The Federal Communications Commission voted in July to implement tighter price caps on phone and video call services in prisons and jails. The $1.4 billion industry of prison communications will now attempt to continue to squeeze a profit under these restrictions. The FCC decision was the result of 2022 legislation signed by President Joe Biden, entitled the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act.
I remember one guy I tutored with telling me, “You can even check the stock market on them.” Like most times when I heard something similar in reference to incarcerated life, I had to fight the urge to reply, “You know where you can do that too … on the outside. In the free world.” Throughout my prison stint, the tablets were almost a welcome exploitation. As much as we grew frustrated with them, they also became essential to mentally surviving incarceration. The first thing any “correctional” officer would threaten to take away if they weren’t getting what they wanted was the tablet access.
For 112 days I sat in jail not knowing when I would get released. I had stopped believing it was going to be soon after a couple weeks. I had stopped believing that the pandemic was going to change anything about the punishment bureaucracy. It had stopped occurring to me, every time we were on lockdown for health and safety reasons, that the best thing for public health and safety would be for me to be in my own home.