Month: September 2011

email for prisoners highly successful

Email systems for prisoners enhance public safety.  Prisoners’ hand-written letters are difficult and costly to monitor, archive, and search.  Monitoring, archiving, and searching email can be done much more effectively.  That helps crime investigations and crime prevention.

Email for prisoners helps to reduce recidivism.  Email has become a standard form of communication.  Prisoners’ ties with friends and family are important for their re-integration into productive, law-abiding society.  Being incarcerated often involves loss of job, loss of living place, loss of driver’s license, and many other dislocations from ordinary life.  Prisoners need communication with the outside world to return successfully to it.

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has implemented an email service for prisoners across all BOP prisons.  On August 24, 2007, the email system had been implemented at 14 BOP prisons.  The 12,000 prisoners served by that date had exchanged 8,250,000 emails with 76,000 members of the public.[1]  In July, 2008, at the Coleman federal correctional complex, emails averaged nearly one per inmate per day.[2]  BOP officials recently noted that email service volumes had doubled from 2009 to 2010, and they expect volumes to continue growing in 2011.[3]  Part of that growth comes from implementing email in new prisons.  As of Feb. 2, 2011, email had been implemented at all U.S. federal prisons.[4]

BOP’s prisoner email system differs in important ways from text messaging systems in common use outside prisons.  Prisoners use a specifically designed terminal to send and receive text email messages.  They pay 5 cents per minute to read and compose messages, and 15 cents per page-side to print messages.  Prisoners cannot access the Internet, and they can exchange text emails only with persons on their approved contact list.  Prisoners’ emails are monitored and archived.[5]

State prisons are also implementing email service for prisoners.  The Advanced Technologies Group (ATG), a major technology supplier for BOP, began implementing two-way email in Iowa state prisons in April, 2010.  In November, 2010, the Oklahoma Department of Corrections selected ATG to provide email to Oklahoma state inmates.  In May, 2011, Minnesota selected ATG to provide email for Minnesota state prisoners.  In September, 2010, ATG processed its hundred-millionth prisoner email.[6]  Given the benefits of prisoner email for public safety and prisoner re-entry into society, other states are likely to adopt such systems soon.

Prisoners are auspicious customers for new communications services.

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Notes:

[1] Advanced Technologies Group, “ATG’s Inmate Email System processes over 8,000,000 messages,” Press Release, Aug. 24, 2007.  ATG operates BOP’s prisoner email system.  A pilot program was operating at the Coleman Federal Prison Camp and Low Security Correctional Institution by October, 2005.  The American Bar Association urged full implementation of the system in a letter dated Feb. 24, 2006.  By May, 2006, the service had been extended to the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut, and the Federal Prison Camp in Montgomery, Alabama.  More than 30 federal prisons had email service by April, 2009.

[2] USA Today, “Letters from federal prisoners going electronic,” published Aug. 16, 2008.  According to this news article:

Scott Middlebrooks, the warden at Coleman federal prison northwest of Orlando, said his inmates sent more than 3,200 messages and received some 2,800 a day last month through the system, which is called TRULINCS and run by Iowa-based Advanced Technologies Group Inc.

The Federal Correctional Complex at Coleman consists of five facilities — two high-security penitentiaries, a medium-security institution, a low-security institution, and a prison camp.  The specific referent for “Coleman federal prison” in the above quote isn’t clear.  The five Coleman prison institutions had a total prisoner population of 7,489 on 10/02/08.  See BOP, State of the Bureau 2008, p. 47.  I’ve assumed above that the message-traffic figures apply to the Coleman prisoner total.  Average emails per inmate per day is estimated as (3200+2800)/7489=0.80.

[3] U.S. Government Accountability Office, Bureau of Prisons: Improved Evaluations and Increased Coordination Could Improve Cell Phone Detection, Sept. 2011, p. 15.

[4] U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons, TRULINCS FAQs.  TRULINCS (Trust Fund Limited Inmate Computer System) is the name of the BOP email system.

[5] For information about the BOP email system, see the TRULINCS FAQs, BOP Program Statement P5265.13, and inmate handbooks for federal prisons, e.g. Inmate Handbook for FCI Morgantown, WV, p. 3.

[6] Information based on rolling news highlights on the ATG website.  In a news article dated Sept. 6, 2011, ATG’s CEO stated that ATG is currently providing email for federal prisoners and state prisoners in Oklahoma and Iowa and is doing “over 400,000 messages a day,” all sent through the Corrlinks website.

ritual services in Roman Egypt: the so-called Greek Magical Papyri

Ritual texts written in Demotic, Greek, and Coptic in Roman Egypt document persons learned in ancient Egyptian temple culture seeking to serve broader, more lucrative, and more competitive Greco-Roman symbolic markets. Among these ritual texts, which are now conventionally called magic texts, erotic and healing services are common.  Spells relating to financial interests are rare.  That pattern suggests an economy with a highly polarized distribution of economic assets and little economic risk-taking.

scribe at work

Consider a ritual text that describes drowning a cat.  The ritual text is from Roman Egypt, probably in the third century.  The ritual text begins with direct, practical instructions:

[Take a cat], and [make] it into an Esies {sacred dead} [by submerging] its body in water.  While you are drowning it, speak [the formula] to [its] back,

The formula during the drowning [is as follows]: “Come hither to me, you who are in control of the form of Helios, you the cat-faced god, and behold your form being mistreated by [your] opponents, [them] {insert name of spell’s target}, so that you may revenge yourself upon them, and accomplish [the] {insert desired action} deed, because I am calling upon you, O sacred spirit.

The text continues with voce mysticae (voce magicae) and another invocation to the cat-faced god.  This section then concludes with the parenthetical instruction “add the usual.”  The ritual text as a whole includes additional, similar text and a few references to charioteers and racehorses.  The text ends rubricated thus:

This is the ritual of the cat, [suitable] for every ritual purpose: A charm to to restrain charioteers in a race, a charm for sending dreams, a binding love charm, and a charm to cause separation and enmity.

Overall, this ritual text is like boilerplate a modern lawyer might use in filing for divorce, bankruptcy, and tort damages.  The purposes of the ancient Egyptian ritual text, however, are much less closely related to allocating economic assets.

Financial services are rare among the surviving Demotic, Greek, and Coptic ritual texts from Roman Egypt.  Among the roughly 530 spells in a collection called the Greek Magical Papyri, only three directly concern financial interests.  Among ritual texts in Coptic, six out of roughly 260 spells serve financial interests.  The financial-service ritual texts don’t concern financial needs for the financially desperate (for a good harvest, a high price for goods, forgiveness of debt, need for a loan, etc.).  The texts seem oriented toward serving persons who already have considerable economic assets.

In the Greek Magical Papyri, all three financial-service ritual texts concern the success of a business in a specific location.  Two of the texts request, respectively, “give income and business to this place” and “give favor, business to me and this place…in the house I do my business…send to this place every business and good daily profit.” The third financial-service text exploits the traditional charitable cases of the widow and orphan in its own pleading for luxuries: “I receive you for the widow and the orphan. Therefore, give me favor, work for my business. Bring to me silver, gold, clothing, much wealth for the good of it.”

The six Coptic financial-service ritual texts provide more detail about specific financial interests.  A pair of oracle texts concerns the acquisition of a bank.  Another concerns the acquisition of a shop.  In addition to these interests in acquiring ownership of businesses, another concerns insurance for major business assets: “For the safety of ships at sea or on the ocean with everything (on board).”  Others concern smaller financial interests: finding a job (“a shop you wish to work”), transactional profits (“For a merchant to profit”), and increased demand (“gather together the people of this village into the shop of N.”).

The rarity of financial services in the ritual texts is underscored by the context of their references to business and prosperity.  References to business in the Greek Magical Papyri predominately concern the ritual business itself.  For example, an erotically tinged spell to induce insomnia in a woman calls upon a god to “hear me, in this business which I am performing.”  Another spell “to make a woman love a man” has the ritual-service provider speak into a cup of wine to a godly agent, “I shall send you.  Will you go on my business?  Will you do it?”  Prosperity is just one concern among many in a prayer for “health no magic can harm, well-being, prosperity, glory, victory, power, sex appeal.  Restrain the evil eyes of each and all of my legal opponents.”  Even “profit” is multifaceted and embedded amidst other interests in a prayer to make an image powerful:

powerful against all [opponents] and to be able to call back souls, move spirits, subject legal opponents, strengthen friendships, produce all [sorts of] profits,  bring dreams, give prophecies, cause psychological passions and bodily sufferings and incapacitating illness, and perfect all erotic philters.

Ritual services in Roman Egypt were a business that served mostly non-financial interests.

Persons with large land-holdings or lucrative political-administrative offices most likely were the customers for ritual services.  Although Roman Egypt was a major source of grain for the Roman Empire, real wages for unskilled workers were barely sufficient for survival, and wage workers apparently also worked small plots of land to provide food for themselves.  The size of the rent-collecting class isn’t clear from available economic sources.  The ritual texts are evidence that the size of that class was sufficient to support a ritual-service economy, and that persons in that class were economically secure.

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Related post:

Source notes:

The Greek Magical Papyri (PGM) analyzed and quoted above are from Betz (1992).  The spells in this collection were not selected by topic.  Most of the PGM spells apparently originated from a single, ritual-service provider in Thebes during the second or third century.  The Coptic ritual texts analyzed and quoted above are from Meyer and Smith (1994).  This collection has been selected to be representative; it probably covers a large share of known Coptic ritual texts.  The Coptic ritual texts are typically from a few centuries later than the PGM.

Here are specific references for the PGM and Coptic financial spells, with the PGM spell list (Excel version).

On the precarious economic position of unskilled wage earners in Roman Egypt, see Fox (2007) and Scheidel (2008).  On landholding patterns, see Rowlandson (1996).

References:

Betz, Hans Dieter, ed. 1992. The Greek magical papyri in translation: including the Demotic spells Vol. 1, [Texts].  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Fox, Edward. 2007. Meager Returns: Agricultural Wages in Roman Egypt.  Senior Thesis, Columbia University.

Meyer, Marvin W., and Richard Smith. 1994. Ancient Christian magic: coptic texts of ritual power. [San Francisco]: HarperSanFrancisco.

Rowlandson, Jane. 1996. Landowners and tenants in Roman Egypt the social relations of agriculture in the Oxyrhynchite Nome. Oxford [England]: Clarendon Press.

Scheidel, Walter.  2008. “Real wages in Roman Egypt: A contribution to recent work on pre-modern living standards.” Versions 1.0. Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics.

motivating persons to seek true knowledge

A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

So said James Madison, a founding father of the U.S., in a letter in 1822 to William T. Barry, Lieutenant Governor of Kentucky. Madison made this statement in the context of supporting government funding for a public school system (including colleges and universities).  Madison’s point was not just open access to knowledge.  Madison also recognized that seeking knowledge should be sufficiently entertaining to compete with other amusements:

Were I to hazard one {suggestion}, it would be in favour of adding to Reading, Writing, & Arithmetic, to which the instruction of the poor, is commonly limited, some knowledge of Geography; … A knowledge of the Globe & its various inhabitants, however slight, might moreover, create a taste for Books of Travels and Voyages; out of which might grow a general taste for History, an inexhaustible fund of entertainment & instruction. Any reading not of a vicious species must be a good substitute for the amusements too apt to fill up the leisure of the labouring classes.

This insight applies to all classes, including intellectuals.  Vicious species of reading and writing have become prevalent.  Hear the echoes of Madison’s words in the writing of Karl Marx:

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

In an uncanny Marxist dialectic, public education is now playing on the stage of a farce.

beware of statistical designs

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), like agriculture departments in most industrialized countries, channels subsidies to farmers.  Part of the justification for agricultural subsidies is to give farmers a fair share of national income.  Farmers’ share of U.S. consumer food-spending, according to USDA statistics, fell from about 48% in 1913 to 19% in 2000.  A declining farm share in consumer food-spending suggests that farmers are getting squeezed.  The statistics showing a declining farm share have spurred major government investigations into causes and remedies.

The design of the USDA statistic largely explains the fall in farm share.  The farm share statistic doesn’t capture food work within the home.  A large  increase in women’s labor-force participation generated a shift from food work within the home to purchasing food work (acquiring, preparing, cooking, and kitchen-cleaning) bundled with prepared food.  The result was an increase in consumer food spending relative to farm product sales, i.e. a fall in the farm share.  Farm share statistics that control for changes in non-market-based food work show a constant farm share.

The U.S. communications industry has considerable similarities with the U.S. agricultural industry.  Like family farms, small, rural telephone companies have an important place in U.S. economic history. Statistics that support subsidies for telephone companies under the justification of universal service deserve strict scrutiny.

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Source notes:

Sheldon Kimmel (August, 2011), “The Illusion of Anticompetitive Behavior Created by 100 Years of Misleading Farm Statistics,” explains the trend in farm share. The first two paragraphs above are based on that work.  The food share statistics are from id., Figure 1.  For references on political concern about the food share and government investigations, see id. footnotes 2-5.