On Sunday, The Philadelphia Inquirer gave OpEd space to Aaron M. Kinzer, because the editors just love them some criminals:
In prison, a phone was my lifeline. Until I got caught with it.
Congress should overturn the Cell Phone Contraband Act to give incarcerated a a lifeline to the outside world.
by Aaron M Kinzer | Sunday, April 17, 2022
Since 2010, when I was incarcerated, I have been at the mercy of the prison phone service industry. I have paid 15 cents to $1 per minute for monitored 15-minute phone calls to hear my mother’s prayers, my spouse’s love, and my children’s laughter. Companies like PayTel and Securis compete for contracts to siphon off money sent from family to people like me.Aaron M Kinzer, from Parents.
High prices, monitoring, and restrictions fuel the demand for illegal smartphones. Most incarcerated people don’t use smartphones to sell drugs or order violent attacks. Instead, they connect with loved ones. A more humane justice system would take this into account by providing tablets to inmates or allowing for video visits.
Unfortunately, because of how diffuse our national system of corrections is, this is an issue we’ll have to tackle at the county and state levels. While access to smartphones is still forbidden in jails and prisons across the country, many jurisdictions recognize the value of keeping families connected. New York City and San Francisco no longer require incarcerated people to pay a fee for making phone calls from jail, and other cities and states are considering following suit. Texas has expanded tablet access for sending emails, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons allowed for free calls during the pandemic when visitations were banned.
In prison, a phone is a lifeline, a thin thread holding together fragile family bonds. When I was transferred to a federal minimum-security prison in Virginia, located in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains, I thought I would be able to resist the lifeline thrown to me. But after six months of being restricted to the prison phone, I smuggled an illegal smartphone into prison. I knew that if I got caught, I would be placed in solitary confinement, transferred, have more time added to my sentence, or, even worse, be indicted for possessing contraband.
And caught with it he was.
Click to enlarge.
We are told that Mr Kinzer “is a father of four children. He is a writer, poet, and speaker.” Elsewhere, it says of him, he “is an impact poet and journalist. He is dedicated to raising awareness about the plight of incarcerated persons worldwide so that their struggle can be understood and overcome. He has written for The Columbia Journal, Parenting, Dream Corps and The Re-Sentencing Journal.”
But Mr Kinzer is not a good person. Mr Kinzer and his girlfriend were arrested in 2009:
Sullivan County vice officers said they’d been investigating Kinzer for about a year, and that he has a long history of drug activity involving other states as well, including Georgia and North Carolina.
So, he’d been dealing in drugs for around a year, as far as Sullivan County officials suspected, but as we document below, had been for many years before. How many lives did this dedicated “father of four” ruin before he was caught?
Mr Kinzer was a previously twice convicted felon, and was allowed to negotiate a plea deal, so there is no question of his guilt. The advisory guidelines range for his sentence were 262 to 327 months of incarceration, yet he got off with just 188 months, or 15 years and 8 months. He could have been sentenced to between 21 to 27 years, and should have been!
Mr Kinzer continued in the Inquirer:
But to me, the risk (of getting caught with the cell phone) was worth it. In that phone I saw a chance to live.
Mr Kinzer apparently thought that the risk of getting caught dealing drugs was worth it as well; perhaps his judgement isn’t that good. If you read this document from the courts, Mr Kinzer admitted selling marijuana for a living beginning around December of 2002, and was constantly involved in the drug trade ever since. Given the Inquirer’s coverage of the devastation caused by drugs in the Kensington neighborhood, I have to wonder why they gave this scumbag the OpEd space.
On March 4, 2019, while sitting on my bunk after midnight headcount, I was sending birthday songs to a childhood friend when a night officer made an irregular post-count round. I was caught with my phone, handcuffed behind my back, escorted out of the camp, and driven 200 yards to its companion prison. The fortresslike, walled-in maximum-security United States Penitentiary in Lee County, Va., is devoid of any sense of freedom or humanity.
The smartphone was classified as a dangerous device and sent to the FBI. I was sent to the Secured Housing Unit, the prison within the prison, where I would spend the next six weeks. The Justice Department added 41 days to my sentence. I then was shipped to Allenwood Federal Prison in Pennsylvania, where I was fenced off from my family, friends, freedom, and the lifeline of a phone.
But while I was in that 6-by-10-foot concrete box — alone and away from all human contact, being fed like an animal through a slot in the steel door — I paced the floor, exercised obsessively, read voraciously, and wrote more than 50 poems with a three-inch pencil. I asked myself some tough questions: Was what I gained with my phone worth what I lost? Did eight months of conversations make a dent in eight years of distance?
Perhaps, just perhaps, the devastation caused by his career of selling drugs — he admitted to selling pot all the time, but claimed that the crack cocaine was something just prior to his arrest — outweighs not only him having a cell phone, but the lenient sentence he received. Cell phones were prohibited to prisoners because they could be, and were, used to arrange for drug deals outside of prison, and contraband smuggled in to prison. Prohibiting them was the right thing to do.
As a Catholic, I am supposed to be forgiving of the sins of others, but when I see drug dealers, I see people who have inflicted tremendous damage on other people, destroying lives and families. How many of the people to whom Mr Kinzer sold drugs couldn’t hold drugs because they were too messed up in the head, how many lost jobs because they failed a random drug screen or worse, a post-accident drug test? How many families broke apart because someone was addicted to a drug Mr Kinzer sold? How many people were injured, or even killed, in automobile accidents because a driver was stoned on pot he sold?
I can forgive Mr Kinzer for his sins, but that does not mean I believe he should be released even a single day early, or that I believe that his lenient sentence was appropriate. I can hope that he finds faith in God while in prison, but that does not mean I have any confidence that he will do anything other than try to sell drugs again one he gets out. He deserves the loss of that cell phone, and while I can see the point that prisoners should be allowed more contact with their families on the outside, that they should be allowed to do so freely and unmonitored is a step too far; it would allow more criminal activity to occur.
As a libertarian — not a Libertarian! The Libertarian Party is a joke — I’m supposed not to care what people put in their bodies of their own choice. But I’m also the husband of a pediatric nurse, and my wife has told me that she has never seen a child abuse case — and they have to have been abused enough to require hospitalization for her to have seen them — in which drugs and/or — usually and rather than or — alcohol were not involved. I personally know grandparents rearing elementary school aged children because their parents were unable to care for them due to drugs. My nephew, an EMT in a nearby county, has told me that the majority of his ambulance calls were due to drug use.
Drug use has been devastating to our society, and it has been people like Mr Kinzer who have enabled that devastation, have made their living by enabling that destruction. Were it up to me, I could forgive his sins, but I still believe that the most appropriate sentence for him should have been life in prison without any possibility of parole.