Tag: Cooper Quintin

In the novel 1984, George Orwell imagines a technology called a “viewscreen” which not only lets you watch TV but lets a surveillance state watch you.

No matter how many rights are taken away from people in prison, no matter how brutally they are treated by the prison industrial complex, there is one right so fundamental, so essential, that even controversial prison telecommunications company Securus can’t bear to see it violated: the right to find new ways to extract money from prisoners and their families. 

There are too many people in U.S. prisons. Their guards are overworked, underpaid, and prone to human errors. Some have taken this as a sign that we need to rework our criminal justice system.

Prison technology and telecom companies such as Securus and Global Tel*Link are already notorious for their ongoing efforts to extract every last penny and destroy any last shred of privacy afforded to incarcerated people.

Prison wardens and detention center administrators have, for years, faced what they believe to be a serious problem. While they can surveill every aspect of the lives of the people imprisoned in their facilities, they typically have no ability to violate the privacy and civil liberties of the friends and family of incarcerated people.