{"id":16968,"date":"2022-04-28T18:42:44","date_gmt":"2022-04-28T18:42:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/?p=16968"},"modified":"2022-04-28T18:42:44","modified_gmt":"2022-04-28T18:42:44","slug":"despicable-exploitation-of-blackness-by-mass-incarceration-profiteers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/despicable-exploitation-of-blackness-by-mass-incarceration-profiteers\/","title":{"rendered":"Despicable Exploitation Of Blackness By Mass Incarceration Profiteers"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Why should incarcerated people and their families be required to spend the little money they have on transfer fees, phone calls and electronic messages<\/strong><\/em><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
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by\u00a0Dexter Murray<\/a><\/p>\n

In a series of emails circulated during February 2022, which were overlaid with the red, green and yellow colors of the African freedom flag, the company JPay\u00a0purported<\/a>\u00a0to \u201ccelebrate Black History Month\u201d by \u201chelping you stay connected with your incarcerated loved one\u201d and making \u201cevery Tuesday during February a \u2018Free Reply Tuesday.\u2019\u201d But what does it mean to celebrate Black history when you profit from a prison system that harms the Black present?<\/p>\n

As I know from my personal experience, JPay is only one of several companies that enjoy\u00a0enormous profits<\/a>\u00a0from \u201ccorrectional\u201d facilities that are\u00a0disproportionately comprised<\/a>\u00a0of Black and brown people. Others include Securus, JPay\u2019s parent company, Global Tel Link, and Access Corrections. Those companies\u00a0charge exorbitant fees<\/a>\u00a0to family members seeking to add money to their locked-up loved one\u2019s commissary accounts. They have also made telephone calls and other forms of communication\u00a0prohibitively expensive<\/a>\u00a0and have even advocated for the\u00a0cruel end of in-person family visits<\/a>\u00a0because it\u00a0increases reliance on their products<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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These predatory companies are among the beneficiaries of the prison industrial complex, but their central role in that story is often obscured by the singular focus on private prisons. To be sure, private prisons have played an important role in creating perverse incentives that have\u00a0increased incarceration<\/a>\u00a0in the United States. (One comprehensive study examining nearly 30 years of data\u00a0found<\/a>\u00a0that a rise in private prison beds per capita increased the number of incarcerated people per capita as well as the average sentence length.) As the\u00a0Corrections Corporation of America<\/a> explained in an annual statement, \u201cThe demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by \u2026 leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices.\u201d<\/p>\n

Private prisons, though, are just one part of a much broader infrastructure of privatization. Any public interest lawyer would tell you that the vast majority of our clients are warehoused in public jails and prisons. Indeed,\u00a0less than 8%<\/a>\u00a0of the incarcerated population are confined in private prisons, which means we could eliminate those facilities and would still incarcerate more people than\u00a0any country in the world<\/a>. Even the Biden Administration seems to have missed this point,\u00a0calling for the end of private prisons<\/a>\u00a0while embracing the deeply troubling for-profit company\u00a0Smart Communications\u2019 \u201cMailGuard\u201d Program<\/a>, which would monetize correspondence and eliminate physical letters from entering facilities.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, companies such as Securus \u2014 which has a monopoly over the prison telephone industry in many states \u2014 are reported to have contracts with\u00a0more than 2,500<\/a>\u00a0\u201ccorrectional\u201d facilities throughout the country, the overwhelming majority of which are public prisons. The prison telephone industry is itself a\u00a0billion-dollar industry<\/a>, as is the prison money transfer industry, the electronic messaging industry and the video visitation industry.<\/p>\n

The broader infrastructure of privatization even reaches into the community. This past fall, for example, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau concluded that JPay \u201cengaged in\u00a0unfair and abusive<\/a>\u00a0acts\u201d by attaching illegal fees to people re-entering society, swindling\u00a0millions of dollars<\/a>\u00a0from people who could afford it least. People on probation or parole, meanwhile, are frequently returned to jail for\u00a0technical violations<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 placing them once again at the mercy of JPay and other companies who treat human beings as if they were financial assets.<\/p>\n

I know firsthand what it is like to be turned into one of those financial assets. For 31 months, I languished on Rikers Island, waiting for my day in court. I waited on a carceral island bearing the name of the notorious enslaver\u00a0Richard Riker<\/a>, where nearly\u00a090%<\/a>\u00a0of people awaiting trial were Black or brown. Once I got my day in court, I was greeted by a white judge, a series of white lawyers and a white prosecutor \u2014 who illegally excluded the Black people from the jury. I know, quite personally, that one cannot divorce the racial bias that shapes the adjudication process from the profits that result upon conviction. (My conviction was overturned on appeal because of the\u00a0prosecutor\u2019s race-based misconduct<\/a>.) This understanding is part of the reason why I found JPay\u2019s email so intolerable.<\/p>\n

For those of us who are serious about confronting the broader infrastructure of privatization and mitigating the perverse incentives that lead to more incarceration, we must first monitor and tell the truth about corporate gaslighting and its entry into the criminal legal system.\u00a0Claiming to celebrate Black history<\/a> while benefiting from a prison system that separates, confines and monitors millions of Black Americans is a form of resistance to racial reckoning and civil rights \u2014 cut from the same cloth as the widespread challenges we have seen to move toward a fact-based teaching of U.S. history. In other words, saying that JPay celebrates Blackness is about as truthful as that the U.S. Civil War was not about slavery. Such falsehoods influence the body politic and make meaningful progress much harder to achieve.<\/p>\n

Second, there are also modest and urgent legislative fixes. Prison profiteers are not going to regulate themselves. One legislative priority is to outlaw the\u00a0kickback clauses<\/a>\u00a0that lead to monopolization and enrich local jurisdictions with the money taken from incarcerated families through correspondence and money transfer fees. Another priority \u2014 currently being led by Color of Change and Common Cause \u2014 is to prohibit private companies that benefit from incarceration from\u00a0donating to sheriffs races<\/a>\u00a0across the country, which creates a conflict of interest and compounds already misaligned incentives away from freedom. Until we pass common-sense legislation, human beings will continue to be seen in terms of dollars and cents. Black people have a long history of being viewed through that prism.<\/p>\n

Finally, the longer-term and more fundamental fix lies in this question: Why should incarcerated people and their families be required to spend the little money they have on transfer fees, phone calls and electronic messages? Imagine being charged every time you reply to an email. Now imagine the\u00a0price rising on Mother\u2019s Day<\/a>. And imagine earning\u00a026 cents<\/a>\u00a0an hour from prison labor.<\/p>\n

Making family communication free and therefore more widely accessible would also decrease recidivism rates, as our experience and\u00a0every study has shown<\/a>. We know from experience that people who stay connected to their communities are much more likely to succeed as they navigate a re-entry process too often defined by stigma and a lack of support. Companies like JPay would lose from lower recidivism rates, but society would win.<\/p>\n

As we continue to\u00a0reconceptualize public safety<\/a>, broader conversations around family separation and those who profit from it must be part of that reimagining. \u201cDo I send money to him so he can afford to stay in touch with the kids, or do I feed the kids?\u201d is a question we have heard often, and it\u2019s one that simply cannot be reconciled with a just or safe society.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why should incarcerated people and their families be required to spend the little money they have on transfer fees, phone calls and electronic messages by\u00a0Dexter Murray In a series of emails circulated during February 2022, which were overlaid with the red, green and yellow colors of the African freedom flag, the company JPay\u00a0purported\u00a0to \u201ccelebrate Black Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16970,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[860,1241,5,58,6],"tags":[799,1054,20,25,1177],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16968"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16968"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16968\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16973,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16968\/revisions\/16973"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}