On one hand, you are challenging the dominant narrative, so that gets some reaction.
On the other hand, the logic you are using includes bold and unsubstantiated claims about kickbacks, which alienates your message from the remaining readers.
Thanks for the response. Here's some additional substantiation for the stuff about kickbacks. The term for kickbacks is "site commissions":
>Site commissions are payments that phone companies make to prisons and jails in exchange for the exclusive right to offer service to inmates. FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks said that banning the commissions will "end the practice of provider kickbacks to correctional facilities and payments for costs irrelevant to providing services so callers will no longer be forced to bear the financial burden of these costs."
I don't really have a dog in this fight, but I do think it is interesting that the FCC prohibited not just the site commission costs, but also the call surveillance costs. who exactly will pay the surveillance costs now?
There was some strange language in the FCC quotes. 8 out of 12 of the phone providers had a profit before the cost of "safety and security categories that generally are not used and useful".
I guess the charitable take of the FCC statement is that these services are not required by law, but still desirable to prisons?
Funny anecdote: a week after getting out of prison I was hired to listen to these calls and transcribe them. The State's Attorney's office would send me the ones they suspected of talking about illegal activities and were being investigated. None of the calls I listened to had anything illegal going on. Usually the opposite. Securus (the main operator) has a system for detecting certain words, so if you mention "drugs" it gets flagged.
I remember one call from a girl to her wife and the entire call was about how she badly wanted to get clean, the drug classes she was taking, the rehab they were setting up for her after she got out. It was literally as wholesome as you could get, and yet it was flagged for drug crime.
>It was literally as wholesome as you could get, and yet it was flagged for drug crime.
This isn't surprising in the least. The act of flagging shouldn't be construed to imply criminal content. That determination should be made at the time of review.
They would send me the transcripts to tidy up, but a ridiculously cursory review would have shown there was no crime. They had already been through two levels of "review," apparently.
I was a neutral party just hired to accurately fix the AI-gen'd transcripts, because most of the call is stuff that is fairly slangy prison terms, but the calls would come with unnecessary notes that I didn't need to see where the gov was champing at the bit trying to find crimes where they didn't exist. They were convinced there were crimes happening if they just looked harder.
After that I was given police interrogations, but honestly, when you have to listen to this stuff for hours it is horribly depressing (not because of the crimes, which are often horrific, but more because of the governmental conduct). I had to give it up.
It's an important job though. I've seen transcripts that were entered into evidence that were so totally wrong that it would boggle your mind. And wrong to the point where they logically reverse whole aspects of the case or evidence.
On one hand, you are challenging the dominant narrative, so that gets some reaction.
On the other hand, the logic you are using includes bold and unsubstantiated claims about kickbacks, which alienates your message from the remaining readers.