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Cake day: November 22nd, 2024

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  • I’ve been in enough jails to say with some certainty: it depends. Like unmagical posted, some places you will absolutely get a phone call at some point. In others, it’s pretty much an ‘executive privilege.’

    The truth lies in the squishy, wet world of humanity, not the written word of the law. In one jail I know of, they’d give you three chances to make a free phone call (the other party has to accept, because they can’t let an abuser call the abusee without some warning of who it is), and if they weren’t busy, you would be able to keep trying for a couple of hours. Another place, you might get the phone call, but it could be 18+ hours after you were brought in and you had already seen the judge, been given a personal recognizance bond, and would be delaying your exit from said jail if you made the call. Jailers sometimes like to put the thumb screws to you in any way they can.

    Most of the time, inmates will have access to a phone 24/7. Even in solitary, a phone was available. It looked like a pay phone strapped to a dolly that got wheeled right up to the door of the cell and the phone would stick through the little food slot you could look out of. Those phones require money on their account, and it works in a similar manner to the old collect calls. Those phone calls can be as expensive as a dollar a minute. A law was passed in the US around the end of Obama’s term or the beginning of Trump’s that was supposed to set a limit on how much those calls could cost, but I don’t remember what came of it.



  • It’s less state dependent than you think. The feds have the last say in the safety equipment that comes on your car from the factory. They write the regulations on safety equipment for all highway vehicles.

    You’re right that they regulate the safety equipment that is required to be on from factory, but the states nearly copy/paste those and make them statutes in their jurisdictions. I have never seen a federal traffic cop. It is the state’s law enforcement arm (the various state troopers, county deputies, and all the forms of police) that enforces the traffic code. What gets people tickets (rarely) is that the states don’t ctrl+a, ctrl+c, ctrl+v the requirements, so some don’t get added into the state codes, and they can add on stuff. One example off the top of my head is the third brake light. Federally required after, oh, 1984 I think, but not required in my state. The cops can’t stop you if it is completely removed and made to look as if it was never there, but they can stop you if it is broken, because the statute reads that way. For the opposite example, I think we regulated the ground-effects lighting recently.