by Andy Chen | Feb 19, 2023 | California
If you’re an inmate in California and you want to be able to talk to your friends and family, it’s going to cost you money. Shockingly, there is not much — cough, none, cough — competition in California’s jails and prisons when it comes to an inmate choosing what company to use to place a call to their family. Prices for calls are very high. There are two reasons why these high prices matter. First, the family of an inmate can go into debt. More often than not, the families who do go into this kind of debt are already living with precarious finances. Punishing the family of an inmate makes no sense. Second, if the price is too high and the aforementioned debt is incurred, at some point the family members can no longer afford to incur it. For example, they can’t borrow any more money and the calls to the inmate have to stop. Now, some of you might be thinking that there’s nothing wrong with this. The inmate committed a crime after all and they need to suffer hardship for it. Looking at it from the perspective of making inmates suffer or not suffer misses the point, I think. There’s a more universal conclusion that I think we should all be able to get behind: reducing the occurrence of crime is a good thing so that fewer people get murdered, fewer cars get broken into, and fewer grams of cocaine or methamphetamine get sold. Having the support of family and friends makes it easier to accomplish almost anything in life. I’d say that includes inmate recidivism....
