a) I predict that if there is a draft that does not include females, there is going to be a spike in women hailing from Massachusetts.
b) Not all the inmates will find themselves in front of those TVs, come Super Bowl Sunday. The bigger the privelege, the more it hurts when you make bad decisions and lose it. A great big TV might not only keep morale up, but could save a few guys from being injured in attacks or some guards from being hassled.
The cable service isn’t priced based on the size of the TV. (For a residential customer, fewer big TVs would be more economical than lots of little ones. The prison system probably has a negotiated contract rolled into the contract for their phone and internet services.) The prison would have a hard time finding an electrical device that would do as much to foster content and compliance on that amount of watts. It is probably a drop in the bucket, next to what the electric fences, surveillance systems, bright lighting, and electric locking systems draw.
Keep in mind: This won’t make any of the inmates less in a hurry to get out. You see, none of them gets to touch the remote control, and every one of them knows that the advertisements hawking the various trappings of “the good life” aren’t aimed at them.
There is not a TV big enough to make incarceration enjoyable. For some, it hardly makes it more tolerable. In fact, one of the things I remember about my tour of Alcatraz is how the guide commented about how many of the inmates were tortured by their view of San Francisco Bay, of all the people out there sailing around in freedom, enjoying the beautiful setting. In an awful place like that, you can’t refuse to look out the window, but looking out the window can hurt, too.
