The situation may not be perfect today, but communication to/from prisons are heavily guarded to prevent these situations and others.
Inmates in most countries can make phone calls only to phone numbers which have been approved, usually only family. You can't make random phone calls. All phone calls are monitored and recorded to prevent abuse.
You can't call an inmate afaik, that would be a very low security facility, which I am not aware of.
Visitors are only by request and undergo security checks before, during and after visits. And yes, visitors are a huge security issue in prisons, but if you deny all visitors to prisoners, you're in Guantanamo, not a normal prison anymore. There are different levels of security in prisons.
Internet access is much harder to control. Encryption is, as you as a HN reader know, very easy to do on a computer, but hard using your voice. Hiding information on a computer is easy, but very hard on a voice phone.
There have been prisons in the world that allowed internet access to inmates and there are problems with that, much as with visitors or phone calls. It's a balancing act to weigh those problems to the benefits. You just have to go into the discussion with open eyes about the problems that internet access would bring. Imagine a pedophile convicted for sexually harassing children online, and giving him/her internet access in prison. What an outrage. Someone in a low sec jail for DUI could be given internet access, no problems. It happends, I've even seen a CEO run his company from within the jail. He was given supervised internet access to his companys financial system once a month, one guard watching pover his shoulder at all times. Not a very scalable solution though.
It all depends, doesn't it.
Inmates in most countries can make phone calls only to phone numbers which have been approved, usually only family. You can't make random phone calls. All phone calls are monitored and recorded to prevent abuse. You can't call an inmate afaik, that would be a very low security facility, which I am not aware of.
Visitors are only by request and undergo security checks before, during and after visits. And yes, visitors are a huge security issue in prisons, but if you deny all visitors to prisoners, you're in Guantanamo, not a normal prison anymore. There are different levels of security in prisons.
Internet access is much harder to control. Encryption is, as you as a HN reader know, very easy to do on a computer, but hard using your voice. Hiding information on a computer is easy, but very hard on a voice phone. There have been prisons in the world that allowed internet access to inmates and there are problems with that, much as with visitors or phone calls. It's a balancing act to weigh those problems to the benefits. You just have to go into the discussion with open eyes about the problems that internet access would bring. Imagine a pedophile convicted for sexually harassing children online, and giving him/her internet access in prison. What an outrage. Someone in a low sec jail for DUI could be given internet access, no problems. It happends, I've even seen a CEO run his company from within the jail. He was given supervised internet access to his companys financial system once a month, one guard watching pover his shoulder at all times. Not a very scalable solution though.
It all depends, doesn't it.