EXCERPT: In mid-September, Keefe Co., the private, multi-million dollar contractor that stocks Florida prison commissaries, raised prices as much as 40% statewide. It was the latest in a consistent string of price increases by the company, which has a monopoly in the Florida prison system, and ensured that inmates and their families will continue to bear undue economic burdens in the name of little more than corporate greed and insatiability.
It has to stop. Before the hike, commissary prices, which were as much as 100% higher than those of common retail grocery stores, were already outside the scope of what is affordable for thriving citizens of the free world, let alone for inmates who have no choice but to rely on their families for financial support. (Florida requires all inmates have jobs, but does not allow them to be paid.)
I was one of those inmates. I did eight-and-a-half years in the Florida system with only my disabled old man to rely on for support. Somehow, he scraped together $100 every month so I could have extra to eat from the commissary. Yes, it was indeed extra. But make no mistake: It was abundantly necessary in light of the substandard diet provided by the state.
Officially, Aramark, the (also private, for-profit) contractor who provides food services to the Florida Department of Corrections, offers a “balanced” 2,000 calorie per-day diet to inmates. They pin their tidy little menus around prison compounds detailing such delectable concoctions as “Shepherd stew” and “Yakisoba,” and even stamp them with the signature of a real dietician.
Then they provide enough on a plate to leave a 7-year-old wanting. (We won’t even talk about quality.)
I was one of the fortunate ones. An analysis by the Bookings Institution found that “boys born into households in the bottom 10% of earners are 20 times more likely to be in prison [in the United States]” than children born into higher income families. Many of the guys I did time with lived on little to nothing precisely because their families had nothing to give. They “hustled” — sewing together old shoes and boxers, fixing AM/FM radios, making other guys’ bunks — for the extra meals they needed to maintain. Or else, they received $50 or $60 by some stroke of luck every few months.
Still, they went to bed hungry on a regular basis. So did I.
TITLE: Securus is charging families six dollars for phone calls from jail
EXCERPT: In 2018, former Sheriff Dan Walsh signed a three-year contract to pay Securus $66,750 in “annual licensing and maintenance costs,” and $240,500 for the “one-time cost” of hardware. The total payment to Securus was $440,750 in taxpayer dollars from Champaign County. Additionally, Securus will make hundreds of thousands of dollars from phone calls by families and loved ones with a person in jail. This is how Securus makes millions from mass incarceration. They have contracts for some 3,500 jails and prisons across the country.
Sheriff Dustin Heuerman, a Democrat elected in 2018, has been rolling over this contract, until recently when community members started raising questions. Heuerman put out a request for proposals (RFP) for a new jail phone contract, which companies can bid on by the deadline of October 6th. Due to community pressure, County Board members Jen Straub and Stephanie Fortado have been appointed to a committee that will review the proposals. Ultimately, the sheriff decides who gets the contract, but the County Board has to approve the decision as a final oversight.
Community members met with Sheriff Heuerman in April expressing their desire for free phone calls. Yet the original RFP made no mention of free calls. After community members raised the issue, an amendment was released for a “cost quote” of two free 20-minute phone calls per day for each person at the jail.
In recent media coverage, Sheriff Heuerman claimed that phone calls are currently 13 cents per minute, much less than what I was billed in February. He suggested people could come to the jail to make free calls through video screens that have blurry images and frequently cut out. Before COVID, in-person visits were stopped, and replaced by the shoddy video systems. Rather than scheduling video calls at the jail, working people will more likely pay for the overpriced phone calls. To make one of the video calls from home costs a whopping $13, and some still pay the costs.
Also included in the original RFP is a request for Voice Print Technology, the controversial collection of data on individuals at the jail, people who have not been convicted of any crimes. Voice print has been called into question by civil libertarians. The RFP explicitly says the service provider “must use a covert enrollment process where the voice print is created without the inmate’s knowledge.”
Barbara Kessel, also part of the campaign for free calls, has flagged this issue. “The voice print is taken from about a minute of speech recorded by the Voice Print technology,” she says. “The result is, like your fingerprint, a print of your voice is made that is supposedly unique to you in all the world. Once the data is gathered, it is instantly owned by the telecommunications company that provides the technology. Then the data can be sold off to other companies or governmental agencies for a large profit.”
Securus is one of two companies that possess Voice Print technology (the other is GTL, Securus’ main competitor). The requirement for Voice Print in the sheriff’s RFP potentially excludes other smaller companies that may want to apply.
It is overwhelmingly women — and Black women — who pay the costs for these calls. A 2015 study produced by the Ella Baker Center in Los Angeles found that 87% of the phone bills are paid by women. The 2022 annual report from the Champaign County Sheriff’s Office states that 59% of jail intakes were Black people. Champaign County has a chance to implement free phone calls at the jail and lighten the load for families struggling the most in these trying times.
TITLE: The Complex Reality of Immigration Detention Centers in the Biden Era
EXCERPT: In 2020, President Joseph “Joe” Biden pledged to end for-profit immigration detention, emphasizing the moral imperative that “no business should profit from the suffering of desperate people fleeing violence.” However, as the Biden administration embarked on this mission, it encountered numerous challenges.
As of July 2023, 90 percent of the 30,000 individuals in ICE detention were housed in privately operated facilities. Private corporations have seen their revenues from immigrant detention increase exponentially. As the ACLU has stated, it is evident that the federal government's immigration detention system leans heavily on private prison corporations. Notable entities in this sector, including the GEO Group, CoreCivic, LaSalle Corrections, and the Management Training Corporation, have amassed billions from ICE detention contracts over the past two decades.
What could be done about this level of corruption? I wonder if after 4 years of a Bernie presidency, problems like this would still exist. I think so. And yet problems such as these, of grotesque unfairness to the point of actual cruelty, are emblematic of the whole! They CANNOT exist in a country that is truly modern and humane.
"You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages--they haven't ended yet."
--Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Deadeye Dick (1982)