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The FCC has voted to end exorbitant phone fees for prison inmates

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Re: The FCC has voted to end exorbitant phone fees for prison inmates

#141

Post by crapshoot101 »

nrb wrote: post #115
DubiousPusher wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The whole private prison thing makes me want to vomit. I'm not sure this is the fundamental problem. Seattle jail is run by King County Corrections and it's a human rights disaster.

It absolutely is a fundamental problem. Just because government-run prisons have some overlap in their human rights abuses with private-run doesn't excuse the business model of the latter. When you are paid by the bed, it is in your best interest to lobby for stronger sentencing guidelines[1] to gain and keep as many inmates as you can, and bleed as much cash out of them as possible in the process. In some cases you…

This is a fair point, and I don't disagree, but the lobbying is by no means limited to private corporations. For the best example, look at California and the State prison guard unions, who have consistently argued for more mandatory sentencing guidelines and for more prisons, which enriching themselves in the process.

I want to reiterate that I'm with you on private prisons, but the basic point remains that any group (public or private) will act in what it perceives as its best interests, whether those jibe with the platonic ideal or not.

http://mic.com/articles/41531/union-of-the-snake-how-califor...

Re: The FCC has voted to end exorbitant phone fees for prison inmates

#142

Post by thaumasiotes »

michael_fine wrote: post #117
thaumasiotes wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it mean to be from Seattle vs. Vancouver?

You're right, in an ideal world it would mean nothing, as country distinctions are mostly arbitrary. However, there doesn't exist, and most likely won't exist in the near future, a world government that can realitistically replace all of the country governments, which is why it's not worth calling for the imminent removal of 'country rights'. However, in the case of states, there is a organizing body that can, and is…

The cultural (and physical!) distance between Seattle and Vancouver is minimal. Seattle is closer in basically every sense to Vancouver than it is to Salt Lake City. It can't make any sense to call for a unified Seattle-Salt Lake City government before a unified Seattle-Vancouver government. Applying the same policies to Seattle and to Salt Lake City is going to make one of those groups very unhappy.

Re: The FCC has voted to end exorbitant phone fees for prison inmates

#143

Post by toomuchtodo »

harryh wrote: post #93
smt88 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that you're proposing something hypothetical. So let's assume that it's true: Mississippi needs the revenue to run the prisons. The federal government should be able to say, "No, sorry Mississippi, you aren't going to run your prisons on the backs of the families of inmates." Why should someone have to pay extortionist prices to speak to a loved one? They likely had nothing to do with the crime (or the c…

I'm pretty sure that the loved ones of prisoners are being punished (by, you know, being physically separated from the prisoners) regardless of the cost of phone calls. Again, I'm not saying you're wrong. Were I a Mississippian, I'd prolly be in favor of cheaper phone calls for prisoners. But aren't we drawing a line in kind of a weird place? - OK to lock someone up in a cage. - OK to charge them $0.11/minute to talk…

> And given how weird that line is, should it really be drawn by outsiders who feel no effects of where the line is drawn?

Yes. That how treating humans humanely works.

Re: The FCC has voted to end exorbitant phone fees for prison inmates

#144

Post by nickff »

s73v3r wrote: post #136
nickff wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the commission's charter broadly enough, and without regard to either the original understanding or the original intent, you come to all kinds of absurd conclusions. From the text you provided, one could, for instance conclude that the FCC has the authority to issue regulations which require parents to provide all children above the age of two with a cellphone capable of high-speed internet access with no…

If the intent was different, then why didn't they explicitly mention that?

I am not a fan of trying to use original intent at all, but it is most often done by a relatively large number of judges by reading legislative history.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legislative_intent

Re: The FCC has voted to end exorbitant phone fees for prison inmates

#145

Post by simoncion »

hugh4 wrote: post #134
scottshepard wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that prisoners are a captive audience, being held by the Government, and the phone companies get a monopoly on an essential good. So a federal regulatory body absolutely makes sense.

But is the FCC the correct body?

As mentioned by linksbro upthread:

> [The FCC is] an independent commission created by [C]ongress to "make available so far as possible, to all the people of the United States, without discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex, rapid, efficient, Nationwide, and world-wide wire and radio communication services with adequate facilities at reasonable charges"

Given that (almost?) all prisoners in US prisons are "people of the United States", this seems like exactly the correct body.

Re: The FCC has voted to end exorbitant phone fees for prison inmates

#146

Post by SilasX »

smt88 wrote: post #52
TimMeade wrote: post #10

Not to be the naysayer on this but it is a very serious incursion on states rights. The legal consensus i'm hearing is that it will be overturned by the judicial system. Does the FCC have the right to tell a state or town what to do with local calls? That is the root of this. It's a given that they can regulate interstate, but historically intrastate has been the rights of the states.

It's probably time to give up on the ridiculous sanctity of states' rights. It made sense in a time when people lived in same state their whole lives, rarely traveled outside the state, and rarely communicated outside the state. Their whole lives unfolded within a few hundred square miles. That's not the case anymore. You can't subdivide the interests of American citizens by state anymore. What does it mean to be fro…

What about when your particular state wants to deviate from the national norm on, say, drug policy or gay marriage (in favor)?

Re: The FCC has voted to end exorbitant phone fees for prison inmates

#147

Post by vectorjohn »

ctdonath wrote: post #91

For a while I worked on a 3rd-party/collect-call billing system for a major telecom company. For several days after starting, technical discussions mentioned "inmate" every few minutes. Still getting my bearings, I finally piped up in a meeting with "surely it doesn't mean what I think it means, what is this 'inmate' you keep referring to?" Indeed it meant "prison resident". The problem was that inmates very often ab…

After rattling thru call menus trying to get a live operator, I'd be pissed off enough to berate the person too.

Re: The FCC has voted to end exorbitant phone fees for prison inmates

#148

Post by giancarlostoro »

Wow what a racket! For Less than $3 a month you could call the US / Canada with Skype, I don't imagine Skype does anything special that makes it more affordable to do the same things the prison system more or less end up doing, but that's horrible $1 a minute...

Re: The FCC has voted to end exorbitant phone fees for prison inmates

#149

Post by smt88 »

SilasX wrote: post #146
smt88 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably time to give up on the ridiculous sanctity of states' rights. It made sense in a time when people lived in same state their whole lives, rarely traveled outside the state, and rarely communicated outside the state. Their whole lives unfolded within a few hundred square miles. That's not the case anymore. You can't subdivide the interests of American citizens by state anymore. What does it mean to be fro…

What about when your particular state wants to deviate from the national norm on, say, drug policy or gay marriage (in favor)?

Several states already do that with legalized marijuana. The federal government has chosen not to get involved, so it's become a de facto state's right.

Re: The FCC has voted to end exorbitant phone fees for prison inmates

#150

Post by dang »

revscat wrote: post #58

That may have been their stated objection, but the broader pattern belies this. The broader pattern is "make life as difficult for the poor, middle class, and the minorities as possible."

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10434723 and marked it off-topic.
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