Apparently a ‘private’ federal prison in Kansas is about to get its ass handed to it, along with the release of multiple inmates over recording of attorney/client phone calls…
The federal public defender’s office has asked for the release of 67 inmates from a Kansas federal prison and plans to seek freedom for more than 150 others because authorities secretly recorded conversations between prisoners and their attorneys that are supposed to be private.
Most of the federal inmates are being held on drug or firearms-related cases.
Full article, HERE.
And apparently this is now TWO years after the original investigation started, HERE.
Grrr… For profit prisons are NOT covering themselves in glory. A quick google search turns up almost 20 MILLION hits for private prison problems, ranging from food, to health care (lack of), to misbehaving guards, etc.
Prison isn’t supposed to be a five star experience, and as much as we dislike it, they do still have rights, but damn… the stupid of these administrators and ‘wardens’… Really?
Don’t release the prisoners. They’re still guilty.
Jail the people who recorded the conversations.
+1
McC/WSF- You would think, but no, they’re going to release the damn prisoners… sigh…
A D.A. in Oregon tried that on Fr. Timothy Mockaitis – they asked him if they could wire his confessional to get evidence on a guy who was in for one job but suspected for another. “It’d help bring closure for the family if we could get him on the second count.”
He told them to pound sand, BUT they recorded him anyway.
Knights of Columbus raised around $2M to gum up the legal works and get the recording thrown out. Upshot was a change in OR law so that now, pastoral counseling where privacy can be expected is equivalent to attorney-client privilege.
https://www.ewtn.com/library/PRIESTS/sealconfess.htm
https://www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?storyid=3888
On a par with Obama releasing “drug related” prisoners.
Don’t we have the largest prison population in the world, or something like that? With a 1/4 of the world’s incarcerated people held here, in the US?
Of course the stats are skewed — in China/Norkland etc they just shoot you. So.
But even so, there’s something really wrong with this, at every level. Could it be that people are making $$$ out of it? Surely not.
Of yes, both the recording system companies and the prisons are making money off of the system; in my county they charge the inmates $4/minute to make calls!
There are only a couple makers of prison phone monitoring systems. The systems are supposed to not record calls to certain numbers (lawyer’s offices) but several times it has come out that ALL calls are recorded but the ones to lawyers aren’t shown in the normal view of the computer system – but a savvy prison employee can find them.
Call it one quarter in the US, with a bit more than a twentieth of the world population. With perhaps a disparate proportion of our prison population being illegals from other parts of the world.
China has three to four times our population, and they shoot folks.
I’m not going to trawl the CIA world factbook to estimate third world population just for this comment, but they aren’t prosecuting all the crimes we prosecute.
India and the EU likewise are probably apples and oranges in terms of prosecution.
The other variables are execution rate, public safety, and cultural diversity. (We are a nation of mixed cultures, which means mixed cultural attitudes towards property, etc. The mixing produced as a workable compromise a tendency to value individual freedom and property rights. 1. Other countries do not have our same assumptions. 2. All of a sudden now that mixed compromise culture isn’t authentic for people who come from alien cultural backgrounds.) Show me that the rest of the world is exactly the same where these variables are concerned, and then our proportion compared to the world proportion would be a valid comparison.
Our problem, in my eyes, is twofold. One, we can afford to feed more people in prison without at least getting forced labor out of them. We are an extremely wealthy society, which isn’t a problem itself, but does have effects that are a problem. Second issue is that lawyers as a profession have distorted the criminal justice process.
We obviously need common sense revolutionary justice reform like DPRK’s sanban system. 🙂
It costs a lot to warehouse people in prisons, perhaps as much as the price of sending them to a decent college but then again a lot of the folks are in prison because they are either not very bright or not good decision makers so college would not be a good fit for them to find success. Of course druggies are a large part of the prison populations and that would include people with mental problems who self medicate and at times prefer prison to living on the street.
I have no idea what the answers are, the rules and requirements for running jails and prisons are extensive and there should be better solutions instead of just adding more expense. I used to think I knew a lot about how schools need to be run until I retired the first time and tried substitute teaching Jr. High in South Dallas and after two months gave up on that when I was totally out of my depth trying to work with disadvantaged minority kids from fractured backgrounds. The kids were not stupid but they had very little knowledge of anything outside of their own neighborhoods, I though I had some answers and then realized I didn’t even know the questions.
When I quit trying to teach and went back to a real job my wife asked me if there were any kids we might be able to help one on one and I told her the next time I saw any of them I would be sitting on a jury. That’s the truth and it’s sad.
Ordinary Federal prisons get caught doing this too.