Could I say what is the hardest thing ever happened to me?
When my son went to prison.
(Hallease) And why was that hard for you?
Because I felt like I failed him, which I knew I didn't, but I felt that way.
That was kinda hard.
(Pop music plays)
(Hallease) So, late last year, I produced a YouTube Original short documentary here
on this channel around this idea of progress.
If you haven't checked it out, please do.
Pretty proud of it.
Not gonna lie.
Now, while filming this documentary, I discussed a variety of different topics with my family.
Over the next few weeks on this channel, I want to bring some of those topics to you
in a little mini series I'm calling Continued Conversations where we dive a little bit deeper
into these topics.
And, I think ... we just chat about 'em.
With this first installment of the series, I wanna talk about incarceration.
At the beginning of this video, I showed you footage of my now late grandmother Hallease
Dudley Walker that I shot back in 2013 talking about my uncle, her first born son.
He is incarcerated.
He has been in a federal state prison at least as long as I can remember and he will die
there, more than likely.
This video isn't about the school to prison pipeline or the fact that our prison system
is built on charging the poor and marginalized with non violent crimes ... Well, it might
be about that a little bit.
What I wanna try to do with this video is try to break down what it means when you hear
the term For Profit Prisons.
For those of you like me who have a family member or friend who's incarcerated, this
video's a little redundant for you.
You already know what's going on.
But if you don't have a family member that's going through the system, I can see how it
would be hard to sympathize, understand or even empathize with what's happening because
it's just not part of your day to day life.
You don't have to interact with it or navigate it.
I mean, unless you have a friend or family member in prison, you're not really having
to deal with the prison system.
What I'm gonna do for you in this video is break down what it costs to communicate with
my uncle.
That's it.
Nothing else.
I'm gonna show you how much it costs to talk to him audibly, so over the phone, and then
how much it costs to communicate with him digitally, via an email system.
Whenever my uncle would call growing up, I would pick up the phone and I would hear some
variation of this, and to this day, it's still sounds something like this.
"Hello.
This call originates form a Virginia correctional facility and may be recorded or monitored.
An inmate is trying to contact you.
To accept the charges, press zero."
Whenever I would hear this, I would immediately go try to find an adult because I needed to
confirm that we could indeed afford the charges.
There were definitely times when money was tight and I would go to ask my mom and dad,
"Hey, uncle Johnny is on the line.
Can I talk to him," or "Do you wanna talk to him?"
And the answer was "no" because my parents knew they just couldn't swing it that month.
When I was growing up, to call from a prison meant that you called collect.
I think in some prisons and jails this is still a thing.
For those of y'all who don't know what a payphone is and therefore probably don't know what
calling collect is, it means that you make a call on a landline and whoever you call,
they accept the charges of you calling them.
They pay for the fact that you're using the landline to reach them.
Obviously, this was well before the days of cell phones.
- Operator, I'd like to make a collect call please, first name Bob last name is We-Got-A-Baby-It's-A-Boy.
(Phone rings)
- Hello?
- (Operator) Collect call from Bob We-Got-A-Baby-It's-A-Boy.
- Sorry, wrong number.
- Who's that dear?
- Bob, they had a baby.
It's a boy.
- Ah.
- (Narrator) Don't cheat the phone company.
So, I did reach out to my mom to ask her about how much it cost when my uncle would call
in the 90s and early 2000s.
But when we're all still mostly using landlines majority of the time and she said, usually
for a 15 call she would expect to get another $10 added to her phone bill.
Now, something else to consider with this is that my uncle was also in a federal prison
that's in a different state.
This is also back when interstate calls were an additional charge.
Nowadays, though, things are a little different.
Let me explain.
He uses these prepaid phone call cards to talk to us.
We send him money so he can purchase these cards because he doesn't just use them to
talk to us.
He uses them to talk to our extended family as well.
Thankfully, over the past few years, the FCC has stepped in to curb the prices of these
calls.
I'll link to a really interesting article from PrisonPolicy.org which breaks down how
much it costs to make a call from a prison by state between 2008 and 2018.
It's really interesting.
Currently, the cost to make a call is 21 cents per minute for debit or prepaid calls and
25 cents per minute if you're calling collect.
Additionally, though, providers can charge little extra things on top of those rates
for things like your paper bill or statement or automated payments if you pay online or
other stuff like if you end up needing to talk to an agent randomly.
I wanna just remind you that this isn't about just a potential prisoner trying to communicate
with his or her family.
This is also about a potential prisoner trying to communicate with anyone.
Maybe you have a court case coming up or a trial coming up and you need to be prepared.
You're trying to communicate more with your lawyer.
Who's paying for the price of these phone calls?
Especially if it's with a lawyer so it might take some time.
You're gonna be on the phone for a while.
Is it the lawyer paying for that?
Is it the inmates family maybe paying for those calls?
Or is it the prisoner themselves?
I don't know.
Food for thought.
Now, let's talk about the second way that I communicate with my uncle: email.
In order to email my uncle, the facility he's at uses a service/provider called JPay.
You can go on to that website, search the state facility that your loved one is in,
and search their prison ID number and then usually they do some kinda background check
on you, kinda vet you, all that kinda stuff.
Then you're able to now email them.
Now, me myself: I prefer to pay the money.
If I'm gonna have to pay the money, I would rather talk to my uncle on the phone than
email him and I'ma tell you why.
JPay's paying structure takes everything we hate about snail mail and puts it into email.
It's hella frustrating, at least on my end.
I know for my uncle's side of things, it is the most widely accessible and easiest way
for him to communicate with me.
If he has enough stamps, he can email me every day.
Which brings me to the stamps, let's get into this.
To send an email with JPay, you purchase stamps just like you would with snail mail.
However, the price of the stamp fluctuates depending on a variety of factors: which facility
your family member or friend is in, or the time of year.
In an article from Wired in 2018, for example, they talk about the price of the a stamp before
Mother's Day was 35 cents, but then conveniently, the week of Mother's Day the price jumped
up to 47 cents.
Now, a contrarian at this point may say something to the degree of, "Hallease.
Come on, now: 35 cents versus 47 cents.
We trippin' over that?"
And my rebuttal to you would be, yes: we trippin' over that.
Because most emails cost more than one stamp.
Let me explain.
One stamp doesn't actually equal one email.
It equals one page in an email.
Bear with me, because what's a page in an email?
What's one page in an email?
I'll tell you what one page is an email is according to JPay.
According to them, one page in an email is roughly, roughly 4,800 characters.
Now, let's take it a step further.
This isn't the Stone Age, you can also put attachments in your emails.
Each one is an additional stamp, though.
I believe you can now also include super low res video as well.
Of course, for additional stamps.
Let's say that I want to recount to him the process of producing the YouTube Originals
documentary.
And I do that in a 10,000 character email and I include five behind the scenes images
since obviously my uncle does not have access to YouTube so I can't just let him watch it.
That would cost me three stamps for the characters and five stamps for the photos for a total
of eight stamps.
Oh, wait!
I also wanna check that little box in the corner that says send an extra stamp because
I want him to respond to my email, duh.
So, nine stamps total.
At the time of filming this, my institution for JPay has moved to a buy in bulk model.
I can't just buy the nine stamps that I need.
I have to pick from a couple different tiers that they offer.
The closest one to this hypothetical example is the 20-stamp buy which currently costs
at the time of filming this anyway $6.95 for 20 stamps.
That would put the price of each stamp at about 35 cents and would bring the total cost
to send my hypothetical email to be at $3.15.
And at this point I just wanna remind you that a basic gmail account for us regular-degular
people out in the world is free.
To be fair, okay, to play devil's advocate, if you will.
Iono why you wanna be advocating for the devil, but.
My uncle technically can get a job in prison and make his own money.
But you have to remember that prisoners aren't actually subject to the same policy protections
around minimum wages that you and I are.
Yes, the 13th amendment did abolish slavery, but it did it with an asterisk, little ... read
the fine print.
"... except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted."
Depending on if the institution is a state owned business or not, prisoners on the low
end average around $0.14 an hour in pay.
Prisoners on the high end average around a $1.41 per hour in pay.
Keeping that in mind, you can see how a three dollar email can add up.
Now, this is the point in the documentary where I'm supposed to give you a call to action.
Maybe it's like a new policy that's coming up or, I don't know, an NGO or non profit
that's out here doing something for you to support, you know.
I'm supposed to do something like that here, but I got nothing.
Not because the NGOs and the non profits don't exist: they definitely do and they're doing
good work.
A lot of actually the data that I found was form the Prison Policy Initiative, prisonpolicy.org.
Check it out.
A wide breadth of information on that website.
But beyond that ... I got nothing.
I guess again, like I said at the top of the video, if you're someone who doesn't have
a family member, friend who is incarcerated and so therefore just has never known about
this side of the prison system, at least I've given you hopefully some context around what
people mean when they say For Profit Prisons.
And how that term then also fits into this bigger discussion around institutionalized
racism.
For the people who are very familiar with this and have family members, friends, loved
ones who are currently in the system, were in the system and had to handle and deal with
this cost burden, I haven't even talked about everything else, I'm just talking about talking
to them: I see you.
I feel you.
You're not alone, I know what you been through.
Regardless of who you are and which camp you kind of fit in, let's continue the conversation
down below.
If you somehow made it this far into the video, wow.
Thank you for sticking around.
Please like the video, share it, and also if you haven't, consider subscribing.
I'd love to keep you around.
A big thank you to my Patreon producers for being my production partners here on this
channel, patreon.com/hallease if you're interested.
There, you get early access to any video that's on the channel as well as private weekly vlogs
from me where I go into things around behind the scenes, you can ask me questions and I'll
make whole videos responding.
It's a really good time.
Again, I'm Hallease and I'll see you when I see you.
(Lo-fi hip hop music plays)