Profiting off an inmate's desire to communicate with their family seems egregiously "unreasonable", for starters.
And to your post-prison future point, maladaptive.
Discharging someone at the end of their sentence with (a) family and social connections strained or severed, (b) depleted financial resources, & (c) a barrier to jobs in many states... does not sound like a mix that reduces recidivism.
Instead, reasoning backwards from a complete, well-adjusted person at discharge time, and figuring out what the prison needs to provide to an inmate during their incarceration to end up that person, and then funding it as needed without any prisoners-need-to-pay-for-themselves BS, makes more sense.
That said, I do think there should very much be tiering of prisons. There are some irredeemably fucked up individuals, who have burned through multiple chances, and one of the worst things we could do to people interested in getting their life back on track is mix them in with those people.
