"Consider the prison-phone industry"

From an article explaining how the prison system in the United States has been corporatized into profitable ventures:

The profits generated by the corrections economy have not been definitively calculated, and a comprehensive audit would be a staggering accounting task. The figure would have to include the cost of private-prison real estate, mandatory drug testing, electronic monitoring anklets, prison-factory labor, prison-farm labor, prison-phone contracts, and the service fees charged to prisoners’ families when they wire money for supplies from the prison commissary. Contracted commercial activity flows in and out of every city jail, rural prison, suburban probation office, and immigration detention center. For stakeholders in the largest peacetime carceral apparatus in the history of the world, the opportunities for profit add up. For analysts like Sommer, the system also offers a safe, government-secured investment...

Consider the prison-phone industry. For inmates, especially urban felons shipped to far-off rural sites, calls to the outside are a social lifeline and a proven method for reducing recidivism. But here, too, Wall Street has identified a high-demand, low-supply commodity. Other government contractors, be they food suppliers or dentists, collect fees paid out by the state. Prison-phone companies, and the prison-wire-transfer companies that are following their model, extract revenues directly from inmates and their families. (Fifteen dollars for a fifteen-minute phone call is not uncommon.)

As with partnership corrections, profits are largely determined by contracts, but phone and money-transfer companies sweeten the deals for their public partners with profit-sharing perks. These commissions kick back anywhere from 40 to 60 percent of revenue to the contracting government agency. According to a study by Prison Legal News, a publication of the Human Rights Defense Center, about 85 percent of non-federal jails sign up for commission-added contracts, and because commissions increase in proportion to the total contract value, cash-strapped public officials are motivated to choose the most expensive contract available. Prison Legal News found that when Louisiana put out a public request for proposals for phone services in 2001, the agency stated the wish explicitly: “The state desires that the bidder’s compensation percentages . . . be as high as possible.”

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"Active shooter" school drill done without notification

Police officers in Florida surprised students, teachers and parents Thursday with an active shooter drill. And by “active shooter drill,” we mean that a Winter Haven middle school went into lockdown as two armed police officers burst into classrooms, guns drawn, leaving the unsuspecting children terrified — and their parents furious.

According to Fox affiliate WTVT, officials at Jewett Middle Academy e-mailed parents to inform them of the drill, after it took place. By that point, WTVT reports, cellphones were already filling up with texts from frightened students, who thought there was a real shooter in the school.

Winter Haven police told The Post that one of the officers had his duty firearm – a handgun – drawn. The gun was loaded, as required. The other officer was carrying an unloaded AR-15. According to Ray, one of her other children texted: “I thought he was going to shoot me.”

“We don’t want students to be scared, but we need them to be safe.”

That's one viewpoint.  Others would argue that a pre-announced drill would be educational; a surprise drill is designed to frighten and intimidate.

But not all active shooter drills are surprises: WTVT spoke to officials in two neighboring Florida counties, where police said that their officers conduct drills in empty schools, usually over a holiday break.

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Free range parenting punished - updated

The Port St. Lucie, Florida, mom was arrested on Saturday for letting her 7-year-old son, Dominic, walk alone — in the daytime, with a cellphone — a half-mile to a local park. “I honestly didn’t think I was doing anything wrong,” she says. “I was letting him go play.”During his approximately 10-minute walk, the boy passed by a public pool, where a patron asked him where his mother was and other questions. As he told a local news station, “I got scared and ran off to the park, and that’s when they called the cops.” Police picked up the boy at the park, brought him home and arrested his mother for felony child neglect. In their report, police noted that “numerous sex offenders reside in the vicinity.” Gainey says the cops “just kept going over that, you know, there’s pedophiles,” which sounds to me like the kind of problem that perhaps there’s a better approach to than whisking kids off playgrounds and arresting mothers...

More at Salon, and an extended discussion thread at Reddit.

There is a Wikipedia page on slow parenting/free range parenting.  Years ago I wrote a post (which I frustratingly cannot locate this morning) which incorporated a map showing the range a man's father had wandered freely as a child compared to the range he wandered as a child compared to the neighborhood his child is allowed to wander.  The circles get smaller and smaller...

Addendum:  A tip of the blogging hat to reader Dan for finding the link I referred to above, which contained this image:

Addendum #2:  This Pearls Before Swine cartoon seems relevant -

Addendum #3:  It has happened again, to another family.

It was a one-mile walk home from a Silver Spring park on Georgia Avenue on a Saturday afternoon. But what the parents saw as a moment of independence for their 10-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter, they say authorities viewed much differently.

Danielle and Alexander Meitiv say they are being investigated for neglect for the Dec. 20 trek — in a case they say reflects a clash of ideas about how safe the world is and whether parents are free to make their own choices about raising their children...

The Meitivs say they believe in “free-range” parenting, a movement that has been a counterpoint to the hyper-vigilance of “helicopter” parenting, with the idea that children learn self-reliance by being allowed to progressively test limits, make choices and venture out in the world...

Police picked up the children near the Discovery building, the family said, after someone reported seeing them...

Danielle is a climate-science consultant, and Alexander is a physicist at the National Institutes of Health. Alexander said he had a tense time with police on Dec. 20 when officers returned his children, asked for his identification and told him about the dangers of the world. The more lasting issue has been with Montgomery County Child Protective Services, he said, which showed up a couple of hours after the police left...

The Meitivs say that on Dec. 20, a CPS worker required Alexander to sign a safety plan pledging he would not leave his children unsupervised until the following Monday, when CPS would follow up. At first he refused, saying he needed to talk to a lawyer, his wife said, but changed his mind when he was told his children would be removed if he did not comply...

The family has a meeting set for next week at CPS offices in Rockville.
“I think what CPS considered neglect, we felt was an essential part of growing up and maturing,” Alexander said. “We feel we’re being bullied into a point of view about child-rearing that we strongly disagree with.”

I don't have time to cover it now, but I would note here that the April 2014 issue of The Atlantic has an excellent article by Hanna Rosin entitled "Hey! Parents, Leave Those Kids Alone."

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The escape from Eastern State Penitentary

Excerpts from the original post at Life Without Buildings:

With its hub-and-spoke design of long blocks containing individual prison cells, ESP could be considered the first modern prison. There are many, many stories told about the prisoners that have been incarcerated here over its nearly 150 years of operation–some inspiring, some horrible, some about Al Capone–but none of them have captivated the public more than the 1945 “Willie Sutton” tunnel escape...

Working in two-man teams of 30 minute shifts, the tunnel crew, using spoons and flattened cans as shovels and picks, slowly dug a 31-inch opening through the wall of cell 68, then dug twelve feet straight down into the ground, and another 100 feet out beyond the walls of the prison. They removed dirt by concealing it in their pockets and scattering it in the yard a la The Great Escape. Also like The Great Escape, the ESP tunnel was shored up with scaffolding, illuminated, and even ventilated...

More details, photos, diagrams, and information about the fate of the escapees and the current state of the tunnel here.

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"Motor Vehicle Services" looks like a scam

I've received THREE notices of this sort recently.  The second was reportedly from a "Motor Vehicle Division" and the third from an unnamed entity with a callback number.

I have no doubt that these are examples of the "extended warranty scams" reported in U.S. News and World Report many years ago.

"Consumers who receive such deceptive calls or mailings may choose to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, which has the power to sue these companies, fine them, and make them stop any misleading sales practices." 

I wasn't born yesterday and am not at risk for being a victim.  But what bothers me is that all of these identify me (correctly) as a Subaru owner - presumably garnered from some public database (is state vehicle licensing info public?), and it's true that my real warranty is expiring.  That could be a coincidence, but I wonder whether the scammers have accessed the Subaru database either nationally or perhaps at my local dealership.  That's what makes me uncomfortable.

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"Shellshock" - a scary new computer bug

From the BBC:

The flaw has been found in a software component known as Bash, which is a part of many Linux systems as well as Apple's Mac operating system. The bug, dubbed Shellshock, can be used to remotely take control of almost any system using Bash, researchers said...

"Whereas something like Heartbleed was all about sniffing what was going on, this was about giving you direct access to the system," Prof Alan Woodward, a security researcher from the University of Surrey, told the BBC.

"The door's wide open."

Some 500,000 machines worldwide were thought to have been vulnerable to Heartbleed. But early estimates, which experts said were conservative, suggest that Shellshock could hit at least 500 million machines...

"Using this vulnerability, attackers can potentially take over the operating system, access confidential information, make changes, et cetera," said Tod Beardsley, a Rapid7 engineer...

For general home users worried about security, Prof Woodward suggested simply keeping an eye on manufacturer websites for updates - particularly for hardware such as broadband routers.

More at the link. I would welcome comments from some of the informed readers of this blog.

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"Swatting" explained

YouTube link.

Militarized local SWAT teams can be tricked by hackers into raiding homes of innocent people.  The Vice video above illustrates the problem, which is also discussed at Salon:

“The caller claimed to have shot two co-workers, held others hostage, and threatened to shoot them,” the Littleton Police Department said in a statement. “He stated that if the officers entered he would shoot them as well.”

What the cameras captured is a perilous new prank known as “swatting,” or making a false report to get the SWAT team to invade a rival gamer’s space. As evidenced by the Vice News report below, this can involve disguising the caller identity and making some potentially life-threatening claims.

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Millions more personal records stolen

Community Health Systems, which operates 206 hospitals across the United States, announced on Monday that hackers recently broke into its computers and stole data on 4.5 million patients.

Hackers have gained access to their names, Social Security numbers, physical addresses, birthdays and telephone numbers.

Anyone who received treatment from a network-owned hospital in the last five years -- or was merely referred there by an outside doctor -- is affected.

The large data breach puts these people at heightened risk of identity fraud. That allows criminals open bank accounts and credit cards on their behalf, take out loans and ruin personal credit history.

It never ends...

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