When I was in federal prison several years back it was 70 cents per minute to call. You were limited to 300 minutes per month. Working at my job in the prison full time paid 5.25$ per month. For those guys who were in for a long time and had zero money being sent in, they had to support themselves on the best possible jobs which paid up to .19 cents per hour.
I'm still heartbroken when I think about the guys who somehow saved up money on these wages and sent it out to their families.
The most gut wrenching thing about being in prison is the fact that the gaurds treat you like animals, and most all of them seem to derive a sick pleasure from it.
Some other interesting things, calls were limited in length to 15 minutes. Calls were monitored in real-time and if you started talking dirty with your girl, you got disconnected and could potentially be written up and given more time.
The gaurds also use whatever they hear in the calls to decide which cells to hit and search for contraband. Guys who are down for a long time never use the phones. You would have to work at least 4 hours or up to 3 days to afford one minute of conversation. That minute could be burned up with the phone ringing and waiting for the person to approve the phone call.
Phone conversations are recorded forever and easily accessible by pretty much any employee.
If you get in fights or get caught with contraband or try to escape you lose your good time and stay in longer. Due to new rules, there is no parole. Good time is 15%. Other new rules also allow them to extend your original sentence for some infractions such as having a cell phone. Before if you got caught with a cell phone it was a write up and go to the hole for 90 days (small confined room with no human contact, no window, no mail, no calls, no nothing). Now they add up to five years on to your sentence and put you in the hole for a year.
You can machine anything to any tolerance, assuming that you can measure it (and you have enough time.) In other words, you can create these tiny parts using relatively crude tools. (Files, saws, lapping, grinding) The critical part is being able to measure the part you are making, so you know if it is good enough or if you need to take off more material. In a 500 year old clock, the parts would have been made to only fit in that clock. Every part would be slowly made by test fitting it against the part it rides against. The fitment would be judged by feel, or by using blue die to see where two surfaces were touching.
Using modern measurement tools, you can machine to pretty tight tolerances, even if your lathe/mill is extremely worn.
I work from home and I go days without putting on clothes, I get my groceries delivered and don't leave the house for weeks. It's become sort of an adventure but I basically turned the house into a spa so I'm staying relaxed.
I make a point of getting out once a day to walk, shop or whatever. I still wear the same three day old clothes though. I probably look like a gold card wielding bum. But who cares. I get paid piles of money to do what I love (DevOps). +1 on the spa idea...
I can also do that with DirectDebit (ACH for you yanks) transactions in the UK for example; brute force branch sort code and account numbers and when you "transfer money" (you can do 1p, or even cancel the transaction once the TUN code has been generated iirc) you get the name associated with the account.
There isn't much you can do about it, detecting an abuse of an invoicing system and locally blocking it is much preferable to the other potential outcome of not knowing or being able to confirm where the hell did that invoice actually went.
I'm still heartbroken when I think about the guys who somehow saved up money on these wages and sent it out to their families.
The most gut wrenching thing about being in prison is the fact that the gaurds treat you like animals, and most all of them seem to derive a sick pleasure from it.