That Easy Prison Transport Advertisement

I am kind of a sucker when it comes to clicking on scammy internet businesses. I like reading up about them, taking a little of their ad dollars and educating myself on how they work. As a big consumer of the news and podcasts, I’m particularly interested in products and services marketed to the poor and how they compare to what is available to us in the Middle Class.

A few weeks ago I started seeing advertising for Easy Prison Transport, a local business that uses old city school buses to transport loved ones without cars to state prisons for visitation hours. For $100, you can buy a ticket for a Saturday day trip to Clinton Correctional in Dannemora, 15 miles west of Plattsburgh or Bare Hill Correctional outside of Malone, a few miles south of the Canadian border. On Sundays they offer $60 trips to Greene Correctional in Coxsackie and Hudson Correctional just outside Hudson.

I am sure these services are mostly used by wives and children of the colored and poor who want to visit their loved ones every once in a rare while. $100 bucks isn’t that much money these days, but if you’re poor and making minimum wage it might be a whole day’s labor. You have to figure only the poorest of poor people use these services – most other people would probably just drive their cars to visit the prison.

It has to be quite a trip. The buses leave at 4:30 am and are old school buses that rumble through the Adirondacks to their destination, on buses packed with people of common cause. Must be some very somber discussion.

It’s a very scenic trip, the mountains scenery of the Adirondack Northway and the somewhat pungent farm country of the Lake Champlain flatlands of Plattsburgh and the vast timberlands and less rich farm and grazing country up around Dannemora and Massena. The rundown trailers and mobile homes, the junk cars and broke down tractors and goats and cows in rocky pastures.

To be sure, many of the people behind bars are there for serious reasons. Most of these prisons are maximum or at least medium security. The people behind bars are often convicted of very serious crimes that have others seriously injured and disfigured, often for life, or dead. Other people are behind bars long periods of time for much more dubious reasons – things totally legal in one state but banned in another – often for purposes of stroking a political ego. Laws on the possession of firearms and so called illicit drugs often fall into that category.

Why do people make this costly trip to prisons for visitation purposes? For a few hours sitting across plexiglass to talk into a phone but see the face of loved ones behind bars? Love. It has to be quite the trip.