Re: <nettime> A Dystopian New Initiative Will Charge Inmates by the

[tbyfield <tbyfield@panix.com>]

The good news: "States are passing laws abolishing private prisons and 
businesses are cutting ties with the facilities. And private prison 
companies are planning for a future in which their core service is 
illegal."

	=> 
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/12/1/20989336/private-prisons-states-bans-califonia-nevada-colorado

The bad news: There's a difference, which gets lost in the outrage of 
this Hyperallergic piece, between prisons and the services they rely on: 
construction, infrastructure maintenance, healthcare, food, etc. Huge 
swaths of those services are provided by for-profit contractors, of 
course; so even if privately run prisons go away, that immense apparatus 
of commercial services continues. That's why it's helpful to understand 
prisons, private and public, in terms of *state economic planning* — 
or "economic development," as we like to call it in the US. Many other 
prison systems (notably the Nazi death camps and Soviet gulags) have 
been structured around extracting labor from prisoners; the US system 
— which also extracts labor from prisoners — is more heavily 
oriented around prisoners as consumers.

	=> See Andrea Pitzer's history of the concentration camp, _One Long 
Night_: https://andreapitzer.com/

As for this metered e-reader "initiative" is awful, but on a certain 
level all it's really doing is making reading like phone calls. Under 
Obama the FCC capped prisoners' long-distance charges at around 
$0.25/minute, but Trump's FCC made rescinding those caps a high 
priority, so charges may have risen back to what they were before, often 
in excess of $1/minute. Extortionate fees like that shock the 
conscience; but if you add up the countless ways "us" non-prisoners pay 
to read — mobile data charges, ubiquitous logins for paid or "free" 
(as in "you are the product") services, ridiculously overreaching DRM 
claims, and all the rest — it's pretty shocking as well.

	=> Just search something like {prison phone charges}

None of this is meant to defend or soften metering prisoners' use of 
e-readers. Just the opposite: the clarity of this example should remind 
us just how pervasive and normalized these abuses have become. That's 
why it's easy to imagine an activist push defeating this initiative but 
impossible to imagine anything other than metered reading being a nearly 
universal norm in some arbitrary near future — say, 10 or 20 years.

Ted


On 3 Dec 2019, at 17:49, nettime's avid reader wrote:

> A Dystopian New Initiative Will Charge Inmates by the Minute to Read 
> e-Books
>
> https://hyperallergic.com/530216/a-dystopian-new-initiative-will-charge-inmates-by-the-minute-to-read-e-books/
>
>
> If you’re not already on board with the ways in which for-profit 
> prisons
> are a moral and civic affront and the outrageous and racially-biased
> incarceration rate in the United States amounts to a new form of
> slavery, I’m not sure what might convince you, but try this on for 
> size:
> prisons in West Virginia are introducing a new e-literacy initiative
> that will charge prisoners to read.
 <...>





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