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Jails banned in-person visits in order to maximize revenue from voice and video calls as part of a "quid pro quo kickback scheme" with prison phone companies (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 month ago by Rozauhtuno@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/abolition
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Crossposted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/13937769

Across the United States, hundreds of jails have eliminated in-person family visits over the last decade. Why has this happened? The answer highlights a profound flaw in how decisions too often get made in our legal system: for-profit jail telecom companies realized that they could earn more profit from phone and video calls if jails eliminated free in-person visits for families. So the companies offered sheriffs and county jails across the country a deal: if you eliminate family visits, we'll give you a cut of the increased profits from the larger number of calls. This led to a wave across the country, as local jails sought to supplement their budgets with hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from some of the poorest families in our society.

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[-] BallShapedMan@lemmy.world 21 points 1 month ago

For profit prisons are cancer, and so are the police.

[-] Deceptichum@sh.itjust.works 10 points 1 month ago

Prison owners and police need to be locked up.

[-] BallShapedMan@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago

Agreed!

[-] mojofrododojo@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago

Cory Doctorow's book, The Bezzle, covers this in detail. It's a fiction book but the heinous bullshit is all too real, definitely recommend, it's a quick read and worth your time.

this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
151 points (96.3% liked)

Abolition of police and prisons

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Abolish is to flourish! Against the prison industrial complex and for transformative justice.

See Critical Resistance's definitions below:

The Prison Industrial Complex

The prison industrial complex (PIC) is a term we use to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems.

Through its reach and impact, the PIC helps and maintains the authority of people who get their power through racial, economic and other privileges. There are many ways this power is collected and maintained through the PIC, including creating mass media images that keep alive stereotypes of people of color, poor people, queer people, immigrants, youth, and other oppressed communities as criminal, delinquent, or deviant. This power is also maintained by earning huge profits for private companies that deal with prisons and police forces; helping earn political gains for "tough on crime" politicians; increasing the influence of prison guard and police unions; and eliminating social and political dissent by oppressed communities that make demands for self-determination and reorganization of power in the US.

Abolition

PIC abolition is a political vision with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment.

From where we are now, sometimes we can't really imagine what abolition is going to look like. Abolition isn't just about getting rid of buildings full of cages. It's also about undoing the society we live in because the PIC both feeds on and maintains oppression and inequalities through punishment, violence, and controls millions of people. Because the PIC is not an isolated system, abolition is a broad strategy. An abolitionist vision means that we must build models today that can represent how we want to live in the future. It means developing practical strategies for taking small steps that move us toward making our dreams real and that lead us all to believe that things really could be different. It means living this vision in our daily lives.

Abolition is both a practical organizing tool and a long-term goal.

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