[aeturnum]

Sure - prisoners are people who society has determined should have limits on their freedom and maybe this can be understood as a reasonable limit? Different people would draw lines in different places. For me, it seems essential that we preserve access to intellectual and communicative resources for at least two reasons: the post-prison future for correctly convicted people and the wrongly convicted. Prison must, after all, be a thing one is allowed to "move past" in a meaningful way.

I think "reasonable"[1] access to communication & informational resources is a sensible bedrock upon which to guarantee that people who've done wrong and completed their proper punishment can spend their time and energy preparing to lead a more productive life after they are free.

[1] What this word means always causes a fight but at least we're talking about it.

[ethbr1]

Profiting off an inmate's desire to communicate with their family seems egregiously "unreasonable", for starters.

And to your post-prison future point, maladaptive.

Discharging someone at the end of their sentence with (a) family and social connections strained or severed, (b) depleted financial resources, & (c) a barrier to jobs in many states... does not sound like a mix that reduces recidivism.

Instead, reasoning backwards from a complete, well-adjusted person at discharge time, and figuring out what the prison needs to provide to an inmate during their incarceration to end up that person, and then funding it as needed without any prisoners-need-to-pay-for-themselves BS, makes more sense.

That said, I do think there should very much be tiering of prisons. There are some irredeemably fucked up individuals, who have burned through multiple chances, and one of the worst things we could do to people interested in getting their life back on track is mix them in with those people.

[aeturnum]

I totally agree that it's important (to all of us) that prisoners be able to maintain their most intimate connections.

> I do think there should very much be tiering of prisons. There are some irredeemably fucked up individuals, who have burned through multiple chances

I both know what you mean and think it's important to consider the current unacceptable state of prisons (which isn't exactly new) when thinking about people using up "multiple" chances. I don't have easy answers at all but part of this is how easy it is to write people off based on an incomplete understanding of their situation.

[ethbr1]

Any system is fallible. Is the person in prison because the courts worked or they didn't? Is the inmate in solitary because prison monitoring worked or it didn't?

So human sortings will never be 100% fair and correct.

But there's also a vast range to how people conduct themselves in the world and their moral codes.

I think it at least behooves us to consider that the greatest threat to rehabilitation of some inmates might be... other inmates.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Profiting off an inmate's desire to communicate with their family seems egregiously "unreasonable", for starters

How much is profit versus heightened cost, e.g. monitoring?

[ethbr1]

We'd know, except the two biggest companies GTL and Securus, that together make up about 70% of the market, are both owned by private equity and have no requirement to disclose.

It is known that a high percentage of fees are paid back to the prison the calls originate from [0], and that offering to return a higher percentage is one way these companies win exclusive contracts with prisons.

So color me suspicious that a profit source for prisons is being run at the most efficient and lowest possible cost to inmates...

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inmate_telephone_system#Serv...