There are many issues in the criminal justice reform debate -- policing, bail, sentencing, politicization. None are worse for their utter lack of a justifying rationale than the systemic fleecing of inmates' families through the jail comms systems. @CBHessick @GalvinAlmanza 1/ https://twitter.com/theintercept/status/1294081512820953091

As a prosecutor, recorded inmate jail calls were an invaluable source of evidence in some very serious cases. I can't overstate this. I specialized in hard-to-prosecute domestic violence cases, and jail calls broke open & helped prove more DV cases for me than I can count. 2/

I have no reservation in saying the system of recording jail calls saved many a battered woman's life just in this one prosecutor's experience. But, for all the evidentiary value these systems bring, their cost to use for the inmate & family is a gross abuse of power. 3/

Once I left my badge behind and joined the corp world, part of my job had me working w/ the companies who provide these comms systems to prisons & local jails. I was shocked to learn how the revenue was made ... and shared. 4/

Inmates and their families (who are the ones actually buying the phone cards and credits sold by the jail) pay ridiculously exorbitant rates for phone time to keep connected to each other -- the single best way to reduce the risk of recidivism. 5/

Worse than the financial abuse aspect of all this is who benefits. The comms system provider, of course. They're a business, and this post-install revenue is a major piece of their profit pie. But what shocked me was the vested interest the *jails* have in this. 6/

Jails get a substantial cut of the fees generated by these comms systems. The selling point for corrections institutions is that these systems do more than pay for themselves - they provide an evergreen source of funding to offset ever shrinking local budgets. 7/

As technology has expanded the service offerings from just phone calls to now wifi tablets equipped with email, music, games, limited web access, and legal research (where I was involved), the pay-to-play fee opportunities have grown too. 8/

This @WIRED article from a couple years ago lays out the extortionate pricing and financial interests very well.

(Disclosure: the two companies named in the article - JPay and Securus - were companies my business segment often partnered with.) 9/ https://www.wired.com/story/jpay-securus-prison-email-charging-millions/

There are real arguments for/against how bail works, how policing works, how sentencing works, and how justice works when it's administered by political/elected officials. But there isn't a defensible argument in favor of maintaining this gross, financially exploitive system. FIN