civil liberties – American Times

It’s cheaper to call Singapore than to call an American prisoner

February 7, 2012Erik Kain

Collect calls from prisons are a multi-million dollar business.

The many ways that the prison industry profits off the people it incarcerates – from cushy prison guard union contracts to dubious private prisons – is a long list with many surprises.

The latest? Phonecalls:

According to Prison Legal News, the cost of making a long distance phone call from a prison in Oregon includes a $3.95 connection fee plus .69 cents a minute, costing $14.30 for a 15-minute call. Compare this with making a public call outside of prison which costs anywhere from 05 to 10 cents per minute for long distance calls on landlines, costing a maximum of $1.50 for a 15-minute call.

For many families with loved ones behind bars, the choice between accepting a collect call and putting food on the table is a real and painful decision. It may come as a surprise to many that the increased cost of these calls has nothing to do with the actual service that is being delivered. What is actually happening is that prisons have designed a business system that allows them to offset their operation costs onto the shoulders of innocent families and to reap a profit.

The state prison kickback rate varies, with Texas accepting a 40% commission rate for phone calls and charging up to $6.45 for a 15-minute call. That same phone call provided by the same company in Maryland yields a 60% commission rate and costs a family member $17.30.

Maybe the state thinks this is justified. After all, to house a prisoner – even a nonviolent one – costs upwards of $30,000 a year, sometimes more. You could basically pay people minimum wage just to stay our of prison and save money in the process. $15 bucks a call is just the state making up for lost revenue.

Of course, it would make more sense to reform our prison system and our drug laws so that fewer not-menaces-to-society ended up behind bars. But again, the powers-that-be and the many groups that stand to lose money from drug reform and prison reform will lobby hard to see the racket continue perpetually.

If you want to understand why America locks so many people up, just follow the money.

“These contracts are priced not only to unjustly enrich the telephone companies by charging much higher rates than those paid by the general public,” Prison Legal News reports, “but are further inflated to cover the commission payments, which suck over $152 million per year out of the pockets of prisoners’ families—who are the overwhelming recipients of prison phone calls.

Averaging a 42 percent kickback nationwide, this indicates that the phone market in state prison systems is worth more than an estimated $362 million annually in gross revenue.”

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A Young, Modern Republican Party? What’s Wrong With Voting Democrat?

January 16, 2012Erik Kain

So long as the Republican Party is the party of old, white men we won’t get guys like Jon Huntsman at its helm (though, as Larison points out, he’s hardly as modern and charming as we’d all like to think.)

Ben Smith writes:

The party Huntsman imagined — modernizing, reforming, and youthful — could still be born. That might be the reaction to a second smashing defeat at Obama’s hands, or that might be where President Romney takes his re-election campaign. But it’s now hard to see Huntsman leading that change. He bet, too early, on a fantasy, and ran for the nomination of a party that doesn’t exist, at least not yet. His decision tonight to drop out just marks his recognition of that fact.

We already have the Democratic Party. In it there are lots of free market types, lots of good-government types, lots of people in tune with youthful voters, etc. I’d like more civil libertarians in the Democratic Party, personally, but I see no reason why we need a more youthful modernized GOP when the Democratic Party is already leaps and bounds closer to that mark.

What we need is more focus on civil liberties issues from our liberal leaders (though I welcome civil liberties being embraced on the right as well.) We need more Ron Wydens and Russ Feingolds. I see the Democrats moving toward a sort of populism that isn’t necessarily bad but that doesn’t particularly excite me either. It’s a response to Tea Party populism on the right. But fighting fire with fire isn’t always the best move. And since I’m a market liberal, a lot of progressive populism rankles me.

Obama has already illustrated perfectly well that if we want to actually contain the size of government through smart policies the Democrats are a better choice than Republicans. Bush grew government in all the worst ways. As far as I’m concerned, Obama is a competent enough politician and president but hasn’t done nearly enough to constrain those bad areas of the state that Bush let out of the box. A “modern, youthful, GOP” wouldn’t do any better, and would likely do worse. Part of the appeal of Ron Paul is his willingness to scale back those parts of the government which are illiberal and violent. What we need to do is work to cultivate a Democratic Party that believes we ought to scale back the military, end illiberal detainment and surveillance policies, and write off the war on drugs as an expensive disaster.

There are progressive politicians out there who do care about these things, just not enough of them. A primary attempt at Obama from the left flank would have been extremely stupid politically, of course, but we do need to find other ways to push the needle in the direction of expanded civil liberties and economic freedom and a more efficient welfare state. (Note: I do not necessarily mean a scaled back welfare state, but one which is economically efficient. I do think that for all its flaws the ACA moves us in that direction though I will go into more detail on that in the future.)

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The National Defense Authorization Act is the Greatest Threat to Civil Liberties Americans Face

December 5, 2011Erik Kain

If Obama does one thing for the remainder of his presidency let it be a veto of the National Defense Authorization Act – a law recently passed by the Senate which would place domestic terror investigations and interrogations into the hands of the military and which would open the door for trial-free, indefinite detention of […]

Liberals Need to Take Obama’s Civil Liberties Record Seriously

November 8, 2011Erik Kain

Liberals defend Obama on his political victories at home and abroad, but they should focus more on his Bush-era national security policies and other broken promises. In 2008, during the aftershocks of the housing market and financial collapse and the fall of Lehman Brothers, and amidst the increasingly frightening din of anti-Obama sentiment that was […]

Civil Liberties in the Post-9/11 Era

September 12, 2011Erik Kain

Jason Kuznicki has one of the most stirring 9/11 posts I’ve read. Forgive me a longer-than-usual excerpt: September 11 was the day “Orwellian” stopped being an argument against anything. It became a checklist. My country started collecting various-sized bits of Nineteen Eighty-Four like so many grim commemorative postage stamps. Constant surveillance. Constant warfare. Constant suspicion. […]