Re: [telecom] The predatory prison phone call industry is finally about to be fixed

I think it would not help, and would probably hurt.

“Competitive Bidding” isn’t an enforceable method. The “Competition” almost always turns out to be between three or four straw men who are, in fact, actually all the same company, or between two or three or four executives having drinks around a table where they divide up the available bids and highest-profit contracts so that they’re only “competing” with startups and offshore rivals that aren’t in the game anyway.

As for “kickbacks,” there aren’t any. Prison administrators and their political bosses muscled into the game very early on, and they’ve never been stupid enough to ask for bribes. They get their cut via checks in the mail, with the amounts and the timing already public information. The money goes for “essential” supports like extra jobs for the Warden’s wife’s friends, for the politician’s idiot in-laws, for the friends of the legislature that arranged the deals in advance, and, very occasionally, for equipment repairmen who are trying to make a living the old-fashioned way.

Of course, it’s a three-way street: the providers receive benefits from the taxpayers and pass some of that largesse on to their friends in the prison bureaucracy: free high-speed Internet links to carry the calls via VoIP trunks, free space, free electricity, free background checks on prospective employees, and (of course) free security for their equipment, and thus negligible insurance costs.

high prices and the ways inmates squeeze their lovers, wives, and relatives to pay them are seen as a small minority of do-gooders whom are not in touch with the fact that none of the decision makers care about the powerless or the poor.

Bill Horne