Hacker News Reader

You're making some flawed assumptions. The prison wants the cash -- these are revenue contracts that generate a lot of money.

The video stuff nets money for the prison operator as and has other benefits. They pull the fiber to the prison in nowhere vile using erate funds for the "schools" in the prison.

View on HN

Not to mention the municipalities that benefit. There's a perverse incentive to pick the vendor with the highest price, since the muni will net a higher dollar value on the kickbacks.

I'm interested in seeing more about using erate funds to pull fiber and invest in other infrastructure, especially if it's then turned over to a private operator. Do you have any more info about who is doing this, and where?

I was wrong about the ERate thing -- it wasn't a prison, but a juvenile detention center. Kiddie prison is considered a school.

See: http://usac.org/sl/applicants/beforeyoubegin/non-traditional...

Thanks for the link and the correction. I'm going to look into pulling a list of contractors who have used erate funds for infrastructure upgrades which mainly benefited a private prison telco rather than the incarcerated juveniles.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com