[Shakeil Price at The Marshall Project]

The technology situation for incarcerated people in the United States is beyond bad:

"Because prison telecom vendors tend to bundle their services, corrections systems often contract with a single provider, regardless of quality. And dozens of states make “commissions” from user fees. Within this context, incarcerated people become the unwilling consumers of a billion-dollar industry. Shakeil Price, one such user at New Jersey State Prison, explores another aspect of package deals: What happens when a state switches providers?"

Well, specifically, here's what:

"My little 7-inch JP6 tablet with its meager 32-gigabytes of memory may not mean much to the state, but it holds a decade’s worth of sentimental e-messages, pictures and video messages from my family and friends. By changing vendors, I will lose access to photographs from my son’s high school graduation and videos of my grandchild saying his first word, taking his first step and riding his first bike. These items are priceless to me; a dollar amount can't measure their worth."

Not to mention other downloads that the author has paid for, on a $5 a day salary, that are locked to this device and will go away when the vendor changes. It's nothing less than an abusive system - which, of course, just makes it part and parcel of the American justice system as a whole.

#Technology

[Link]