Jail video conferencing

Let's squeeze the poor families of those incarcerated for every last penny. [Link]

Dallas County, TX, considers banning live visits for jail inmates and switching to for-pay videoconferencing service. However, other communities have already installed the system by jail-telecom-for-profit experts, Securus.

In fact, Dallas County, TX, appears to have originally accepted the company's bid. However, as of this week,inmate advocates have managed to have the original contract nulled and the bid for services re-opened.

Nonetheless, among other places (including Michigan, where Ingham County jail administer Sam Davis proudly gushes over their jail's new visitation-for-pay system, ""Imagine, a first born is brought home and mom gets to turn on the webcam. Dad gets to see their newborn"), Securus is already installed in Florida. (Good news, library fans! If you don't have a computer, Securus has arranged that you can use your commmunity library's computers.)

Besides striving to punish families of people who are incarcerated (most of whom have not yet been tried), apparently Securus also dabbles in patent trolling and disconnecting calls coming from competing (less-expensive) VOIP-based services.

Besides pay-for-pay videoconferencing with friends and family, Louisiana (via TX-based US Telehealth) now provides "telemedicine" to inmates.

Of course, another advantage—as infamous AZ Sheriff Joe Arpaio (who began having such equipment procured and installed last year) points out—all calls and informations such as IP addresses are tracked and recorded allowing investigators to "mine intelligence data like never before."