NEWS & LETTERS, August - September 2008
Voices from the Inside Out
Corporate influences on Corrections
by Robert Taliaferro
Recently Correctional Billing Services decided to raise its phone billing rates to prisoner families. Already higher than comparable rates in the community, Correctional Billing Services--in conjunction with various Correctional Departments around the country, and contracted phone companies--have pushed the rates through the roof.
In a world where a person can talk to China for about 2 cents a minute, it is an outrage that a man, woman or child in prison can only talk to a family member 2 hours away for 11 dollars for 20 minutes. That same 20 minutes costs 40 cents if they were calling Moscow.
CORPORATE ABUSE OF FAMILIES
Companies like Correctional Billing Services are only one example of unfettered corporate greed taking advantage of family members of prisoners, supported by and with the blessings of state correctional departments.
Though this type of corporate abuse has been going on for some time, it has gone largely unnoticed as most people tend to focus on companies like the CCA and Cornell when discussing the relationship of private corporations and corrections.
Cost-saving phone options like jailhouse versions of phone cards (in place with the federal system and private prisons for some time), with their attendant lower rates, have been rejected by states like Wisconsin and others. Those who opt for the higher cost billing and phone services often extort prisoner family members to use specific options of their services or not be able to receive calls from family members at all.
Correctional Billing Services, for instance, has a policy of requiring a family member's phone bill to be under a certain level for a period of three months. This requirement includes both correctional calls and private phone services having nothing to do with corrections. If the family member extends beyond their arbitrary level--even when the bill is paid timely and regularly--Correctional Billing Services will block prisoners from contacting their families for up to three months.
The only way to get phone service once that happens is to send Correctional Billing Services a prepayment thus allowing the company to invest these prepaid amounts--with attendant service fees of course--during the life of the service. The company can shut off phone access at an unspecified amount so that family members are required to deposit even more money, though enough money might still be available to cover one or two more calls.
Abusive corporate influences on corrections don't stop with phone services or private prisons. From medical services to banking, corporations have been promulgating practices towards prisoners and their families which--if practiced towards the general population--would result in criminal charges.
Such practices in the correctional setting are done with the tacit approval of correctional officials and state legislatures. States with such policies and practices often provide service monopolies to companies that are willing to toe the line with procedural precepts that a state might establish for its prisoners--regardless of its legality if held up to scrutiny.
Correctional capitalism was once content to abuse its wards. After all, who is going to feel sorry for prisoners who committed crimes against the community? Correctional capitalism, however, is an addict and like any addict, once the source of supply becomes overused, a new supply has to be found to placate its needs. This new supply line is the families of prisoners whom the correctional supplier and its corporate addicts are abusing with near impunity.
As Felix Martin (Isaac Woods) once wrote, "...the disease of capitalism keeps on destroying and mutilating all life in sight.
"The way I see it, capitalism has produced a nation of addicts...because this whole system... fragments the whole human being, separates thinkers and doers, tears us up into small pieces, our hands separated from our minds, our minds separated from our feelings..." or if corrections has its way, families separated from families due to impinged inter-familial contact perpetrated by states themselves (The Revolutionary Journalism of Felix Martin, pp. 70-71).
The correctional Tao of capitalism is designed to place the families of prisoners into the same category of citizenship as their incarcerated fathers, mothers, sisters, or brothers.
CRIMINALIZING COMMUNITIES
"When a community becomes self-deprecating, it gives carte blanche to the bourgeoisie to attack that weakness and find ways to criminalize all of its members" (Dialectics of Black Freedom Struggles, pp. 59-60).
It is time that the community at large refuses to let such blanket criminalization by association continue. Politicians say change is coming to the U.S. in election year 2008; let's make sure that the probe of change sinks beneath the surface and shines light upon the families of prisoners, who are often abused for their associations, and forgotten.
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