[jlafon]

First of all, I'm not defending what is obviously predatory. However, there is more involved then what you might think at first glance. Right or wrong, correctional facilities have reasons to discourage phone calls (context: I put myself through college working at a maximum security prison). Calls are supposed to be monitored (usually done manually) to prevent criminal business from being done on prison phones - and there are never enough people to listen to all calls. There are never enough phones either, which frequently causes tension between inmates using phones and those waiting for them. In higher security levels phones are labor intensive. An officer has to escort a (potentially dangerous) person from their cell to the phone, and stand there for the duration of the call. And to the article's point, it's such a problem that prepaid phone cards are a form of currency on the inside.

[ceejayoz]

> Calls are supposed to be monitored (usually done manually) to prevent criminal business from being done on prison phones - and there are never enough people to listen to all calls.

At $1/minute sorts of rates, it should be possible to pay several people to listen to a call.

[icanhackit]

Calls are supposed to be monitored (usually done manually) to prevent criminal business [...] In higher security levels phones are labor intensive. An officer has to escort [...] from their cell to the phone, and stand there for the duration of the call.

Sounds like part of the solution is right there, at least in higher security prisons, which is to have the escort also monitor the call. Record all calls regardless and perform spot-audits so that any potential collusion between inmates, outsiders and escorts can be eliminated or minimized. A higher percentage of spot-audits should be carried out on repeat offenders and lower percentage on inmates associated with minor crimes - risk can be assessed with a couple of conditional equations. Advise inmates and staff of monitoring system to prevent collusion from forming in the first place.

[chillwaves]

They record the phone calls. It seems that if there was an incident it is trivial to review phone calls and bring evidence to bear against the guilty parties.

[toomuchtodo]

Or someone like Google could be doing this as a service? Isn't GOOG411 how they captured enough voice data to train their neural nets for Google Now?

[x5n1]

This is because the people running the show have created a problem. Let business be done. Let all prisoners know all phone calls are recorded and may be monitored at any time. And record all of them. Then get a company that does this sort of thing to transcribe them all. Then do a search on all the text for keywords that might indicate problems or send the text to India to be read. That's it. The rest, well you know who they are calling, those are potential people to investigate... send those to the NSA or the police.

Or just let illegal business be done. What's the worst that could happen. Lots of criminals outside of bars too.

Also you could let the non-violent ones do whatever and only watch the violent ones. It just depends on whether or not you have a problem solving attitude or a problem creating one. It seems the prison industrial complex creates problems and then spends lots of money to solve them, money of prisoner's families who are already broke and belong to low income households.

[gozur88]

>Or just let illegal business be done. What's the worst that could happen. Lots of criminals outside of bars too.

What's the worst that could happen? How about this: inmate arranges a contract on witnesses in his case.

[pm24601]

Monitor calls: How can this be an issue when we have the NSA able to snoop on all the worlds' phone calls and mine them for content.

Apple Siri has the ability to translate spoken word to text.

The point is that there is lots of technology that can do a first pass filter on phone calls.

It doesn't need to be manual.

Additionally, this is ignoring the reality that cell phones are smuggled into prisons as well. Any coordinated criminal activity doesn't need to use a land line that is monitored - just use a smuggled cell phone. ( http://fusion.net/story/41931/inside-the-prison-systems-illi... )

[jackvalentine]

> The point is that there is lots of technology that can do a first pass filter on phone calls.

Like most things, it becomes a question of incentives not technology. To the prison it looks like:

You want me to pay lots of money to develop/purchase a system that will vastly reduce the overhead on my very expensive phone system and will probably make me have to charge less?

(And for private prisons)

This will reduce recidivism and therefor the number of repeat 'customers' coming to my facility?

[netcan]

Of all the ways of limiting phone use, is this a good method.

Why not just limit duration?

[Retra]

If you're going to permit phone calls at all, you need to allow enough duration to enable the reasons for allowing phone calls, and that's plenty enough time to orchestrate criminal activity.

[Sacho]

Is there any evidence that criminals conduct more criminal activity during their prison sentence than the general populace? If there isn't any, then either you should be monitoring all citizen calls, or get rid of this arbitrary punishment for criminals. If there is such evidence, is the difference substantial enough to warrant the surveillance?

[ptaipale]

>Is there any evidence that criminals conduct more criminal activity during their prison sentence than the general populace?

The point is rather moot, considering that one of the main purposes of incarceration is incapacitation (effect of a sentence in positively preventing, rather than merely deterring, future offending).

I.e. you cannot steal, rob or kill because being monitored in prison prevents you from doing so. Lack of evidence therefore wouldn't make much of a justification for removing such monitoring because it could be argued just to show that the monitoring works.

However, without digging into statistics I would expect that there is more crime in prisons than outside (not because incapacitation wouldn't work at all, but because offenders are concentrated in prison).

There is substantial violence in prisons between inmates. (Not only in the US but everywhere).