This is one of the examples of what happens when ethics & religion are disconnected from the general public's everyday life. Ethics is a by-product of faith & religion, regardless of which religion one believes in. But, then the general public is told that religion & ethics has no room in their daily lives.
Businesses do make a big show of conducting their businesses with ethical principles, but then everyone's ethics is different. A robber thinks that the society has done him/her wrong & is liable to pay reparations to him/her. In the same vein, the owner of a company thinks he/she has worked hard to build this business, & hence, cutting costs & increasing profits, at the expense of increasing social misery is all ethical. He/she thinks that as long as he/she is following the minimum law required of him/her, he/she is all good.
Here, the companies are extracting, or a better word would be, "extorting" money out of criminals, alleged & proven, alike. Now, some may think that since these people are criminals, & perhaps, don't have any morals & ethics, of themselves, it's all right to "extort" money out of them for their phone calls to their families. If that's the case, then perhaps, the Pope Francis should not make a habit of visiting prisons on his continental tours.
Regardless, however, as I've blogged in my prior blog posts, most criminals don't want to become criminals in the first place. Their extraneous circumstances made them criminals. Every human wants to put food on the table, clothe themselves & their families, & put a secure roof over their heads. But the unending greed of wealthy individuals to hoard as much money as they can, while keeping the government officials in their pockets, too, leave the poor out in the cold. Then, some people out of that poor public resort to violence & wrong means to support themselves & their families.
Heck, one can see the corruption of these phone companies in that they are offering latest tablets & signing bonuses (or in other words, "bribes") to prison individuals to secure these lucrative phone contracts. Is that exactly ethical or moral from any point of view?
Furthermore, the discrimination at all levels; racial, ethnic, linguistic, & regional etc. creates more misery for members of that poor public. For instance, several laws in US are considered quite harsh for African-Americans, e.g. getting arrested for not paying parking tickets or even sleeping out in park benches. The people who are getting those tickets or fines are not exactly earning 6-figure salaries but struggling to pay for their food, clothes, & rent.
Coming back to this article, these companies are earning exorbitant profits from the misery of people who are put in the so-called prison & justice system. They are essentially making money off of someone else's misery. Those people are of poverty-ridden backgrounds themselves & every nickel & dime they need to spend to talk to their loved ones, who may help them in not becoming further violent, are not going towards their loved ones' food, clothes, & rental payments.
To add insult to injury, company CEOs are actually fighting government laws, which is doing something good for a change, to keep "extorting" the poor.
So, who is the real criminal here? The one who might have been forced by his/her extraneous circumstances to forgo all ethics & morals & resort to violence or someone who is making a 6-figure salary (investors included) & has a complete control of his/her decision to not "bribe" government officials & not only reduce these calling fees but help the government come up with laws in support of reducing such high calling fees?
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Private phone companies are making a pretty penny by nickel-and-diming prison inmates & their families, sometimes to the tune of $2 a minute for in-state phone calls. Yet the exorbitant fees keep taxpayers from footing the bill.
The prison phone industry has been booming since the 1990s. It’s grown to a $1.2 billion-a-year industry dominated by a few private companies, as people made some 500 million calls totaling more than 6 billion minutes both to & from prisons & jails in 2014 alone, the New York Times reported.
RT’s Lindsay France called Global Tel*Link (GTL), which contracts with Los Angeles County, to set up an account to call a fictional friend at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility.
“The nice lady on the phone told me that first off, I’d be hit with a nearly $5 sign-up fee, a possible service fee, possible facilities fee depending on where I wanted to call into,” France said. “And when my fictional friend or loved one gets out and I ask for a refund on the money left inside my account, I get hit with a fee then too.”
On top of those fees, France learned that there was no way to determine the per-minute rate of a call until it had been made & paid for.
Anthony Graves spent 18 years on death row accused of a crime for which he was later exonerated. He struggled to maintain communication with his support network at home by phone.
“That was very expensive. It was like 15 dollars for 20 minutes, 30 minutes. So very expensive all the way around. It’s like I said, at the end of the day everyone’s making a dollar now,” he told RT. “The whole rehabilitation thing is going out the window with private industries coming in and making a lot of money.”
Graves isn’t alone in paying such a high price to keep in touch. The Prison Policy Initiative reported that a call from California’s La Verne City Jail to an in-state number requires a connection fee of $12.59 & a per-minute charge of $1.15, amounting to nearly $30 for a 15-minute call.
After a decade of complaints from prison-rights groups & families of inmates, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is slowly attempting to rein in the telecom companies.
In August 2013, the FCC instituted interim requirements for interstate long-distance calls, capping rates at $0.21 per minute for debit & pre-paid calls & $0.25 per minute for collect calls. A revised version of the rules went into effect last February. Typical commercial rates ‒ those not involving the prison system ‒ cost a mere $0.04 per minute, according to the NY Times.
...
Those rules didn’t affect the cost of in-state calls, however, which the Prison Policy Initiative says comprise 92% of prison phone calls. The agency began focusing on lowering the cost of all calls between prisoners & their loved ones last fall, noting that “the cost of in-state calls remains high, calling fees have mounted, and payments to prisons unrelated to the cost of providing service have escalated, driving up rates.”
The same month that the FCC rules went into effect, Securus Technologies & GTL both offered incentive-laden contracts to one Georgia county, France reported. Securus offered a little over a million-dollar signing bonus for a five-year contract with 110 free tablet computers thrown in, while GTL proposed $1.5 million upfront for a seven-year deal & threw in 150 tablets.
In response to the offers ‒ & knowing that more FCC regulations were likely in the pipeline ‒ the jail’s administrator told the companies: “Since it is highly likely that the FCC will be eliminating all inmate phone commissions in the near future, in lieu of a (MAG) Minimum Annual Guarantee, please discuss alternatives” that “would provide to supplement the loss of jail phone revenues.”
In October [2014], the FCC opened up comments on “a comprehensive, market-based approach to achieving just, fair & reasonable rates for all inmate calling – local, in-state long-distance and out-of-state long distance.” It is also looking at banning so-called “site commissions,” which are payments that prisons demand of the inmate calling service providers & are often used by prisons to pay for services & facilities not related to the cost of hosting calling services. The agency is also seeking to impose permanent rate caps on all of those services, replacing the current, interim ones.
Prison phone call providers are fighting the FCC’s rules, saying that the rate caps have forced them to lose money on those calls.
“We think some of the new rates are below our cost,” Richard Smith, president & CEO of Dallas-based Securus, told Time last February. He said his company handles 120 million calls per year at an average rate of $3.50 per call, & that, while some inmates may have paid $17 per call, those cases were “outliers” made by inmates he believed were pushing an agenda.
“This is a public policy issue,” Smith added, noting that vendors like Securus will end up paying prisons less in site commissions, which totaled $460 million in 2013 ‒ money that cash-strapped facilities will have to make up elsewhere. “Taxes are going to go up,” he said.
Prisoner advocates argue, however, that there’s another public-policy issue involved ‒ that of recidivism.
“If you are an inmate and you have strong ties to your family, the less likely you are to reoffend,” Diane Goldstein, an executive board member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, told RT. “If you are an inmate that has rehabilitation opportunities inside prison and you get an education and you walk out with a skill the less likely you are to reoffend.”
Businesses do make a big show of conducting their businesses with ethical principles, but then everyone's ethics is different. A robber thinks that the society has done him/her wrong & is liable to pay reparations to him/her. In the same vein, the owner of a company thinks he/she has worked hard to build this business, & hence, cutting costs & increasing profits, at the expense of increasing social misery is all ethical. He/she thinks that as long as he/she is following the minimum law required of him/her, he/she is all good.
Here, the companies are extracting, or a better word would be, "extorting" money out of criminals, alleged & proven, alike. Now, some may think that since these people are criminals, & perhaps, don't have any morals & ethics, of themselves, it's all right to "extort" money out of them for their phone calls to their families. If that's the case, then perhaps, the Pope Francis should not make a habit of visiting prisons on his continental tours.
Regardless, however, as I've blogged in my prior blog posts, most criminals don't want to become criminals in the first place. Their extraneous circumstances made them criminals. Every human wants to put food on the table, clothe themselves & their families, & put a secure roof over their heads. But the unending greed of wealthy individuals to hoard as much money as they can, while keeping the government officials in their pockets, too, leave the poor out in the cold. Then, some people out of that poor public resort to violence & wrong means to support themselves & their families.
Heck, one can see the corruption of these phone companies in that they are offering latest tablets & signing bonuses (or in other words, "bribes") to prison individuals to secure these lucrative phone contracts. Is that exactly ethical or moral from any point of view?
Furthermore, the discrimination at all levels; racial, ethnic, linguistic, & regional etc. creates more misery for members of that poor public. For instance, several laws in US are considered quite harsh for African-Americans, e.g. getting arrested for not paying parking tickets or even sleeping out in park benches. The people who are getting those tickets or fines are not exactly earning 6-figure salaries but struggling to pay for their food, clothes, & rent.
Coming back to this article, these companies are earning exorbitant profits from the misery of people who are put in the so-called prison & justice system. They are essentially making money off of someone else's misery. Those people are of poverty-ridden backgrounds themselves & every nickel & dime they need to spend to talk to their loved ones, who may help them in not becoming further violent, are not going towards their loved ones' food, clothes, & rental payments.
To add insult to injury, company CEOs are actually fighting government laws, which is doing something good for a change, to keep "extorting" the poor.
So, who is the real criminal here? The one who might have been forced by his/her extraneous circumstances to forgo all ethics & morals & resort to violence or someone who is making a 6-figure salary (investors included) & has a complete control of his/her decision to not "bribe" government officials & not only reduce these calling fees but help the government come up with laws in support of reducing such high calling fees?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Private phone companies are making a pretty penny by nickel-and-diming prison inmates & their families, sometimes to the tune of $2 a minute for in-state phone calls. Yet the exorbitant fees keep taxpayers from footing the bill.
The prison phone industry has been booming since the 1990s. It’s grown to a $1.2 billion-a-year industry dominated by a few private companies, as people made some 500 million calls totaling more than 6 billion minutes both to & from prisons & jails in 2014 alone, the New York Times reported.
RT’s Lindsay France called Global Tel*Link (GTL), which contracts with Los Angeles County, to set up an account to call a fictional friend at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility.
“The nice lady on the phone told me that first off, I’d be hit with a nearly $5 sign-up fee, a possible service fee, possible facilities fee depending on where I wanted to call into,” France said. “And when my fictional friend or loved one gets out and I ask for a refund on the money left inside my account, I get hit with a fee then too.”
On top of those fees, France learned that there was no way to determine the per-minute rate of a call until it had been made & paid for.
Anthony Graves spent 18 years on death row accused of a crime for which he was later exonerated. He struggled to maintain communication with his support network at home by phone.
“That was very expensive. It was like 15 dollars for 20 minutes, 30 minutes. So very expensive all the way around. It’s like I said, at the end of the day everyone’s making a dollar now,” he told RT. “The whole rehabilitation thing is going out the window with private industries coming in and making a lot of money.”
Graves isn’t alone in paying such a high price to keep in touch. The Prison Policy Initiative reported that a call from California’s La Verne City Jail to an in-state number requires a connection fee of $12.59 & a per-minute charge of $1.15, amounting to nearly $30 for a 15-minute call.
After a decade of complaints from prison-rights groups & families of inmates, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is slowly attempting to rein in the telecom companies.
In August 2013, the FCC instituted interim requirements for interstate long-distance calls, capping rates at $0.21 per minute for debit & pre-paid calls & $0.25 per minute for collect calls. A revised version of the rules went into effect last February. Typical commercial rates ‒ those not involving the prison system ‒ cost a mere $0.04 per minute, according to the NY Times.
...
Those rules didn’t affect the cost of in-state calls, however, which the Prison Policy Initiative says comprise 92% of prison phone calls. The agency began focusing on lowering the cost of all calls between prisoners & their loved ones last fall, noting that “the cost of in-state calls remains high, calling fees have mounted, and payments to prisons unrelated to the cost of providing service have escalated, driving up rates.”
The same month that the FCC rules went into effect, Securus Technologies & GTL both offered incentive-laden contracts to one Georgia county, France reported. Securus offered a little over a million-dollar signing bonus for a five-year contract with 110 free tablet computers thrown in, while GTL proposed $1.5 million upfront for a seven-year deal & threw in 150 tablets.
In response to the offers ‒ & knowing that more FCC regulations were likely in the pipeline ‒ the jail’s administrator told the companies: “Since it is highly likely that the FCC will be eliminating all inmate phone commissions in the near future, in lieu of a (MAG) Minimum Annual Guarantee, please discuss alternatives” that “would provide to supplement the loss of jail phone revenues.”
In October [2014], the FCC opened up comments on “a comprehensive, market-based approach to achieving just, fair & reasonable rates for all inmate calling – local, in-state long-distance and out-of-state long distance.” It is also looking at banning so-called “site commissions,” which are payments that prisons demand of the inmate calling service providers & are often used by prisons to pay for services & facilities not related to the cost of hosting calling services. The agency is also seeking to impose permanent rate caps on all of those services, replacing the current, interim ones.
Prison phone call providers are fighting the FCC’s rules, saying that the rate caps have forced them to lose money on those calls.
“We think some of the new rates are below our cost,” Richard Smith, president & CEO of Dallas-based Securus, told Time last February. He said his company handles 120 million calls per year at an average rate of $3.50 per call, & that, while some inmates may have paid $17 per call, those cases were “outliers” made by inmates he believed were pushing an agenda.
“This is a public policy issue,” Smith added, noting that vendors like Securus will end up paying prisons less in site commissions, which totaled $460 million in 2013 ‒ money that cash-strapped facilities will have to make up elsewhere. “Taxes are going to go up,” he said.
Prisoner advocates argue, however, that there’s another public-policy issue involved ‒ that of recidivism.
“If you are an inmate and you have strong ties to your family, the less likely you are to reoffend,” Diane Goldstein, an executive board member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, told RT. “If you are an inmate that has rehabilitation opportunities inside prison and you get an education and you walk out with a skill the less likely you are to reoffend.”
