While onsite video visitation systems for communicating with prisoners have been used in the U.S. since 1995, online video visitation with prisoners has now become highly feasible.  Online video visitation allows prisoners’ family and friends to visit prisoners via personal, secure Internet video conferencing from their homes.[*]  A crude estimate for potential online prisoner video visitation service revenue is about $200 million per year in the U.S.   This communications industry development can increase prison security, lower prison operating costs, and increase the welfare of prisoners and their friends and family.

Personal visits with prisoners can be a significant conduit for contraband.  The risk of passing contraband causes many prisons not to allow personal contact visits with prisoners.  Even non-contact but open-air visits have contraband risks.  Because of security concerns, allowing personal visits only across a transparent barrier is quite common.  Such visits have similar sensory properties to video visitation, but much higher costs for all parties.

Online video visitation lessens prison operating costs.  Moving prisoners securely from cellblocks to visiting areas requires considerable prison staff time.  A physically separate visitation facility also requires dedicated staffing.  Video visitation stations for prisoners can be distributed close to cell blocks and in a way that minimizes additional staffing required to supervise the video visitation stations.  Such efficiencies in turn allow prisons to offer a wider range of times and days for visits.

Online video visitation also lessens visitors’ costs.  Prisoners held for terms longer than one year are typically held in large state facilities that can be a long distance from where the prisoners’ family and friends live.  Online video visits eliminate visitors’ travel costs, both time and expenses.   Because of unavoidable variance in travel times, on-site prisoner visits cannot be precisely scheduled, and often they are not pre-scheduled.   Hence visitors can spend considerable time waiting for a visit.  Online video visitation allows more precise visit scheduling, allows visits to be scheduled across a wider range of days and times, and reduces visitors’ opportunity cost of waiting.

Online video visitation would serve to foster successful prisoner re-integration into society after release from prison.  Newly released prisoners face enormous challenges in surviving as law-abiding citizens.  Support from family and friends plays a critical role in successful re-intergration.  Online video visitation, by fostering communication between prisoners and their family and friends, would help prisoners to maintain the relationships that they will need upon release.

Providing new communication opportunities for prisoners is not just a promising business.  It’s also in the public interest.

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Related posts:

• email for prisoners has been highly successful
• prisoners are promising customers for communications services
• concern for the poor includes concern for prisoners

Data: U.S prisoner visiting statistics and estimated online video visitation revenue (Excel version)

[*] In the U.S., an onsite video visitation systems was first installed in the Brevard County jail complex in Florida in 1995.  The system reduced the cost of moving prisoners within the prison.   A similar system was installed in a Washoe County, Nevada, jail in 1999.  An online video visitation system was installed in Ada County, Idaho, in 2009.  After an Ada County sheriff’s poll found that 43% of homes didn’t have Internet access, churches and bail bond companies stepped up to provide Internet access.  The high share of homes not having Internet access may reflect a bias toward the demographics of the disadvantaged jail population.  The Twin Falls County jail in Idaho is moving towards online video visitation.   The Kootenai County jail in Idaho has a similar system that could also support online video visitation.

William Stuntz’s new book, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, compelling indicts the U.S. criminal justice system for failing to provide just and equal justice under law.  Stuntz declares:

The criminal justice system has run off the rails.  The system dispenses not justice according to law, but the “justice” of official discretion.  Discretionary justice too often amounts to discriminatory justice.  And no stable regulatory mechanism governs the frequency or harshness of criminal punishment, which has swung wildly from excessive lenity to even more excessive severity.

Legislators get political credit for passing tough new criminal laws.  Not surprisingly, the number of criminal laws has exploded and the severity of punishment possible under law has increased greatly.  In the U.S., criminal justice now depends largely on prosecutors’ discretion in bringing charges and, to a lessor extent, on judges’ sentencing discretion in disposing of induced guilty pleas.  Current results of this system are 2.3 million persons in prison or jail, with African-Americans and males vastly disproportionately represented among those incarcerated.

Stuntz proposes two complementary directions for reform.  First, to strength equal protection under law, law in action must legally constrain formal criminal laws.  Irrespective of the filigrees of formal criminal laws, imposing dissimilar punishment on persons accused of factually and substantively similar actions should not be permissible under constitutional law of equal protection.  Second, to ensure that criminal punishment actually serves local community needs and values, local democratic control of the criminal justice system should be strengthened.  Increased funding for local policing would strengthen local democratic control.  So too would more jury trials and care to select juries from among the peer community of the accused.

John Paul Stevens, who served for nearly 35 years on the U.S. Supreme Court, praised Stuntz’s book in his recent review of it in The New York Review of Books.  The first sentence of Stevens’ review describes who Stuntz was:

William Stuntz was the popular and well-respected Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law at Harvard University.

Stevens’ review concludes:

Professor Stuntz’s account of the “collapse” of an overgrown system of criminal law enforcement is well worth reading.  It is full of interesting historical discussion.  It accurately describes the magnitude of the twin injustices {excessive severity and disparate treatment of African-Americans} in the administration of our criminal law.  It should motivate voters and legislators to take action to minimize those injustices.

The last sentence of Stevens’ review presents the mass-media model of social change.  An eminent professor writes a book.  Prominent persons acclaim it in prominent publications.  The book becomes widely read.  Voters vote for political candidates who support the book’s proposals.  Legislators, perhaps with an eye to their standing in elite discourse, perceive additional motivation for acting.  Thus voters and legislators act to minimize the grotesque injustices in our criminal justice system.

Even with John Paul Stevens and William Stuntz, both great men, seeking to activate it, the mass-media model offers meager hope for transforming the criminal justice system to deliver sensible justice.  Within your abilities, resources, and constraints, look for additional ways to make the criminal justice system more just.

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Related posts:

• prisoners are among the poor
• general concern about setting prisoners free

The first quotation above is from Stuntz (2011) p. 5.

References:

Stevens, John Paul. 2011.  Our ‘Broken System’ of Criminal Justice. The New York Review of Books. Nov. 10, 2011 issue.

Stuntz, William J. 2011. The collapse of American criminal justice. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Prisoners, in the simplest, most general use of the term, are persons incarcerated under legal proceedings addressing violations of public law.  The facilities that incarcerate prisoners likewise can be simply and generally termed prisons.  Prisoners and prisons are the best terms in English to use for general, transnational discussions of justice systems.

Prisoners, prisons, and other terms of incarceration are complicated by more specific and exclusive usages.  For example, in the U.S., the term “prisoner” often is used specifically for persons confined in justice-system institutions that federal and state governments operate.  The term “inmate” often is used for persons confined in locally or regionally operated incarceration facilities.  “Prison inmate” or just “inmate” is also sometimes used for persons confined in federal and state facilities.  “Inmate” historically has also been used for residents of other public institutions such as hospitals and asylums.  “Convict” is an older term typically used for a person sentenced to years of incarceration.

The specific uses of prisoner and inmate typically parallel distinctions among incarceration facilities.  In the U.S., “prison” is often used for an institution holding persons sentenced to a year or more of imprisonment.  Jails and police lock-ups hold arrested persons before booking.  Jails, but usually not police lock-ups, hold pre-trial detainees, persons awaiting sentences, and persons serving sentences typically of less than a year.  Despite the difference in the specific usage of the terms “prisoner” and “inmate,” the distinction between prisons and jails is not well-defined within the U.S.  For example, Hawaii, Alaska, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Delaware do not distinguish between jails and prisons.  The federal justice system operates pre-trial detention facilities analogous to local jails.  The distinction between prisons and jails is also not generally applicable internationally.

Confusion in incarceration terms reflects historical cross-currents in ideas about the status of incarcerated persons and the purpose of incarceration.  Early modern incarceration facilities for high-status persons (treacherous nobles, heretical high clergy, etc.) were called “prisons”.  Incarceration facilities for low-status persons were called “workhouses,” “houses of correction,” and “jails.”  Late in eighteenth-century England the idea of a “penitentiary” developed.  Penitentiaries were incarceration facilities designed to foster repentance for crime.  The rise of social science in the nineteenth century prompted the establishment of “reformatories.”  These institutions sought to reform persons through the operation of professional treatment expertise.  The term “detention center” emerged in the twentieth century as an abstractly functional description for a short-term incarceration facility.  “Correctional institution” is a modernization of “house of correction” unmoored from a belief in the possibility of correcting persons.  Penitentiaries similarly continue to exist without belief in the significance of penance.

Incarceration terms must be interpreted in the context of their use and with broader knowledge about how the relevant justice system disposes persons.  Where are persons immediately after they are arrested?  Where are persons before a trial, between court appearances (remanded), awaiting sentencing, and serving sentences?  How are persons within the community but under criminal justice supervision, e.g. probation and parole, counted within justice system statistics?  A key step to understand is asking question, even if only to yourself.

About 3300 years ago in Egypt, the wealthy helped themselves through the afterlife by commissioning and having buried with them a personal copy of spells for “emerging forth into the light.”  One obstacle to emerging forth into the light was the weighing of the heart.  Bad behavior made the heart heavy.  If the heart was not lighter than a feather, then a beast would consume the deceased, and her existence would cease.  A standard spell for establishing a light heart included these declarations:

I have propitiated God with what he desires; I have given bread to the hungry; water to the thirsty, clothes to the naked and a boat to him who is boatless [1]

About 1300 years ago, probably somewhere in Mesopotamia, a Jewish teacher also taught care for the poor:

When a man is asked in the world-to-come: ‘What was thy work?’ and he answers: ‘I fed the hungry,’ it will be said to him: ‘This is the gate of the Lord. Enter into it, O thou that didst feed the hungry.’  When a man answers: ‘I gave drink to the thirsty,’ it will be said to him: ‘This is the gate of the Lord. Enter into it, O thou that didst give a drink to the thirsty.’ When a man answers: ‘I clothed the naked,’ it will be said to him: ‘This is the gate of the Lord. Enter into it, O thou that didst clothe the naked.’ This will also be said to him that brought up the fatherless, and to them that gave alms or performed deeds of lovingkindness.[2]

About 2000 years ago in Palestine, another Jewish teacher, whom some regarded as a rogue or traitor, taught similarly:

Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.[3]

Destiny-determining judgment depends on care for the poor.

The specification of the poor in particular texts varied.  The widow and orphan were among the poor within each text’s frame of understanding.  However, only one of the three texts above mentions the widow or the orphan (the fatherless).  Specific literary reasons might explain the widow and orphan’s exclusion in particular texts.  The third text, for example, is written from the perspective of Jesus of Nazareth.  He was a man and hence would not figure as a widow.  He repeatedly emphasized his intimate relationship with his father; he could not be imagined as an orphan.  Nonetheless, Jesus’ and his early disciples made clear that the widow and orphan were among the poor.[4]

Including the boatless among the poor may not be merely an ancient Egyptian idiosyncrasy.  An ancient Jewish song praising the Lord in times of trouble described persons hungry, thirsty, in prison, sick, and persons doing business on boats caught in storms.[5]  Like being boatless, doing business on boats caught in storms seems less universally relevant than being hungry, thirsty, in prison, or sick.  However, the ancient Egyptians understood boats to be the vehicles by which gods traveled across the sky and through the underworld.  Persons could aspire to voyage with a god in the afterworld, and they worried about evil forces carrying them away in a boat:

may a place be made for me in the solar bark on the day when the god ferries across

let me not be carried away in a boat, or be seized violently and taken to the East [6]

Perhaps boats gained more universal significance through their association with the realm of the gods and after-worldly travel.

The poor included persons in prison.  Even pushing aside persons doing business on boats caught in storms, ancient Jewish song included persons in prison among the hungry, thirsty, and sick.[7]  Jesus’ description of judgment not only explicitly included those in prison, but also in its Jewish-poetic repetition closely associated being sick and being in prison.  The righteous asked, “when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?”  The accursed were told, “I was … sick and in prison and you did not visit me.”[8]  The association of being sick and being in prison has deep historical roots and an obvious mechanism of relation: under the harsh conditions of ancient prisons, many prisoners became sick.  Persons who were sick and incapacitated also might understand themselves to be imprisoned by their sickness. Thus an Akkadian poem written in Mesopotamia about 3100 years ago laments:

I took to a sick-bed of confinement, going out was a hardship,
My house became my prison.
A fetter for my flesh, my arms were useless,
A shackle to my person, my feet were done for.
My afflictions were severe, the wound grave.[9]

The Qur’an, which from the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century encompassed much Egyptian, Jewish, and Christian understanding, declares that devotees of Allah “feed, for the love of Allah, the indigent, the orphan, and the captive.”[10]  Those in prison were among standard types of the poor for most of recorded history among the earliest civilizations from North Africa through Mesopotamia.

Weigh your heart today.  Are prisoners among the poor?

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Related posts:

• setting prisoners free
• increasing access to phones in UK prisons

Notes:

[1] Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, from Spell 125, trans. Faulkner (1985) p. 32.  For an example from 1240 BGC, see Papyrus of Ani.  The ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead is more accurately translated as “Book of emerging forth into the Light.” The Weighing of the Heart is a modern name given to a vignette associated with spells 30B and 125.  The first known reference to the Weighing of the Heart occurs in the coffin texts of the 12th Dynasty (1991-1802 BGC).  That vignette, as well as spells 30B and 125, become well established in the 18th Dynasty (1550-1292 BGC).  See Taylor (2010) p. 205. A  second century GC Egyptian priestly text indicates the enduring influence of these spells.  See Grindheim (2008) p. 316, esp. ft. 8.

[2] From Midrash on Psalm 118, trans. Braude (1959).  The text is thought to have been written sometime between the sixth and ninth centuries GC.  See Grindheim (2008) p. 316.

[3] Matthew 25:35-36, trans. RSV.  A figure of God speaks these words.  As Grindheim (2008) insightful observes, this text shifts the account from first-person merit claims to divine observation of actions taken without knowledge of their merit.

[4] E.g. Luke 20:47, Mark 12:42-44, James 1:27.

[5] Psalm 107.

[6] Introductory Hymn to the Sun-God Re and Spell  93.  The first is trans. Faulkner (1985) p. 27.  The second is from the Budge’s translation of the Papyrus of Ani.  That translation more clearly conveys the concern about the boat.  Boats figure in many spells in the Book of the Dead.

[7] Psalm 107.

[8] Matthew 25:39, 43, trans. RSV.  The text’s parallel structure is preserved for other types of the poor in these conversational turns.

[9] Ludlul bēl nēmeqi, trans. Annus and Lenzi (2010) p. 37.  I have removed marks for two minor textual reconstructions.

[10] Qur’an 76:8 (Dahr) trans. Abdullah Yusuf Ali.

References:

Annus, Amar, and Alan Lenzi. 2010. Ludlul bēl nēmeqi: the Standard Babylonian poem of the Righteous Sufferer. [Helsinki]: Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project.

Braude, William G. 1959. The Midrash on Psalms. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Faulkner, Raymond O., trans., Carol Andrews, ed. 1985. The ancient Egyptian book of the dead. London: British Musuem Publications.

Grindheim, Sigurd. 2008. “Ignorance Is Bliss: Attitudinal Aspects of the Judgment according to Works in Matthew 25:31-46.” Novum Testamentum 50 (2008) 313-331.

Taylor, John H. 2010.  Journey through the afterlife: ancient Egyptian Book of the dead.  Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

The UK Ministry of Justice is considering installing telephones within prisoners’ cells.  Currently prisoners share telephones installed in common areas.  Queuing for telephone use constrains telephone use, creates arguments among prisoners, and increases tension within prisons.  Telephone equipment costs are low relative to revenue gained from prisoner telephone service.  Adding telephones to prisoners’ cells would increase prison revenue, reduce risks of prison disturbances, and increase prisoner welfare.

Prisoners in England gained access to telephones relatively recently.  Prior to the terrible Strangeways prison riot in April, 1990, English prisoners did not have regular access to telephone service.  Lord Woolf’s enquiry into the causes of the Strangeways prison riot found that lack of communication between inmates and their families contributed to tensions that burst out in the riot. That finding led to telephones being installed on landings in English prisons.

Allowing prisoners to make telephone calls from within their prison cells would not reduce public safety.  Prisoners’ telephone calls are not monitored by having a prison official watch prisoners making telephone calls or by having a prison official stand near the phone trying to overhear telephone conversations.  Prison phone networks include technology that identifies prisoners, controls who each prisoner can call, controls call length and call frequency, records every conversation, and monitors conversations for illegal activity and suspicious communication.  The location of prison phones is irrelevant to prison call control and monitoring technology.

Installing phones in prisoners’ cells could help to improve public safety by making authorized prison phones more attractive relative to contraband cell phones.  Contraband cell phones allow prisoners to make telephone calls without having to queue to use the common, authorized prison phone.  Contraband cell phones, by allowing prisoners to make calls from within their cells, also allow prisoners to make calls with less risk of other prisoners overhearing their conversations.  That element of privacy is distinct from official monitoring.  Authorized phones within prisoners’ cells would eliminate these two advantages of contraband cell phones and hence reduce the demand for contraband cell phones.

The extent of hostility towards the reasonable proposal to install telephones in prisoners’ cells is astonishing.  The Daily Mail article on the proposal generated 225 comments. Most of the commenters oppose the proposal.  Many of those commenters are angry, contemptuous, or disdainful.  A BBC article on the proposal generated 416 comments, with a similar pattern of responses.  Compared to the UK, the US imprisons a much higher share of its population, imposes longer prison sentences, and has harsher prison conditions.  The US public reaction to such a proposal probably would be even more hostile.

Important connections apparently are failing in communication with prisoners.  The problem is bigger than telephone service.

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Related posts:

• contraband cell phones prevalent in prisons and jails
• prisoners are promising customers for communications services
• email for prisoners highly successful

Prisoners held in U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons’ facilities are generally limited to no more than 300 minutes of telephone calls per month.  This limit was recommended in 1997 and enacted in 2001.  It served to lessen the burden of human monitoring of prisoners’ telephone calls.  Since then, technologies for automatically monitoring, searching, and analyzing telephone calls have improved greatly.  Nonetheless, the call-minute limit has changed little.  A call limit that recognized the capabilities of new technology would increase call revenue for the Bureau of Prisons and increase welfare for prisoners and their family and friends.

When humans were the primary monitors of prisoners’ telephone calls, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) enacted a limit on prisoners’ calls to help reduce the challenge of monitoring calls.  Prior to 2001, BOP prisoners’ telephone calls were not generally limited.  In 1999, the U.S. Inspector General studied the BOP’s management of prisoners’ telephone use.  The Inspector General noted:

Permitting inmates access to prison telephones and protecting the public against crimes facilitated through use of prison telephones present a complex balancing of interests. … At the present time, the balance appears tilted too far in favor of inmate access.

Among the Inspector General’s recommendations were the following:

1. The BOP should impose limits on all inmates’ telephone privileges. The 1997 Wardens’ Working Group recommended 300 minutes per month, an arbitrary figure arrived at without examining data on inmate telephone usage. The BOP should research this issue and develop a recommendation for limiting the number of minutes that inmates can use the telephone which takes into account inmate calling patterns and the number of calls that can be effectively monitored by available staff.
2. The BOP currently monitors less than four percent of all inmate calls. This is an unacceptably low percentage to detect and deter criminal conduct by inmates. We recommend that the BOP set a significantly higher goal and then calculate the resources needed to meet this goal. Undoubtedly, this will require two things: more staff assigned to monitoring inmate telephone calls and fewer inmate calls.

On April 2, 2001, the BOP enacted the 300 minutes per month limit that the 1997 Wardens’ Working group had recommended.  The BOP subsequently increased the limit to 400 minutes for only the months of November and December.  Americans not incarcerated spend on average about 850 minutes per month on the telephone.  Hence the limit on prisoners’ telephone use limits prisoners to less than half as much telephone communication as that of persons not incarcerated.

Information technology developed within the past decade offers major advances in storing, searching, and analyzing prisoners’ telephone calls.  Internet search engines run flexible keyword searches over massive datasets.  Similar machine searching of inmate calls offers a forensic tool that is far beyond anything that human monitors could achieve.  Such technology can also handle a wide range of languages much more easily than can human monitors.  This new technology surely should affect the balancing of interests in regulating prisoners’ telephone calls.

The number of minutes per month prisoners spend on the phone probably isn’t correlated with criminal activity.   With crude human call monitoring, minutes per month is correlated with staff work requirement.  That seems to have been the primary concern in 1999.  Current automated call monitoring and call profiling largely eliminate the correlation between minutes of use and human staff work.  Hence whether a need for any general limit on prisoners’ call minutes currently exists should be carefully considered.

Increasing the limit on prisoners’ telephone calls would have significant benefits.  Raising the limit to 500 minutes per month would generate an estimated additional $1.2 million for the BOP.[1]  That limit would still constrain prisoners to 41% fewer telephone minutes per month than the 850 minutes per month that non-incarcerated persons use.  With a 500 minutes per month limit, an estimated 10% of prisoner would reach that limit.[2]  The additional telephone calls would increase the welfare of prisoners and their families and friends.  Moreover, at a cost well within the bounds of the additional phone revenue gained, new technology almost surely could advance public safety relative to the balance recommended in 1999.

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Spreadsheet calculating effect of increasing prisoners’ call limit (Excel version)

Related post: prisoners are promising customers for communications services

Notes:

[1] Calculation based on an exponential model for the distribution of monthly call minutes across prisoners.  Available evidence indicates that the prisoner-minute distribution has a fatter tail than an exponential distribution.  That implies that actual revenue would be greater than the revenue estimated with the exponential model.

[2] Increasing the monthly minute limit to 850 minutes would generate an estimated additional revenue of $1.8 million.  An estimated 2% of prisoners would be at that limit.   The revenue benefit of eliminating the general minute limit would be greater than $1.8 million.  A more precise figure is difficult to calculate because it depends on the weight in the distant tail of the call-minute distribution.