I agree; if you want the less terse version of my view, it's that the right to communicate (not necessarily privately!) with your loved ones from prison should be enshrined in law. There shouldn't be any profit in it; it should be one of the costs of operating prisons (and, by the numbers in TFA, a very small one).
Sure. My point is turning it into a pure cost centre almost guarantees it will be ignored.
That said, I’d support a certain number of minutes being required to be provided to every inmate every month for free, provided they aren’t in a high-security prison or otherwise high risk (where their calls need to be manually monitored). That simplifies the problem from maintaining infrastructure to ensuring it's being properly provisioned.
> This sounds like a quick route to prisons with no working phones.
I don't think so, and it certainly wouldn't be with sufficient oversight.
> the prison-specific security component ... can probably be done remotely (or by AI listening for naughty words).
Come on, it's not like they monitor prison phone calls to keep the inmates from swearing. It's to prevent inmates from coordinating criminal activity from inside prison, and no "AI" is going to be able to detect and prevent that.
This sounds like a quick route to prisons with no working phones.
Better: ban prison-phone monopolies and unbundle the prison-specific security component from the calling component. The latter is a commodity. The former can probably be done remotely (or by AI listening for naughty words).