Unlike prisons, which house convicted Texas felons, the majority of people in county jails are being held pre-trial, meaning they have not yet been convicted of the crime they were arrested for. Still, the amount of time people spend in jail can be significant. In Harris County, the average length of stay is nearly 200 days.
As the federal government clamps down on inmate phone call costs, the tablets provide prison technology companies with new sources of revenue from a captive customer.
A captive customer that hasn't been found guilty of a crime.
This was a major plot point in Doctorow's Bezzle that I just finished. It's depressing to see it happening in real life but I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
Those tablets are almost totally worthless. When I worked IT at a state facility, those things malfunctioned almost guaranteed. They were vendor machines so I could not touched them, but the software from what I had seen was so locked down and proprietary that you'd have to have vendor tools to do anything with them or the PXE server.
Biden has passed things to lower these costs, implementing a federal cap on video calls for instance. While prisons can still weasel their way around different parts of the system, this is one an example of positive change from the Biden administration.
