Collected Item: “The COVID Pandemic and economic greed”
Give your story a title.
The COVID Pandemic and economic greed
What sort of object is this: text story, photograph, video, audio interview, screenshot, drawing, meme, etc.?
text story
Tell us a story; share your experience. Describe what the object or story you've uploaded says about the pandemic, and/or why what you've submitted is important to you.
I wanted to share a bit about my life during COVID. My brother is currently incarcerated, and I would travel at least once a month to visit him. Once COVID hit, visitations were canceled, and my family was forced to rely on phone calls or snail mail. My brother would call us about once a week for his own sanity and ours as well. Several things have happened these past few months, which made our situation as a family more complicated. A phone call to my brother used to cost him (or us) 40 cents a minute. When COVID hit the private company used by the prison to facilitate calls, decided to take advantage of our reliance on phone calls and upcharge their prices. Phone calls now cost over a dollar a minute. Thankfully my family does ok and phone calls are not something we are willing to let go of, but I feel for families who have to choose between food, bills or funding their calling account. I know it sounds like an extreme situation, but there are families that have lost all contact with their loved ones who are incarcerated because of COVID, and these companies are taking advantage of the pandemic. Were now paying almost twenty dollars for every ten minute conversation, trust me it adds up real quick. The worst part is that these companies have contracts with the prisons, and we (the families on the outside) have no choice or say as far as what company we are able to go through to talk to those incarcerated. As if COVID and social distancing weren't enough, I'm now missing and worrying about my brother more than usual.
Use one-word hashtags (separated by commas) to describe your story. For example: Where did it originate? How does this object make you feel? How does this object relate to the pandemic?
incarcerated, brother, phone call, money, expensive, communication, reliance, greed
Who originally created this object? (If you created this object, such as photo, then put "self" here.)
myself
Give this story a date.
2020-10-01