Video Visitation at the MCSO: InSecurus and Sheriff Joe's newest money-making scheme...

So, for those of you who missed it, there's no longer such a thing as a "contact visit" at the Maricopa County Jails. Prisoners are also now only allowed one "free" visit a week, which must be conducted via videophone from 4th Ave Jail or the Lower Buckeye Jail. All video visits from off-site are unlimited, however - so long as you are able to access a computer with a camera and the internet, and can afford the $12.95 every 20 minute visit will cost you. 

As for the "inmate Services" fund this extra money is supposed to be going to: he should just refund it straight to the families, since the last time he had a chunk of change in the "Inmate Services" fund (where MCSO profits from the canteen sales presumably go, as well) he "misappropriated" it. Remember that $99 million he lost - almost $15 million of which came from this "Inmate Services" fund he likes to force prisoners and their loved ones to contribute to?

There never was actual contact allowed that could have facilitated smuggling at "contact" visits when they had them anyway - not at Estrella, at least - the women were always chained to the tables when visitors sat across from them. Mothers weren't even allowed to hug their kids. MOre access to prisoners from family the world is great - but should be affordable and not result in fewer visitation privileges for those who can't afford it. 

This is just more of the same: extortion and exploitation of what is largely a population of individuals who haven't yet even been convicted of a crime.  Arpaio needs to rein in his departmental corruption, really, if he wants to get that contraband issue under control, as far as I can see.


Anyway, this is what you should really be checking out - we got taken for a ride, people! 

GRASSROOTSLEADERSHIP.org:

#inSecurus | Ensuring Visitation for Prisoners and their Loved Ones

.... (among other resources...)

• For more information about Securus Technologies and video visitation at the Travis County Jail, see our SECURUS FACT SHEET 
• Take our JAIL VIDEO VISITATION SURVEY (versión en Español aquí) to help us learn more about how video visitation impacts friends and family visiting people in jail. (
• SIGN OUR PETITION to restore in-person visitation at the Travis County Jail.
• Join the conversation on Twitter and Facebook using the hashtag #inSECURUS
• Check out our NEW REPORT!

---------or settle for this, from azcentral.com---------------

Video chats replace in-person visits at county jails

Paulina Pineda, The Republic | azcentral.com

 9:06 p.m. MST November 6, 2014

Face-to-face visitation has a new meaning for inmates at Maricopa County jails now that in-person visits have been swapped for Skype-like video chats.

On Thursday, the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office launched a Web-based video-visitation platform that eliminates in-person visitations and expands visitation hours.

The system, developed by Texas-based Securus Technologies, allows people from all over the world to talk to any of the 8,500 inmates in the county's six jails via video, as long as they have a high-speed Internet connection and a webcam.

The Sheriff's Office is offering a promotional price of $5 for a 20-minute conversation, but that price will increase to $12.95 for 20 minutes after Jan. 1.

Securus is paying $2.3million to provide 600 video stations to the six jails at no expense to the taxpayers, according to Securus CEO Rick Smith.

The system, which Securus says is the largest in the country, is expected to generate thousands of dollars for the Sheriff's Office while increasing jail security by eliminating the potential for contraband smuggling, an issue during the more than 20,000 in-person visitations each month, according to sheriff's officials.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio said it will also allow friends and family members to schedule visits without having to miss work or drive down to a facility.

"It's a win for everyone involved," Arpaio said.

Remote visitations can be scheduled seven days a week between 7 a.m. and 9:30 p.m at
visitfromhome.net/maricopa. Visits must be scheduled at least 24 hours in advance.

Inmates can receive one free on-site visit per week, but they will be held through the video platform at either the Fourth Avenue or Lower Buckeye jails.

On-site visitation hours at those jails have expanded to seven days a week between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., up from a single visit on Sunday or Monday.

Sheriff's officials say on-site visits will no longer be conducted at the Durango, Estrella, Tent City or Towers jails, but inmates there have access to video chats.

Securus will receive 100 percent of the revenue until the number of calls reaches 8,000 per month. Ten percent of the excess revenue will then go to MCSO, and that will increase to 20 percent once the company's initial investment is recovered.

Money generated from the system will go toward the Sheriff's Office Inmate Services Fund for education.
The Sheriff's Office will store video calls for 60 days and will monitor calls for criminal or sexual activity.

WSJ Review: The Collapse of American Criminal Justice

Crimes, Courts And Cures

Why the justice system does a bad job of separating defendants who deserve punishment from those who don't.

Wall Street Journal

OCTOBER 26, 2011

By PAUL G. CASSELL

How has the American criminal-justice system become one of the most punitive in the world without providing a corresponding level of public safety? In "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice," William J. Stuntz—a revered Harvard law professor who died of colon cancer earlier this year at the age of 52—offers a provocative big-picture answer.

Perhaps aware that "collapse" in the book's title requires justification, Mr. Stuntz begins by reviewing some statistics. As he shows, in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, amid the largest crime wave in American history, the U.S. prison population declined. Imprisonment rates plummeted to some of the lowest ever seen in the modern Western world. High-crime neighborhoods, as Mr. Stuntz puts it, were "abandoned to their fate."

The backlash to this crime wave was equally striking. Since the mid-1970s, America has punished crime more and more severely. New York's imprisonment rate, for example, has sextupled. In a span of a little more than 30 years, "America first embraced punishment levels lower than Sweden's, then built a justice system more punitive than Russia's."

Mr. Stuntz readily acknowledges what many legal scholars do not: America's current lock-'em-up philosophy has dramatically helped to reduce urban crime. Since 1991, violent-crime rates have declined roughly a third nationwide and as much as two-thirds in a few cities (New York among them). Even so, Mr. Stuntz counts these declines as a pyrrhic victory, given that violence per capita in the U.S. today remains significantly higher than in 1950. And he is unwilling simply to assign all the credit for recent crime drops to increased punishment. He wonders, for example, why crime rates began falling only around 1991—two decades after prison populations started steeply rising.

To unravel such complexities, Mr. Stuntz tries to place America's contemporary criminal-justice problems in their historical legal context. He first looks at the 14th Amendment's effort in 1868 to ensure that newly freed slaves received "the equal protection of the laws"—a promise that fell apart a few years later when the Supreme Court eviscerated the equal-protection guarantee and left generations of Southern blacks to be victimized by Klan violence. Mr. Stuntz argues that narrow equal-protection jurisprudence helps to explain why, nearly a century later, Chief Justice Earl Warren began spinning constitutional restrictions from the 14th Amendment's other important provision, the Due Process Clause.

Justice Warren faced a Southern criminal-justice system that treated blacks unequally. More generally, he was dealing with an American system that did little for indigent defendants. But rather than address racism and poverty head-on as equal-protection matters, the Supreme Court let old precedents divert its attention to due-process claims. The court ended up dealing with such problems indirectly through an array of new procedural requirements. For example, the Warren Court tried to rein in questionable police evidence-seizure tactics by imposing an exclusionary rule on the states (in Mapp v. Ohio). The court likewise responded to unequal treatment during police questioning by creating its famous warning and waiver requirements (in Miranda v. Arizona).

This web of new procedures had an important effect: Defense attorneys, embracing the new rights, did not bring forward evidence of their clients' innocence but instead sought to suppress evidence of their guilt. Whatever the other merits of the procedures, they were bound to make the justice system do a worse job of separating defendants who deserve punishment from those who don't.

Mr. Stuntz powerfully argues that such decisions have perversely worsened inequality in the criminal-justice system. The Miranda rule, for example, gives sophisticated suspects—mainly recidivists and white-collar defendants—the ability to "lawyer up" and avoid questioning altogether. Many other suspects—including the innocent but poor—waive their rights and receive less protection than they did before Miranda.

These excessive procedures contributed to a new punitiveness in criminal sentencing, Mr. Stuntz says. With fewer violent criminals successfully prosecuted under Warren-court restrictions, those who are convicted are incarcerated longer. And because of the difficulty of finding witnesses willing to testify against gang members and other violent criminals, easily proven "surrogate" crimes (namely, drug possession) are punished more harshly.

"The Collapse of American Criminal Justice" concludes that our system suffers "from the rule of too much law and the wrong kind of politics." Mr. Stuntz recommends a host of reforms, including decentralization that would encourage local control responsive to local crime. He also argues for expanding city police forces—because the increased police presence would discourage the commission of crimes.

But he seems to back away from his argument that excessive proceduralism is part of the problem. While critiquing decisions such as Mapp and Miranda, Mr. Stuntz never urges that they be overturned or restructured, even though such changes could lead to the decentralized decision-making that he supports. Instead, he singles out for overruling Supreme Court precedents limiting equal-protection argument by defendants. He targets United States v. Armstrong, for example, which barred drug dealers from arguing that prosecutors must be racially discriminating when statistics indicate disparities in charges being brought. But overturning the law would lead to precisely the kind of procedural litigation that Mr. Stuntz deplores.

Nonetheless, the overarching themes of "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice" deserve wide discussion, and the book as a whole can be rightly seen as the capstone to a distinguished legal career. Americans may debate whether our criminal-justice system has truly collapsed, but few would argue that it can't be improved.

Mr. Cassell is a professor of criminal law at the S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah.