I think competitive bidding on supplying prison telephone systems with
kickbacks being prohibited would help.

Harold
https://w6iwi.org

On Wed, Jan 11, 2023 at 08:52:14PM -0700, Harold Hallikainen wrote:
> I think competitive bidding on supplying prison telephone systems with
> kickbacks being prohibited would help.

I think it would not help, and would probably hurt.

“Competitive Bidding” isn’t an enforceable method. The “Competition”
almost always turns out to be between three or four straw men who
are, in fact, actually all the same company, or between two or three
or four executives having drinks around a table where they divide up
the available bids and highest-profit contracts so that they’re only
“competing” with startups and offshore rivals that aren’t in the game
anyway.

As for “kickbacks,” there aren’t any. Prison administrators and their
political bosses muscled into the game very early on, and they’ve
never been stupid enough to ask for bribes. They get their cut via
checks in the mail, with the amounts and the timing already public
information. The money goes for “essential” supports like extra jobs
for the Warden’s wife’s friends, for the politician’s idiot in-laws,
for the friends of the legislature that arranged the deals in advance,
and, very occasionally, for equipment repairmen who are trying to make
a living the old-fashioned way.

Of course, it’s a three-way street: the providers receive benefits from
the taxpayers and pass some of that largesse on to their friends in
the prison bureaucracy: free high-speed Internet links to carry the
calls via VoIP trunks, free space, free electricity, free background
checks on prospective employees, and (of course) free security for
their equipment, and thus negligible insurance costs.

>From the lofty heights of government power, those who care about the
high prices and the ways inmates squeeze their lovers, wives, and
relatives to pay them are seen as a small minority of do-gooders whom
are not in touch with the fact that none of the decision makers care
about the powerless or the poor.

Bill Horne