Scan, print, deliver?

Capitalist innovation comes up with a new, pointless way to be cruel to incarcerated people!

The printed scans I collected were low-quality, including blurry, darkened family photos that left incarcerated people unable to make out their loved ones’ faces. Even the more readable scans left much to be desired—because, after all, physical mail is rarely just about reading. Incarcerated people couldn’t run their fingers over their loved ones’ handwriting, or grasp a piece of paper that had been held by someone familiar.

. . .

Thus, it’s doubly alarming that more facilities are moving toward restricting traditional physical correspondence in favor of scanning and printing or electronically delivering letters. The Florida Department of Corrections, for example, is considering adopting a policy that would digitize incoming (nonlegal) mail, forcing incarcerated people pay for printouts or to view their correspondence on a tablet or kiosk operated by the private company JPay, the Gainesville Sun recently reported. The Smart Communications’ MailGuard program, launched in Pennsylvania prisons in 2018, now operates in more than 110 facilities in 25 states, according to the current listing of facilities on the program’s portal for family members.

. . .

While physical mail has long been subject to surveillance by corrections officers, bringing in a private company to process correspondence, and storing that correspondence in electronic databases, changes the game.

And this surveillance is part of the point—”MailGuard® creates a searchable database and opens a whole new field of intelligence for your agency,” notes the Smart Communications website.

Death to America.

  • Wertheimer [any]
    ·
    3 years ago

    A good book on this is James Forman, Jr.,'s Locking Up Our Own : https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/books/review-locking-up-our-own-james-forman-jr.html

    “Far from ignoring the issue of crime by blacks against other blacks,” Forman writes, “African-American officials and their constituents have been consumed by it.”

    Forman does not minimize the influence of racism on mass incarceration. And he takes great pains to emphasize that African-Americans almost inevitably agitated for more than just law-enforcement solutions to the problems facing their neighborhoods — they argued for job and housing programs, improvements in education. But their timing in stumping for social programs was terrible. “Such efforts had become an object of ridicule by 1975, a symbol of the hopeless naïveté of 1960s liberalism,” Forman writes.

    One result: A wide range of African-American leaders championed tougher penalties for drug crimes and gun possession in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. It was the one option they consistently had, and it seemed a perfectly responsible, moral position. Wasn’t the safety of black law-abiding citizens a basic civil right?