Circumventing Prison Tech Censorship

Jeremy Hammond opens with a pre-recorded segment from Cooper Quintin, who describes how a small group of companies has built a business around monitoring and charging people in prison and their families. The examples include per-minute phone pricing, mail that is scanned and destroyed, tablets sold with microtransactions, and ankle monitors that extend control after release. Quintin also points to patents and lawsuits that show where these vendors are heading.

Hammond then turns to censorship, drawing on his own years in federal custody and in local jails. He walks through book restrictions limited to a single vendor, bans on certain publications, rules on paper, ink and language, and monitoring tools applied to people on supervised release. He maps the companies involved, the movement of officials between corrections agencies and vendors, and how gunshot detection and gang databases reinforce the same patterns in communities outside prison.

For the close, the talk argues that exposing these systems is not enough and looks at ways to push back. Those include writing to and supporting people inside, backing legal challenges and public comment, and joining campaigns that have stopped facilities from being built or lowered call costs. Hammond urges technologists to reconsider their work with these vendors and to help analyze leaked police data.