#prison tech

If you're thinking that prisoners might pay Securus, Viapath and their competitors out of their own prison earnings, forget it. These companies have decided that the can make more by pocketing the difference between the vast sums paid by third parties for prisoners' labor and the pennies the prisoners get from their work. Remember, the 13th Amendment specifically allows for the enslavement of incarcerated people! Six states ban paying prisoners at all. North Carolina caps prisoners' wages at one dollar per day. The national average prison wage is $0.52/hour. Prisoners' labor produces $11b/year in goods and services:

https://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2024/0324bowman.html

Forced labor and extortion are a long and dishonorable tradition in incarceration, but this century saw the introduction of a novel, exciting way of extracting wealth from prisoners and their families. It started when private telcos took over prison telephones and raised the price of a prison phone call. These phone companies found willing collaborators in local jail and prison systems: all they had to do was offer to split the take with the jailers.

With the advent of the internet, things got far worse. Digitalization meant that prisons could replace the library, adult educations, commissary accounts, letter-mail, parcels, in-person visits and phone calls with a single tablet. These cheaply made tablets were offered for free to prisoners, who lost access to everything from their kids' handmade birthday cards to in-person visits with those kids.

In their place, prisoners' families had to pay huge premiums to have their letters scanned so that prisoners could pay (again) to view those scans on their tablets. Instead of in-person visits, prisoners families had to pay $3-10/minute for a janky, postage-stamp sized video. Perversely, jails and prisons replaced their in-person visitation rooms with rooms filled with shitty tablets where family members could sit and videoconference with their incarcerated loved ones who were just a few feet away:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/14/minnesota-nice/#shitty-technology-adoption-curve

Capitalists hate capitalism. The capital classes are on a relentless search for markets with captive customers and no competitors. The prison-tech industry was catnip for private equity funds, who bought and "rolled" up prison contractors, concentrating the sector into a duopoly of debt-laden companies whose ability to pay off their leveraged buyouts was contingent on their ability to terrorize prisoners' families into paying for their overpriced, low-quality products and services.

One particularly awful consequence of these rollups was the way that prisoners could lose access to their data when their prison's service-provider was merged with a rival. When that happened, the IT systems would be consolidated, with the frequent outcome that all prisoners' data was lost. Imagine working for two weeks to pay for a song or a book, or a scan of your child's handmade Father's Day card, only to have the file deleted in an IT merger. Now imagine that you're stuck inside for another 20 years.

This is a subject I've followed off and on for years. It's such a perfect bit of end-stage capitalist cruelty, combining mass incarceration with monopolies. Even if you're not imprisoned, this story is haunting, because on the one hand, America keeps thinking of new reasons to put more people behind bars, and on the other hand, every technological nightmare we dream up for prisoners eventually works its way out to the rest of us in a process I call the "shitty technology adoption curve." As William Gibson says, "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed" – but the future sure pools up thick and dystopian around America's prisoners:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

My background interest in the subject got sharper a few years ago when I started working on The Bezzle, my 2023 high-tech crime thriller about prison-tech grifters:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

One of the things that was on my mind when I got to work on that book was the 2017 court-case that killed the FCC's rules limit interstate prison-call gouging. The FCC could have won that case, but Trump's FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, dropped it:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/prisoners-lose-again-as-court-wipes-out-inmate-calling-price-caps/

With that bad precedent on the books, the only hope prisoners had for relief from the FCC was for Congress to enact legislation specifically granting the agency the power to regulate prison telephony. Incredibly, Congress did just that, with Biden signing the "Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act" in early 2023:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/1541/text

With the new law in place, it fell to the FCC use those newfound powers. Compared to agencies like the FTC and the NLRB, Biden's FCC has been relatively weak, thanks in large part to the Biden administration's refusal to defend its FCC nomination for Gigi Sohn, a brilliant and accomplished telecoms expert. You can tell that Sohn would have been a brilliant FCC commissioner because of the way that America's telco monopolists and their allies in the senate (mostly Republicans, but some Democrats, too) went on an all-out offensive against her, using the fact that she is gay to smear her and ultimately defeat her nomination:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/19/culture-war-bullshit-stole-your-broadband/

But even without Sohn, the FCC has managed to do something genuinely great for America's army of the imprisoned. This week, the FCC voted in price-caps on prison calls, so that call rates will drop from $11.35 for 15 minutes to just $0.90. Both interstate and intrastate calls will be capped at $0.06-0.12/minute, with a phased rollout starting in January:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/07/fcc-closes-final-loopholes-that-keep-prison-phone-prices-exorbitantly-high/

It's hard to imagine a policy that will get more bang for a regulator's buck than this one. Not only does this represent a huge savings for prisoners and their families, those savings are even larger in proportion to their desperate, meager finances.

It shows you how important a competent, qualified regulator is. When it comes to political differences between Republicans and Democrats, regulatory competence is a grossly underrated trait. Trump's FCC Chair Ajit Pai handed out tens of billions of dollars in public money to monopoly carriers to improve telephone networks in underserved areas, but did so without first making accurate maps to tell him where the carriers should invest. As a result, that money was devoured by executive bonuses and publicly financed dividends and millions of Americans entered the pandemic lockdowns with broadband that couldn't support work-from-home or Zoom school. When Biden's FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel took over, one of her first official acts was to commission a national study and survey of broadband quality. Republicans howled in outrage:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/10/digital-redlining/#stop-confusing-the-issue-with-relevant-facts

The telecoms sector has been a rent-seeking, monopolizing monster since the days of Samuel Morse:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/18/the-bell-system/#were-the-phone-company-we-dont-have-to-care

Combine telecoms and prisons, and you get a kind of supermonster, the meth-gator of American neofeudalism:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tennessee-police-warn-locals-not-flush-drugs-fear-meth-gators-n1030291

The sector is dirty beyond words, and it corrupts everything it touches – bribing prison officials to throw out all the books in the prison library and replace them with DRM-locked, high-priced ebooks that prisoners must toil for weeks to afford, and that vanish from their devices whenever a prison-tech company merges with a rival:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

The Biden presidency has been fatally marred by the president's avid support of genocide, and nothing will change that. But for millions of Americans, the Biden administration's policies on telecoms, monopoly, and corporate crime have been a source of profound, lasting improvements.

It's not just presidents who can make this difference. Millions of America's prisoners are rotting in state and county jails, and as California has shown, state governments have broad latitude to kick out prison profiteers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/08/captive-audience/#good-at-their-jobs

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/19/martha-wright-reed/#capitalists-hate-capitalism

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Working inside and outside the prison Marty Hench and Scott Warms figure out the full nature of the scam that the captive audience of prisoners are involuntary beta-testers for, and they discover a sprawling web of real-estate fraud, tech scams, and offshore finance that is extracting fortunes from the hides of America's prisoners and their families. The criminals who run that kind of enterprise aren't shy about fighting for what they've got, and they're more than happy to cut some of LA County's notorious deputy gangs in for a cut in exchange for providing some kinetic support for the project.

The Bezzle is exactly the kind of book I was hoping I'd get to write when I kicked off the Hench series – one that decodes the scam economy, from music royalties to prison videoconferencing, real estate investment trusts to Big Four accounting firm bogus audits. It's both a fast-moving, two-fisted crime novel and a masterclass on how the rich and powerful get away with both literal and figurative murder.

It's getting a big push from both my publishers and I'll be touring western Canada and the US with it. The early reviews are spectacular. But despite all of this, I had to make my own audiobook for it, which I'm pre-selling on Kickstarter:

http://thebezzle.org

Why? Because Audible – Amazon's monopoly gatekeeper to the audiobook world, with more than 90% of the market – refuses to carry my work.

Audible uses Digital Rights Management to lock every audiobook they sell to their platform. Legally, only an Audible-authorized app can decrypt and play the audiobooks they sell you. Distributing a tool that removes Audible DRM is a felony under Section 1201 of the 1998 DMCA.

That means that if you break up with Audible – delete your Audible apps – you will lose your entire audiobook library. And the fact that you're Audible's hostage makes the writers you love into their hostages, too. Writers understand that if they leave the Audible platform, their audience will have to choose between following them, or losing all their audiobooks.

That's how Audible gets away with abusing its performers and writers, up to and including the $100m Audiblegate wage-theft scandal:

https://www.audiblegate.com/

Audible can steal $100m from its writers…and the writers still continue to sell on the platform, because leaving will cost them their audience.

This is canonical enshittification: lock in users, then screw suppliers. Lots of companies abuse DRM to do this, but none can hold a candle to Amazon, who understand that the DMCA is a copyright law that protects corporations at the expense of creators.

Under DMCA 1201 commercial distribution of a "circumvention device" carries a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. That means that if I write a book, pay to have it recorded, and then sell it to you through Audible, I am criminally prohibited from giving you the tool to take it from Audible to another platform. Even though I hold the copyright to that work, I would face a harsher sentence than you would if you simply pirated the audiobook from some darknet site. Not only that: if you shoplifted the audiobook in CD form, you'd get a lighter sentence than I, the copyright holder, would receive for giving you a tool to unlock it from Amazon's platform! Hell, if you hijacked the truck that delivered the CD, you'd get off lighter than I would. This is a scam straight out of a Marty Hench novel.

This is batshit. I won't allow it. My books are licensed on the condition that they must not be sold with DRM. Which means that Audible won't sell my books, which means that my publishers are thoroughly disinterested in paying thousands of dollars to produce audiobooks of my titles. A book that isn't sold in the one store than accounts for 90% of all sales is unlikely to do well.

That's where you come in. Since 2020, I've used Kickstarter to pre-sell five of my audiobooks (I wrote nine books during lockdown!). All told, I've raised over $750,000 (gross! but still!) on these crowdfunders. More than 20,000 backers have pitched in! The last two of these books – The Internet Con and The Lost Cause – were national bestsellers.

This isn't just a way for me to pay off a lot of bills and put away something for retirement – it's proof that readers care about supporting writers and don't want to be locked in by a giant monopolist that depends on its drivers pissing in bottles to make quota.

It's a powerful message about the desire for something better than Amazon. It's part of the current that is driving the FTC to haul Amazon into court for being a monopolist, and also part of the inspiration for other authors to try treating Amazon as damage and routing around it, with spectacular results:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dragonsteel/surprise-four-secret-novels-by-brandon-sanderson

And I'm doing it again. Last December, I went into Skyboat Media's studios where Gabrielle De Cuir directed @wilwheaton, who reprised his role as Marty Hench for the audiobook of The Bezzle. It came out amazing:

https://archive.org/details/bezzle-sample

Now I'm pre-selling this audiobook, as well as the ebook and hardcover for The Bezzle. I'm also offering bundles with the ebook and audiobook for Red Team Blues (naturally these are all DRM-free). You can get your books signed and personalized and shipped anywhere in the world, courtesy of Book Soup, and I've partnered with Libro.fm to deliver DRM-free audiobooks with an app for people who don't want to mess around with sideloading.

I've also got some spendy options for high rollers. There's three chances to name a character in the next Hench novel (Picks and Shovels, Feb 2025). There's also five chances to commission a Hench short story about your favorite tech scam, and get credited when the story is published.

The Kickstarter runs for the next three weeks, which should give me time to get the hardcopy books signed and shipped to arrive around the on-sale date. What's more, I've finally worked out all the post-Brexit kinks with shipping my UK publisher's books to EU backers. I'm working with Otherland Books to fulfill those EU orders, and it looks like I'm going to be able to sign a giant stack of those when I'm in Berlin later this month to give the annual Marshall McLuhan lecture at the Canadian embassy:

https://transmediale.de/en/2024/event/mcluhan-2024

Red Team Blues and its sequels are some of the most fun – and informative – work I've done in my quarter-century career. I love how they blend technical explanations of the scam economy with high-intensity technothrillers. That's the the same mix as my bestselling YA series Little Brother series – but these are firmly adult novels.

The Bezzle came out great. I hope you'll give it a try – and that you'll come out to see me in late February when I hit the road with the book! Here's that Kickstarter link again:

http://thebezzle.org

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog: