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Charges for water?
Do they disclose the cleaning fee after checkout or right in the beginning? What about the convenience fee?
Are Texas prisons run by Ticketmaster?
Americans have a punishment boner when it comes to the legal system. They don't want to prevent crime or improve society. They want the bad people to suffer.
@VanillaGorilla @gAlienLifeform
Texas prisons are run by someone even worse than Ticketmaster.
They are run by Texas.
Well, Texas loves private prisons, so many aren't run by the state. This is another disgusting example of how libertarians get it wrong.
I'm definitely no libertarian, but I do have one quibble with this - entirely private prisons are actually very little of the prison space in the United States. However, government run prisons do hundreds of millions of dollars in business with private vendors for things like the commissary and healthcare and phones and etc., and all those businesses gouge taxpayers and inmates for substandard goods and services, because they're able to negotiate sweetheart contracts with government bureaucrats who don't give a shit and get lobbied like crazy (vendor salesperson: "Oh, your annual salary is only what? Ha, I've gotten commission checks higher than that! Let me get the tab for our lunch today.").
So it's a bit complicated but at the end of the day underfunding government services and throwing all of our responsibilities for things like taking care of our prisoners to for-profit companies is what's caused all of this, so the solutions to these problems aren't going to be coming out of a libertarian playbook imo.
Prisoners are being charged for water?
Yes, because the tap water in their cells often isn't fit to drink.
They say that prisoners have access to tap water, but the prisoners say that tap water is crap.
This could all be solved by, ya know, having potable tap water by fixing some of our shit infrastructure.
Our treatment of prisoners is a disgrace.
how is texas allowed to exist as a state, they are seriously so inhumane and backwards that it's baffling
The US has a third world prison system...
Ok so that's where your wrong. We have a unique and very complex and balanced first world prison system.
You see in America we use public prisons in a unique way. They are a business model. In a public prison the Administration uses service providers to provide things like Telecom for friends and family, JMS(Jail Management System) for managing the facility and its inmates, Commissary for supplying inmates with products, and many other services. In addition as other people have stated several facilities charge rent this is almost universally a county correctional facilities thing where inmates tend to be people awaiting trial, awaiting sentencing, on temporary hold, or inmate serving less than a year. There are some county mega facilities though now that are longer term and also charge rent. Now lets explore how this ends up working. A telecom service such as GTL(Global Tel Link which is the largest provider in the US) will charge friends and family up to 30 dollars (highly dependent on the facility and the agreement with the administration and the state) to setup an account with all fees and make a 15 minute call. 90+% of that goes to whats called a commission. This commission is paid back to the facility for use of the service. If that sounds like a bribe to you YOUR WRONG you see this is perfectly legal in most states and not a bribe of a public official at all!(very recent legislation has change this in some states (3) but it is still very legal in most states). There are many many ways to bribe officials especially sheriffs but this is the most overt one. Remember its not the inmate who generally pays this as they have no real means of income though some opputunities (we will get to that) their friend and family deposit it into their account and generally that account is tied in with their commissary account and that's generally tied in to the JMS. The commissary business model works identically to the telecom model and these companies tend to offer a JMS essentially for free for obvious reasons. Many inmate especially in long term facilities just tell friends and family to not contact them in lieu of going broke. Thus disconnecting them from their friends and family completely which has a heavy impact on recidivism. Now the facility may have work opportunities as well and isn't it ever so convenient that the amount you can get paid from those work opportunities happens to be JUST about as much as the facilities housing fee. Funny thing to if you don't pay the housing fee while your in the facility the facility will take it out of you commissary account. So you either work as a slave or they take you ability to in the case of a female facility critically necessary health products(though most inmates resort to toilet paper). You see how wrong your were? This is a complex and very well thought out eldritch horror. The machinations of which truly boggle the mind. This isn't even the horrid private prison. This is a publicly funded facility. I could share the endless horrors of the American prison system but its a special hell of which I wish to open no ones eyes to fully.
tl;dr.
In Western European prisions the water is drinkable, they feed you enough and they don't privatize elements of running the place... 🙄
The price of bottled water went up 50% in prison commissaries across Texas last month. The controversial move has two state agencies pointing the finger at each other as inmates struggle to endure an entrenched and deadly heatwave in facilities without air conditioning. The state raised the price from $4.80 per case (24 bottles) to $7.20 per case on June 27. Commissary vendor Royal Pacific Tea Company requested to raise the prices in March even though it contract was incomplete. The prices were negotiated by the state comptroller's office and appear to be approved by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
“I actually begged him not to [drink the tap water],” said Amy Aguilar, whose loved one is at TDCJ’s Ferguson Unit. Her significant other — whose name she asked TPR to not use — has described the water as “rancid” smelling. And she said she was concerned about the quality. “Do you smell the sewer?” Aguilar said she asked him, “And he goes, 'you kind of just smell it all. It's just this big ole rich mix of rancid smell.' ” Water quality in prisons nationwide have been characterized as very low, due to the age of the facilities and the often remote locations.
Of course, for them, prisoners are subhumans, sigh.
Royal Pacific tea company sounds like slave traders. No Surprise they are taking advantage of the situation.
Yeah, it's been a while since I've read any British history but let's just say this is far from the first time an organization with the words "Royal" and "Tea Company" in their name made a pile of money from the suffering of captive people
Jesus fucking christ, what a hellhole.
Peak Texas move.
This is what happens when you put for-profit companies in charge of anything and everything.
Some people are truly evil.
Is Texas now competing to be more or diseutopian than North Korea because it's certainly seems like that appears to be the goal.
They have to pay for water?
This is about bottled water at the commissary, but
Because of the ongoing heatwave TDCJ guards pass out glasses of cold water each day, and TDCJ has pointed out the men have access to tap water. But many current and former inmates have expressed concern about the water quality of the aging prisons — many older then 50 years.
“I would never drink the water at the tap,” said Don Aldaco, a recently paroled man who spent 24 years in various TDCJ facilities. “I would always get a piece of a sheet and I would tie it on the actual spigot, like a filter. I would have to change it like every other day because of all the rust and all the crud coming out.
Other current inmates commented on the smell of tap water in specific facilities resembling sewage. A TDCJ spokeswoman called the claim false.
“I actually begged him not to [drink the tap water],” said Amy Aguilar, whose loved one is at TDCJ’s Ferguson Unit. Her significant other — whose name she asked TPR to not use — has described the water as “rancid” smelling. And she said she was concerned about the quality.
“Do you smell the sewer?” Aguilar said she asked him, “And he goes, 'you kind of just smell it all. It's just this big ole rich mix of rancid smell.' ”
Water quality in prisons nationwide have been characterized as very low, due to the age of the facilities and the often remote locations.
8th Amendment says what?
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
It's strange how they almost never follow the no-excessive-bail requirement and nobody bats an eye.
What, how???
The tap water in many US towns isn't fit to drink, let alone prisons.