Here's the good news: For 50 cents a minute, Dallas County Jail inmates will soon be able to have video face-time with their lawyers and loved ones. Here's the bad news: The contract with the company running the video phones would also bar prisoners from having in-person visitors.

The Dallas Morning News reports:

The county has chosen a local company, Securus Technologies, to install "video visitation" by the end of this year. The system would allow people to chat with inmates from their homes or at special kiosks across the county. The Commissioners Court will consider signing a three-year contract for the system on Tuesday.

The video chats would cost $10 per 20-minute visit. And there's a provision buried in the 29-page contract that could require the county to eliminate almost all in-person meetings.

Inmate advocacy groups say the system amounts to profiteering off inmates and their families, and the county's top elected official is leading a last-ditch effort to kill the contract. County Judge Clay Jenkins says the county shouldn't profit off the backs of some of the area's poorest and most vulnerable residents.

"This is a very insidious thing," he said.

Prison privatization of this sort is one hell of a moneymaking business. That's because a) everybody hates prisoners and hey, screw them, b) government is too big and hey, screw it, and c) wow, there's a way to downsize government and screw prisoners?

Here, check out Securus Tech's web splashes:

As some inmate advocates have pointed out, $10 phone calls can add up pretty fast, especially if you don't have any means of earning money. (Nor does anyone seem to have considered whether this system might give inmates an incentive to oh, say, find phone money in prison black-market work.) "This is a regressive tax on the poor," one advocate said.

It would make sense from the poorest inmates' standpoint, then, to keep in-person visitations open as an option. But that wouldn't make sense from the phone company's economic standpoint. "The company said the 'real benefit' of its system is only realized if it removes 'traffic from the facility lobby,'" the Morning News writes:

[T]he contract's wording seems to suggest that face-to-face visits could be banned. In-person visitation hours have been canceled or reduced in other counties that deal with Securus, including controversial Sheriff Joe Arpaio's jail in Maricopa County, Ariz.

Remember Sheriff Joe?

And anyway, it's win-win for the government:

The system wouldn't cost the county anything. In fact, it may open a new revenue stream. Securus would install the technology for free. And, if certain parameters are met, it would share up to 25 percent of its revenue with the government. That could mean millions of dollars for Dallas County, Jenkins predicted.

To [Mike] Cantrell, the lone Republican on the Commissioners Court, that's a good thing. Dallas County taxpayers pay to house inmates. This would be a way for the inmates to foot at least some of that bill, he said.

There's a certain justice to Cantrell's view. As long as you assume that every inmate of the Dallas County Jail deserves to be there for the full stretch, and hasn't been relegated to a gray cell due to the intervention of subtle but pervasive institutional or cultural forces, or even honest mistakes. And really, isn't it just a lot easier to assume that?

[Photo via Renovo, "the leading provider of video visitation solutions for over a decade."]