Bianca Tylek The multibilliondollar US prison industry and how to dismantle it TED Fellows
[SHAPE YOUR FUTURE]
Not too long ago, a mother told me,
“I can talk to my son in the dark.”
[Operator voice: The prepaid
collect call from an inmate at –]
Her son was in prison
and paying for phone calls often meant
she couldn’t afford her light bill.
See, families can pay as much
as a dollar a minute
to speak to a loved one in prison or jail.
These egregious rates
have created a 1.2-billion-dollar
prison telecom industry
and with visit costs
forced one in three families
with an incarcerated loved one into debt.
Eighty-seven percent of those carrying
this financial burden are women.
And as a result of decades
of racist policies and policing,
they’re disproportionately
Black and brown.
Prison telecom corporations claim
that these high rates are necessary
to pay site commissions
to prisons and jails
and provide security and surveillance.
While the government’s hands
are far from clean,
these corporate claims are simply
not supported by reality.
Consider this.
In Connecticut,
where families are charged
as much as 32.5 cents per minute
and the state takes
a 68 percent commission,
the telecom provider
takes home 10 cents per minute.
Now, in Illinois, where the state
takes no commission,
families pay the same corporation
nine tenths of a cent per minute.
In other words, even after
the government takes its cut,
the corporation makes 10 times more
in Connecticut than it does in Illinois
for providing the same service.
And prisons in Illinois are no less secure
than those in Connecticut.
These are simply corporate arguments
used to justify predatory
business practices
and distract from the very simple truth.
Corporations in the prison industry
have a financial interest
in seeing more people behind bars
and for longer periods of time.
In reality, providing families
and their incarcerated loved ones
with regular communication
is not just the right thing to do.
It’s also the most fiscally responsible
and safe thing to do.
If you think taxpayers
shouldn’t be on the hook
for phone calls for people
who have committed crimes,
remember this.
The most expensive rates
are charged in jails
where the majority of people
are awaiting trial and not yet convicted.
Prison wages range from nothing
to a few cents an hour,
so it’s hard working, taxpaying families
that are paying for calls.
And maintaining strong community ties
is one of the most important factors
in a person’s successful
reentry upon release.
It improves housing,
employment and social outcomes,
making it less likely that people
need government support
or end up back in prison.
The bottom line is
that prison telecom corporations,
and the thousands of others
in the prison industry,
prioritize profit as they promote
the caging of people
to exploit them and their families.
See, prison telecom is just one sector
in the 80-billion-dollar prison industry.
When I say prison industry,
I’m talking about food
service corporations
that serve rotten meat
to people behind bars,
health care providers
that deny incarcerated people care,
and architecture firms that design
windowless six-by-nine-foot cells
for solitary confinement,
where people spend weeks,
months and even years.
We invest in these corporations
through our retirement funds,
public pensions,
university endowments
and private foundations,
and we celebrate their executives
on the boards of our favorite
cultural institutions.
And in all fairness,
it’s not just the private sector.
It’s also government agencies
that charge excessive fines and fees
and abuse free or grossly
underpaid prison labor
to manufacture license plates,
staff DMV call centers, fight wildfires
and, yes, even pick cotton.
So this begs the question,
how can we address our crisis
of mass incarceration
if an entire segment of our economy
is fighting to put more people behind bars
and for longer?
We can’t.
But we can demand and create change.
The key is running coordinated
policy and corporate campaigns.
That’s the playbook I put to use
when I founded Worth Rises,
a nonprofit prison abolition organization
dedicated to dismantling
the prison industry.
Let’s go back to prison telecom
for a quick example.
In 2018, we led a campaign
in New York City
that passed the first piece of legislation
to make jail phone calls free,
saving families with
incarcerated loved ones,
nearly 10 million dollars a year
and increasing communication
by roughly 40 percent overnight.
In 2019,
we helped local advocates in San Francisco
introduce a similar policy
and launched several statewide
campaigns to do the same.
That same year,
we fought the consolidation
of two major market players
in front of the Federal Communications
Commission and won.
We blocked 150-million-dollar
investment by a public pension
with a private equity firm
that owned a prison telecom corporation.
And we removed one
of the largest investors in the field
from a major museum board.
In just two years,
we toxified the industry and threatened
its business model,
causing an investor sell-off.
But more importantly,
that means millions of families connected
and billions of dollars protected
from the predatory hands
of prison profiteers.
It means fewer dollars invested in
and promoting human caging and control.
And it means at least one mother
won’t have to sit in the dark
to talk to her son again.
[Operator: You may start
the conversation now.]
Thank you.