“I am writing to your company, Global Tel Link, but I seek to appeal to a human being. How you have treated me and my family...through your business practices has caused us great harm.” - Miguel, San Quentin
Miguel hasn’t seen his family for more than a year.
“Covid isolation has meant sporadic and limited phone calls with poor sound quality that are... interrupted every few minutes by needless recordings, without privacy... and on 12 phones for 700-800 individuals.”
“There seems to be a constant lack of feeling, care, compassion, or even common sense business practices within this traditional prison industrial complex model... With concern and deep pain, Miguel.”
Unfortunately, he’s not the only one with this experience…
Imagine getting a hand drawn birthday card from your kid. Now, imagine that instead you got a photocopy of that birthday card -- or worse, just a small digital copy on a tablet -- AND that someone threw your kid's card in the trash in some corporate warehouse.
Angry? THREAD.
PA did it first: replaced direct mail in prisons with privatized mail photocopying. Now, this cruel practice is quickly spreading. It's already been rolled out in many local jails, and is being piloted in the federal prison system and in MA prisons.
The corp introducing mail photocopying to prisons and jails is Smart Communications and their product is MailGuard. They make $4M a year on the PA contract, where families have reported delays in mail delivery and low image quality, like this:
"I was in prison on my daughter’s 8th birthday... I had seen it happen over and over to the men around me: active and willing fathers who lost their babies because of the cost of a call." - Jewu
"That’s right, amid a fight over prison calls, the state signed a second predatory contract with the same corporation to further exploit families with incarcerated loved ones. But what can we expect when the state has its hand in the cookie jar?"
"Parents inside need to comfort their kids, support them through remote learning and confirm negative COVID tests. But often they can’t — because they can’t afford to pay Securus, and JPay, and their private equity owner Platinum Equity, and the state."
The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) was created by the first #COVID19 stimulus bill to help small businesses retain employees. Only 5.7% of US businesses received a PPP loan, but among them, infamous corporations in the prison industry. These may shock you…or not. (THREAD)
While many are struggling to pay for calls with their incarcerated loved ones, the corporations exploiting them are getting bailouts. NCIC received a $1-2 million PPP loan while charging families $7.50 for a simple 15-minute local phone call.
Incarcerated people make just $0.20/hr working for the Mississippi Prison Industries Corp, the state's prison labor business. But they weren’t included its employee count when it received $150-350K. Apparently, incarcerated people aren't employees and their pay is irrelevant.
Yes, we must #DefundPolice. We cannot reform a system designed to brutalize and exploit Black people. We must dismantle it. We do that by removing its financial power.
It's time we unpack how police and prisons are funded.
(Thread)
1) Rightfully the focus of most demands to #DefundPolice, legislative budgets are the largest source of police and prison funding. These budgets are proposed, negotiated, passed, and signed at the federal, state, and local level.
2) Fines and fees are a huge funding source for police and prisons that comes directly from communities. Everything from traffic tickets and court fines to jail phone calls and commissary sales--often paid by families--generate funding for police and prisons. #DefundPolice