More New York Times Hysteria

The Times editorial page really is a piece of work. With gas prices heading into the stratosphere and dire warnings about this winter's heating costs, what price levels really concern the Times editors? That would be the cost of phone calls from state prisons.

It seems the state of New York only allows collect calls from prison, then collects a commission from the phone company. And uses these commissions to pay for training and education programs for the inmates. Seems like a fair system to me. After all, the prisoners aren't compelled to call their mommies, or hang on the line for hours on end. But to the Times, this system is tantamount to torture:

In this context, the increasingly common practice of jacking up the costs of inmates' telephone calls to bankrupting levels, and then using the profits to pay for some prison activities, is self-defeating and inhumane.

Inhumane? INHUMANE?? Over-charging a convicted criminal for a collect phone rises to the level of inhumanity? Who could take such a contention seriously? The Times, apparently not content with simply "over the top" takes the rhetoric right down the other side.

Dunning the poor to run the prisons where so many of the poor wind up may have been acceptable in Dickens's time, but no longer.

Now "dunning" means ""making persistent demands for payment." It seems to me that demands for payment are only as persistent as the convicts demand for phone calls. And to call that system Dickensian is a silly perspective to say the least.