Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/11/20/captive-markets.html
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We need a law that outlaws profiting off of incarceration, banning private prisons and profiteering “service providers.” Social remedies such as criminal rehabilitation should not be sources of profit, just like basic health care and education.
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Privately-run, for profit prisons were funny to read about in Snow Crash, but in real life are NOT things that should ever exist.
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Christ - what assholes.
Maybe some nice gentlemen can express how counterproductive this is to the owners when they get released.
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You see, since they’re slaves, they’re the ideal market.
-any capitalist
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dingdingding! And here’s how it really works. As the prices rise, the money the prison makes through kickbacks also goes up, so they allow it. Would they allow this shit without a kickback? Money lubes their consciences quite well. I hope one day they are all on the receiving end of shit like this.
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This is so casually evil. It’s one of the more alarming trends lately where no one’s even bothering to try to make things like this even appear to be ok. It’s just slavering, naked greed.
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Really just a test market for everyone else.
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Are they allowed to own normal consumer-grade e-readers? If Amazon just donated a load of previous-generation Kindles they could still probably turn a profit on book downloads and the prisoners would get shafted slightly less.
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Burn the whole system to the ground.
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This post from 2015 is seeming less like a clueless ramble and more like foreshadowing…
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Exactly what I was thinking. They wish they could do this to all of us, and this is the first nudge in that direction.
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Even if someone could convince prison officials to allow this, they’d just charge $1/MB to download.
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The jail profiteers who charge inmates by the minute to read Project Gutenberg ebooks should be in jail, themselves.
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The financial exploitation is not the only problem here.
“The New Jim Crow,” a best-selling book about how mass incarceration has ravaged the black community, is banned by prisons in two states and can be difficult to obtain in others.
The choices prisons make when banning books can seem arbitrary, even capricious. In Texas, 10,000 titles are banned, including such head-scratchers as “The Color Purple” and a compilation by the humor writer Dave Barry.
“Mein Kampf,” on the other hand, is permitted, along with several books by white nationalists, despite the existence of prison gangs like the murderous Aryan Brotherhood of Texas.
“When you look at the banned book lists and specifically the stuff that’s being allowed, there’s a definite bias toward violent armed white supremacy and the censorship of anything that questions the existing religious or political status quo,” said Paul Wright, the executive director of the Human Rights Defense Center.
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And I ain’t saying that will change rap back
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The notion of denying incarcerated people reading material if they can’t pay for it is some high grade bullshit right there. We donate used paperbacks to our local prison library; even if they have to be discarded after a reading or two because of the fear of contraband, there is no reason to charge for them in the first place. Even if you have incredible fines, you can still come into the library and sit and read.
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This.
Every part of this is wrong backwards and should be illegal.
But welcome to Donald Trump’s America, where fucking people over just comes naturally to us
let me out of this timeline. PLEASE.
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Note the date:
“2014, when prisoners learned Ohio had signed a contract with JPay, a private prison technology service company, for personal tablets”
As always, this did not begin with Trump.
Also see this story, from 2015:
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The moment “profit” becomes part of the equation with a captive population, it ceases to be business and becomes extortion.
There is no “marketplace” in prison. Half the time they don’t even get to opt-out.
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