I had a friend who was in prison. They charge for everything electric in one way or another. For example. You can send them an email. But you have to pay to send it. And you had to pay for them to have a device and it’s batteries for them to read it.

I wasn’t going to do that. So I wrote letters and kept them “interesting.” My personal favorite was aging paper using tea. Using a feather quill pen. Writing in a mixture of home made ink using black walnut husks, coffee, and some acrylic paint as a binder.

He said they go through all the letters. The one I sent confused the shit out of the guards. And, they asked me not to do it again. But he said it was one of his favorite things he got in prison and the whole wing new about it. Nothing illegal. Just strange. We played D&D together.

Nothing raises morale like a letter. He’s out and doing well. He still mentions the letter a fair bit.

What an awful policy. She is right, the majority of contraband comes from staff. Prison reform now!

Yes, let’s do everything we can to dehumanize inmates while they are incarcerated. I’m sure that will make it so much easier for them when they are eventually released and return to normal society. /s

Because we seem to value punishment over rehabilitation or even justice, most people in Texas will be very happy to hear about this change. They see prisoners more like animals than human. For example, most Texas prisons don’t have air conditioning. Imagine being in a room at 100+ degrees and high humidity with no fan. How long until you snap?

I feel like minimally to completely uninterrupted postal service should be a right regardless of prisoner status, unless you abuse it by bringing in contraband or like recruiting new cult followers through the mail which is highly unlikely to happen as pointed out in the article, most of that happens through guards.

And that’s the problem with the states. Prison should be about rehabilitation but instead we treat prisoners like animals. Hell, some animals are treated better then prisoners.

Taking away mail from prisoners is a terrible thing to do as I’m sure some are looking forward to hearing from their loved ones.

America: you can ALWAYS count on it doing the reactionary, right wing (wrong) thing when presented with and/or creating its own problem(s).

Mass incarceration has been an abject failure from every angle. Obviously from a left wing viewpoint, sometimes liberals also share this viewpoint, prisons like the US has are an abomination. I don’t think in [2023] I need to go into details about why prisons, from a societal standpoint, as implemented in the US do not work, can never work, and really only exist for the most nefarious reasons. Chief among those reasons: “punishment” of those the dominant in-group considers lesser than (ie black people, poor people, homeless people, disabled people of all types, people with mental health crises, habitual drug users, etc.). There’s also secondary and tertiary reasons, the private prison industry, “school to prison pipeline,” etc.; money, basically. Racism and general right wing, evangelical, puritanical views of the world are the primary driving reasons though. Not much to “debate” there. For more info the band System of a Down released a song about this shit TWO DECADES ago, which besides being a banger, lays out pretty clearly and without pulling punches why the prisons exist and the horrors they’re inflicting on the population.

Something which is treated as weirdly controversial is treatment of prisoners. Even if you’re some pro-cop, raging racist who believes that everyone in prison deserves it (ignoring your own daily law breaking, of course, because the system is literally designed so that we are all criminals and only remain free due to the good grace of our local police influenced by our personal attributes such as wealth, income, and skin color) that is absolutely no justification for lumping on the added torture and complete denial of humanity and modernity to the prison population. Cutting to the chase here, there’s absolutely no justification for not allowing unlimited access to all the things a modern person has come to accept: books, mail, email, and yes, I know this one is craaazzzzzyyyy to the right wingers… but access to the internet. All of this given free of cost to the prisoners. The costs associated with internet are seriously negligible anyway. Of course it would have to be monitored, limited access to some sites probably, but just generally, barring like online predators or whatever, there is NO justification to not provide this service for the majority of the day for the majority of prisoners. Right wingers will insta-scoff at this as if “giving” prisoners access to literally just engage their minds a tiny amount will make millions of otherwise law abiding citizens go out and shoot a grandma on the street just to end up in cushy solitary and browse facebook 16 hours a day forever. This is seriously their argument. “Prison “has” to be horrific otherwise everyone will want to go!” The same logic is applied to the few social services offered to US citizens: “welfare,” SNAP (“food stamps”), social security disability, unemployment pay, Medicaid, all that stuff and more is means tested to fuck to the point that if you aren’t basically already homeless you aren’t getting diddly squat. Why? Well of course if you “give” a starving person food you’re just encouraging laziness! (Pay no attention to the capitalist class behind the curtain who does no labor and produces no value who only exists by sucking the surplus-value, the profits, from the same people who they then create laws to deny basic amenities to).

Our society is evil. There’s no nice way to put it. We all live moment to moment with this knowledge of the darkness perpetrated upon the most vulnerable portions of our society (and the world, but that’s a different post) with our implied permission. If you are the one to speak up, to call out the obvious injustices or to simply ask for some relief of the suffering of people the government is nominally supposed to be protecting… you are the crazy one, the annoying one. You’re the one who should shut up and realize the world isn’t so pretty. When confronted with reality they don’t want you to say out loud they make YOU the problem. And we’re all too happy to shut up and try to never think about the horrors done daily. It’s easier that way. Easier to never think, try not to feel, pretend we’re the good guy for acknowledging the problems but never actually doing anything to fix it. But hey, we briefly got outraged, and that’s what matters. That will fix things.

Books are now often contraband in Southern prisons.

Indeed. Just give them a touch screen with an email app. Problem solved.