Read on Twitter
Re: that phone in prison thread: Cell phones should obviously be given to everyone inside pending mass release or abolition. But prisons and prison comms companies operate exactly w the goal of eroding all those connections that are strengthened by cell phones.
It’s not a matter of accident, inability, or poor design. Securus and GTL don’t work to connect families, they work to keep that connection as weak as possible without sparking mass revolt inside, with as little cost to prisons as possible (negative cost, mostly)
Ppl who work at these companies are obsessed with maintaining absolute control of when how and who ppl inside call. They want ppl to only be able to maintain certain types of relationships, under constant surveillance, w minimal cost and inconvenience for guards
They feel this way because their contracts depend on it, because jailers feel that way. And even if you could convince jailers and contractors with a recidivism argument, legal cell phones would be allowed for “low-risk” prisoners just like all comms are now.
The same arguments were made to implement prison pay-phones in the first place, and they only came around because they were terrified by the uprisings of the early 1970s and bc phone companies stepped in to mediate putting the cost on families.
But even then they only did this in general pop, at the same time that they were building out control units to withhold all human contact for “high-risk” / political prisoners.
That would still be an improvement, but any version of this reform that would be pushed in a purely legislative channel, on the ground of an appeal to the good will of the state, would almost definitely be very different from what people are imagining as the demand
It would have to come through real leverage, as an actual demand not a policy request, behind a powerful and coordinated confrontation inside and out. To really open up the possibilities that everyone is 100% right to point out
And this isn’t even taking into consideration the very important social reasons that family and community ties are weakened by cages, which are not often reducible to technological and geographic challenges even if those play a huge part too
But I don’t mean to diminish the importance of popular acceptance of any challenge to normal dehumanizing practices in prisons.
People obviously need help realizing that they have way more to fear from the cell phones at the NYSE or at a rowdy protest than in prison
People obviously need help realizing that they have way more to fear from the cell phones at the NYSE or at a rowdy protest than in prison
