By George Joseph and Debbie Nathan
Roughly six months ago at New York’s Sing Sing prison, John
Dukes says he was brought out with cellmates to meet a corrections
counselor. He recalls her giving him a paper with some phrases and
offering him a strange choice: He could go up to the phone and utter the
phrases that an automated voice would ask him to read, or he could
choose not to and lose his phone access altogether.
Dukes did not know why he was being asked to make this decision, but
he felt troubled as he heard other men ahead of him speaking into the
phone and repeating certain phrases from the sheets the counselors had
given them.
“I was contemplating, ‘Should I do it? I don’t want my voice to be on
this machine,’” he recalls. “But I still had to contact my family, even
though I only had a few months left.”
So when it was his turn, he walked up to the phone, picked up the
receiver, and followed a series of automated instructions. “It said,
‘Say this phrase, blah, blah, blah,’ and if you didn’t say it clearly,
they would say, ‘Say this phrase again,’ like ‘cat’ or ‘I’m a citizen of
the United States of America.’” Dukes said he repeated such phrases for
a minute or two. The voice then told him the process was complete.
“Here’s another part of myself that I had to give away again in this
prison system,” he remembers thinking as he walked back to the cell.
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Source: The Intercept_
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