Suing to protect right of incarcerated people to receive physical mail
<i>Good.</i>  I&#x27;ll have to send them a check and mention it&#x27;s to support this lawsuit. &#x2F;&#x2F;EDIT: Printed, signed, and mailed.  I wonder what junkmail I&#x27;ll get as a result of <i>this</i> donation...<p>I&#x27;ve had the recent displeasure of seeing the jail system far more up close than I&#x27;d prefer (from the outside, someone lied and someone I know well ended up in jail for a few months, left with all charges dropped).  It&#x27;s an absolutely vile system, and letters were one of the very few ways one could actually have long form conversations without paying through the nose.<p>Every aspect of the system is designed to extract money from those outside.  You want to send messages?  Great, install this app, add money (of course, a bunch of what you put in goes to mandatory fees for the privilege of putting money in), and then it ends up with pay-per-message with character limits (remember $0.25&#x2F;text?), via an app that is... very permissions-grabby.<p>Should you want to send money through the fee system for them to buy things at the internal store, you pay your fees, and then can either pay online via a &quot;We need to know everything about you&quot; app, or at an in person kiosk, which tries to collect all the same information, including a photo of you, your driver&#x27;s license, and whatever else they can grab.<p>Should you want to set up a video chat, you have to agree to a EULA that, among other things, includes &quot;We will voiceprint anyone on the call and share that with law enforcement, and we will try to biometrically identify your facial features and do the same.&quot;  And it&#x27;s $7+ for 30 minutes.<p>Of course, it&#x27;s all logged and analyzed.<p>I understand the need to keep communications somewhat monitored, but it feels far more like a blatant cash grab than anything else, which, given for-profit prisons, it almost certainly is.<p>So, of course, the one thing that bypassed this (letters were opened, read, anything useful like tape on them was removed, etc) has to go away.  Because how dare someone be able to actually interact with people outside.  If they do that, why, they might not come right back in on release!  And that would be Bad for Profits.<p>Cram 80 people in a room built for 20?  That&#x27;s fine.  Let them actually read letters?  Can&#x27;t have <i>that</i>!<p>My opinion of the prison system was fairly low to start with, and it rather exceeded my expectations for just how utterly evil the whole thing is, through and through.