Prison-tech companies know they can extract huge fortunes from their captive audience, so they are shameless about offering bribes (ahem, 'profit-sharing') to prison authorities and sheriffs' offices to switch vendors.

33/

When that happens, prisoners inevitably suffer, as happened in 2018, when Florida state prisons changed tech providers and wiped out $11.8m worth of prisoners purchased media - every song prisoners had paid for:

eff.org/deeplinks/2018…

34/

As bad as these deals are for prisoners, they're great for jailers, who are personally and institutionally enriched by prison-tech giants.

35/

This is textbook corruption, where small groups are enriched while vast, diffuse costs are extracted from large groups. Naturally, the deals are swathed in secrecy, and public records requests for their details are met with illegal refusals:

muckrock.com/news/archives/…

36/

The #ShittyTechAdoptionCurve predicts that technological harms that are first visited upon prisoners and other low-privilege people will gradually work its way up the privilege gradient:

pluralistic.net/2021/07/29/imp…

37/

Securus *powered* up the Shitty Tech Adoption Curve. They don't just spy on and exploit prisoners - they leveraged that surveillance empire into a line of product lines that touch us *all*.

38/

Securus transformed their prisoner telephone tracking business into an off-the-books, warrantless tracking tool that cops everywhere use to illegally track people:

nytimes.com/2018/05/10/tec…

39/

In other words, our jails and prisons are incubators that breed digital pathogens that infect all of us eventually. It's past time we got in the exterminators and flushed out those nests.

40/

That's where California's new photocopier-kickers come in. Like many states, California has a #PublicUtilityCommission ( #PUC ), which regulates private companies that provide utilities, like telecoms.

41/

That means that the state of California can reach into every jail and prison in the state and grab the prison profiteers by the throats and toss 'em out the window.

42/

Writing in The American Prospect, kalena thomhave does an *excellent* job on the ins-and-outs of PUCs' role in regulating prison-tech, both in California and in other states where PUCs haven't yet been neutered or eliminated by deregulation-crazed Republicans:

prospect.org/justice/2023-0…

43/