Comment by Jtsummers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jtsummers | Hacker News Reader

> After that, beyond basic bar soap, you’re on your own. You have to order supplies through the commissary system, a sort of monopoly drugstore run by the Keefe Group out of Missouri. This is where you purchase everything from hygiene supplies and chips to a Styrofoam cup. You place orders once a week, and the following week a delivery guy shows up with a cart piled high with plastic bags of stuff. If nobody on the outside puts money on your “books” (inmate account), you can order a second indigent kit. But as soon as someone sends you money, Keefe deducts that cost. And with a 20-cent pack of ramen costing $1.18, just like most monopolies throughout history, goods are sold at an inflated rate.

This is one of the parts of prisons I find particularly distressing. I'm trying to find (but can't recall the name of the company) an article, perhaps posted here a few months ago, about a company that handles inmate "bank accounts". The percentage they took was absurd. Between what the financial company took and the prisons, $100 sent to a prisoner might end up only being $50 by the time they could spend it. Paired with the high prices in the commissary they can barely afford "essentials".

EDIT: JPay. Here's an article, but not the one I was looking for:

http://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/09/30/15761/prison-banke...

I can speak to this personally.

My father is currently in a federal prison. I do not want to reveal sentencing, names, etc. but I deal with Jpay on a daily basis.

Their core currency is 'stamps' if you are technologically literate.

It is $4.50 to be able to buy 12 'stamps'

It takes one stamp to send an email, plus one stamp per attachment.

Beyond this, there are music 'credits', video call 'credits', etc.

It is a fucking racketeering ring. I literally keep a Windows laptop so that I can have video calls with my father because its incompatible with OSX and Linux (Ubuntu 14.04 in my case)

Would love to hear a way to make a difference here...I've thought of nothing.

Sadly the only way to a make a difference, presuming you're in America, is to get a movement going to reform the penal system. The reason it's sad is that for many Americans the point of prison is punishment rather than rehabilitation. So they're happy with people going through hell, 'cause you know, they deserve it.

Your best bet is to find an existing rights group to pursue the changes. It will be a hard sell since the US moved to a private system. This means that the states and fed will have less direct control of things. More red tape and contract negotiations.

The two big issues in the US prison system are:

1) Treatment of prisoners

2) Number of people in prison

As a country we need to improve treatment and reduce the number of people imprisoned quickly.

If there is anyone located in San Francisco or northern south bay that wants to get together and do a hackathon with the focus of building something that generates either awareness or solves a particular problem we should meet up for coffee. I can meet anywhere in the Mission to discuss it. (Contact info in profile). I am currently swamped running my business but I would figure out a way to take a weekend off to build something.

the revolution will not be appified

i agree, but in a world where "going viral" determines what people pay attention to (almost always stupid shit), maybe figuring out how to make socially valuable things go viral is an important approach.

Though the US has some private prisons, they are a minority by a wide margin. And other countries use them as well; the UK has 11% of its prisoners in private prisons and apparently are working on expanding (according to Wikipedia).

The county jail referenced in this piece is almost certainly not privately owned.

A position similar to yours has been countered on HN before... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8562786

> find an existing rights group to pursue the changes.

If you're fine hanging out with a mix of Christians, Agnostics and Atheists who occasionally quote scripture in support of their cause, check out the Quaker Prison Fellowship.

In addition to virmundi's suggestions, find your state and/or federal representative and talk to them about it. While it's not likely to make a big impact, these are the people who have the most sway in this regard, and you never know what might 'take' with them.

I will suggest that one obvious answer is to try to develop a competitor for Jpay and see if it isn't possible to arrange for people to have another option, even if individuals in prison don't get a choice, maybe a few prisons would take the option and then at least a subset of prisoners would be less screwed over by this system.

JPay et al. are the worst scum. One of the justifications though is that our dear leaders expand definition of "crime" and "criminality" but do not expand budgets for incarceration so it falls on the Jailor and/related staff to get finances. They typically bring in these JPay kind of shady dealers who promise a cut per person in jail. So JPay takes a cut but shares it with the Jail or department. To give the kind of commission promised to the Jails they rob the inmates - its that simple. So we not only hold an inmate for crime but his family for ransom. This is sad because people do not have empathy for in-mates. One of the many "criminal" faces of the Criminal Justice System.

When $0.20 ramen and basic hygiene products (kind of required for the sanity housing of anybody) are not provided, it kind of makes you wonder[1] where the several-hundred dollars per-day we spend to keep most people in jail[2] is actually ending up.

[1] rhetorical question; we know, more or less, where the money goes.

[2] prison is usually more expensive

> we know, more or less, where the money goes.

Show us? It's publically available information I guess, where can we read about it?

There's nothing fancy about where the money goes - it was paid to the police/jailers involved along with any contractors or other people on the receiving end of the "jail" budgets.

The point is that running a jail should be easy on $250/day/person-in-jail (or more!). The cost of bulk toothbrushs or ramen is basically in the noise. It says a lot about the character and values of a person that would choose to pocket this kind of spare change just to make their income very slightly bigger.

Heres a video that public integrity made with interviews of people hurt by the system: http://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/09/30/15797/time-money-w...

Yeah it's pretty crazy. For those who want more information here's a short documentary I watched about jPay a while ago.

do you know the name of the doc or have a link?

Sorry about that! here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiZj2wgbedg

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