlining/#stop-confusing-the-issue-with-relevant-facts
The telecoms sector has been a rent-seeking, monopolizing monster since the days of Samuel Morse:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/18/the-bell-system/#were-the-phone-company-we-dont-have-to-care
Combine telecoms and prisons, and you get a kind of supermonster, the meth-gator of American neofeudalism:
The sector is dirty beyond words, and it corrupts everything it touches – bribing prison officials to throw out all the books in the prison library and replace them with DRM-locked, high-priced ebooks that prisoners must toils for weeks to afford, and that vanish from their devices whenever a prison-tech company merges with a rival:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch
The Biden presidency has been fatally marred by the president's avid support of genocide, and nothing will change that. But for millions of Americans, the Biden administration's policies on telecoms, monopoly, and corporate crime have been a source of profound, lasting improvements.
It's not just presidents who can make this difference. Millions of America's prisoners are rotting in state and county jails, and as California has shown, state governments have broad latitude to kick out prison profiteers:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/08/captive-audience/#good-at-their-jobs
(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; Flying Logos, CC BY-SA 4.0; KGBO, CC BY-SA 3.0; modified)
Hey look at this (permalink)
- Common Ownership and Hedge Fund Activism: An Unholy Alliance? https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2024/07/08/common-ownership-and-hedge-fund-activism-an-unholy-alliance/ (h/t Nick Burch)
-
What should have been said after the Trump shooting https://the.ink/p/you-should-say-true-things
This day in history (permalink)
#20yrsago Why registration sites suck https://www.wired.com/2004/07/we-dont-need-no-stinkin-login/
#20yrsago Academic paper about reputation systems https://web.archive.org/web/20040722060854/https://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_7/masum/index.html
#10yrsago DRM-free indie ebooks outsell DRM-locked ones 2:1 https://web.archive.org/web/20140722161213/http://authorearnings.com/july-2014-author-earnings-report/
#10yrsago Snowden: Dropbox is an NSA surveillance target, use Spideroak instead https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2014/jul/17/edward-snowden-video-interview
#10yrsago Ukrainian science fiction subgenre predicted current conflict https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/07/science-fiction-writers-predicted-ukraine-conflict-now-theyre-fighting-it.html
#5yrsago Having burnished their reputations with extravagant promises, the billionaires who pledged €600m. to rebuild Notre Dame are missing in action https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/18/ruins-notre-dame-billionaires-french-philanthropy
#5yrsago After the Oliver Twist poorhouse became luxury housing with a segregated playground, London bans segregated play-areas https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jul/19/london-officials-ban-segregated-play-areas-in-future-housing-developments
#5yrsago Using university syllabi to map the connections between every scholarly and scientific discipline https://galaxy.opensyllabus.org
#5yrsago Small town, independent and municipally owned ISPs offer America’s best connectivity https://www.vice.com/en/article/7xgne9/locally-run-isps-offer-the-fastest-broadband-in-america
#5yrsago Vast majority of porn sites use Google Analytics and Facebook embeds that track you, even in incognito mode https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.06520
#5yrsago Stephen Fry explains the vast superiority of UK healthcare to America’s omnishambles, which Brexiteers hope to import https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSL3z55cT_c
#1yrago Denazification, truth and reconciliation, and the story of Germany's story https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/19/stolpersteine/#truth-and-reconciliation
Upcoming appearances (permalink)
- Exile in Bookville, (Chicago), July 20
https://exileinbookville.com/events/39808 -
American Association of Law Libraries keynote (Chicago), Jul 21
https://www.aallnet.org/conference/agenda/keynote-speaker/ -
Defcon 32 (Las Vegas), Aug 8-11
https://shop.defcon.org/products/def-con-32-las-vegas-convention-center -
Albacon (Albuquerque/remote), Sep 13-15
https://albacon.org/2024/ -
TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10
https://tusconscificon.com/
Recent appearances (permalink)
- The Paradigm Shift
https://paradigm-shift-on-4zzz.pinecast.co/episode/dbf12eaf/tech-criticism-with-cory-doctorow -
How To Fix The Internet (EFF)
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/podcast-episode-fighting-enshittification -
Big Tech and the News (Tech Policy Press)
https://www.techpolicy.press/big-tech-and-the-news/
Latest books (permalink)
- The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).
-
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)
-
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
-
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.
-
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
-
"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
-
"How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)
-
"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html
-
"Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.
Upcoming books (permalink)
- Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025
-
Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025
Colophon (permalink)
Today's top sources: Benjamin Jolley, Chris Messer.
Currently writing:
- Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay. Today's progress: 973 words (23373 words total).
-
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
-
Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025
-
Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM
-
Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM
Latest podcast: The reason you can't buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you https://craphound.com/news/2024/06/30/the-reason-you-cant-buy-a-car-is-the-same-reason-that-your-health-insurer-let-hackers-dox-you/
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.
How to get Pluralistic:
Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):
Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):
https://pluralistic.net/plura-list
Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):
Medium (no ads, paywalled):
Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):
Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):
https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic
"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla