Skip to content

Tariffmania II and Tablets

I had this mildly alarming thought.
Securus currently provides us with tablets here in prison.
These tablets are likely purchased minimum order quantity (MOQ) 5,000 through an original design manufacturer (ODM) like one you'd find on Alibaba.com.

Not familiar with Alibaba? Go look them up -- I can patiently wait while you explore their website. It may be somewhat limited for certain countries participating in Tariffmania II, but I think you may still get my drift. :)

Now, if you're back with me, you may have had a similar realization:

  • Our tablets are very much made in China
  • No purely US source for tablets like these exist

Let's add on to this:

  • People who have had their tablets stolen have waited 2+ years for hardware replacements at Blessington, with most of them still waiting to this day
  • Tablets (or a savvy friend outside) are required to buy the currently 39¢ eMessages stamps needed for us to send messages in Florida's prisons
  • Securus is known for having a shortage of tablet hardware for Florida prisons

In my head, I anticipate that a negative change will be coming to our tablet model in Florida in the not so distant future. I expect we will go back to the model where you must purchase a tablet to have one, as FDC won't want to absorb a price increase from Securus.
I have no evidence to support this; only logic and deductive reasoning.

The current tariff rate on China from the US is astronomical (145% at time of composition), which would make just about anyone pause in buying.
I expect that we'll be sitting here for a year while Securus figures out a way to make (more) money off the situation.

(Frankly, this would be a great time to roll out a BYOD policy in prison. )

... This is, incidentally, a great time for prisons to walk back their policies on getting real mail: it would actually be wise as it uncouples our access to our mail from a system whose hardware is largely made in those overseas factories, and is unavailable to large chunks of the FL DOC population.

The policies, as they stand, feed real mail to a gaping maw in Tampa, Florida (the same for a LOT of other states' prisons, as well as county jails). This digital mail ingest chute then feeds the mail to a high speed scanner, to optical character recognition (OCR), to a moderation queue there who first prereads the message, then forwards to the facility for a final moderation call.
If your letter survives all that, I'll get it after about a week of the processing that was aforementioned -- roughly two weeks after you've mailed it -- as a message on our dorm's kiosk, or on my tablet if I have one.

Strange quirk

I think it is unusual that to print a letter that you have received, you must have a tablet. Tablet users in Florida prisons currently have an assigned tablet that remains in their possession around the clock. It is only surrendered for charging at a centralized charging station -- we do not have our own chargers, and in most cases and campa, we don't even have access to power outlets to use one had Securus provided them to us.
That said, if I wanted to print a mailed letter, it's $1.00 plus tax per page, must be printed as all-or-nothing; both the front and back of the envelope and blank pages must be printed. I've covered this in an earlier post, and nothing has changed.

A musing.

If we end up going back to a model of purchasing tablets, I would wish for better hardware. Something with more internal storage, more RAM, and a heatsink for the CPU, which we just do not have.
A newer build of AOSP would be welcome, but so is an actual Linux distro that is designed for touchscreen environments. Leave me the repo for installing apps and games that shipped with the OS; what harm is an install of Aisleriot or Battle for Wesnoth? What foul does having access to LibreOffice commit?

Oh, that's right. I'm not buying into the hood life music that pervades the Securus Grift Store if I'm using my head. I'm not becoming an $8.30 a flick movie head, cackling at something on a small screen.

I don't want to come back here.
Let me keep using my brain for good things until I leave.
Feed this mind, don't rot it.

Sidenotes

Personally, I would be happy with a standalone email client, a dedicated music player, and my old eBook reader with its low power e-ink display and room for 500+ books. The tablets we have have an addiction factor used to placate many people on this side of the wire; an addiction I try to avoid.