From my global (US) understanding of it: Prison telco providers also often provide their services at zero or negative cost to the prison (i.e. commissions on calls or services). They also provide additional "value-add" services to the prisoners which are also extortionally priced (music downloads, ebook purchases).
The tablets are also often starting to replace physical mail - inmates are being denied physical mail, instead letters and drawings being filtered, scanned, and uploaded remotely from elsewhere. Or they can write letters outbound - just have to pay for "digital stamps" - even for electronic mail. Double points for making people on the outside buy the "digital stamps" to send them inwards, too!
Every single corner is designed to extort the prisoner while making themselves look like the Good Guys for providing access to all this information and capabilities in such a safe and controlled manner and at "no cost to the taxpayer!"
>Every single corner is designed to extort the prisoner
A packet of Ramen in a prison store will cost several dollars. There's zero acceptable justification for this. Making a prisoner pay more for a snack isn't justice.
Also, it's not a snack, because in most states, prisoners are only required to be given two """Meals""" a day. There are very few nutritional or minimum standard requirements for these """meals""" and in many counties, there is a rule that every dollar of the budget for feeding prisoners that is not spent is given directly to the guy who sets the menu and operates the canteen.
Most prison meals in these systems look like that famous picture of a "sandwhich" from the Fyre festival.
You know, the kind of thing that would be used as an example of "Perverse incentive" in a high school economics textbook.
The tablets are also often starting to replace physical mail - inmates are being denied physical mail, instead letters and drawings being filtered, scanned, and uploaded remotely from elsewhere. Or they can write letters outbound - just have to pay for "digital stamps" - even for electronic mail. Double points for making people on the outside buy the "digital stamps" to send them inwards, too!
Every single corner is designed to extort the prisoner while making themselves look like the Good Guys for providing access to all this information and capabilities in such a safe and controlled manner and at "no cost to the taxpayer!"