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Profiting from Prisoners: Charging For Video Calls While Ending Visitation Rights
Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
Not coincidentally, free on-site video visits are offered at the jail only three days each week. Remote visits — those visitors pay for — are more frequent. Clearly, Securus’ interest lies in encouraging visitors to use the remote system, and the county stands to gain, too. When Hopkins County signed its deal with Securus in 2012 the company agreed to give the county a 70 percent cut of its profits from video and phone calls.
Hopkins County is one of five Texas counties that adopted Securus’ video visitation and eliminated in-person, face-to-face visits afterward.
In September, the Dallas County Commissioners Court nearly approved a contract of its own with Securus that would have explicitly eliminated all in-person visits at the Lew Sterrett Jail in favor of video visitation.
– From the Dallas Observer article: Captive Audience: Counties and Private Businesses Cash in on Video Visits at Jails
At first glance, it seems like a reasonable enough plan. Private companies offer to install technology in prisons free of charge that allows inmates to make video phone calls to their friends and family on the outside. Make the video calls free when visitors come to the prison itself, but make that process as inconvenient as possible. Then eliminate in person visitation rights.
At that point, even if you travel to the prison itself, the best you can get is a video call with the inmate, the same thing you can do from the comfort and convenience of your own home. Then tack on a hefty fee for remote video calls. Presto! You’ve created a captive market to financially feed off of. It’s like taking candy from a baby.
I recently came across several articles highlighting this growing trend, and the two main companies, Securus and Global Tel*Link, that dominate this $1.2 billion “market,” if you can actually call it that. To make matters worse, the companies have also been caught illegally violating the attorney-client privilege by recording such phone calls, and employing cutthroat tactics to destroy any cheaper competition that emerges.
The first article comes from the Dallas Observer. Here are some excerpts:
The jail telephones are operated by Securus, a Dallas-based corporation that is a major player on the tech side of the for-profit prison industry. The company is popular with county and state governments for its ability to raise money through jail phone calls. It’s not popular with the people who actually take the calls, the families and friends of inmates, who find their bank accounts taking hits from a system that is expensive and confusing to use.
There is another option that’s free. She can visit the jail where she can actually see the face of Donald Ballowe, her ex-fiance. But as Leisey discovered shortly after his arrest in August, those visits too have moved into the hands of Securus. To speak to Ballowe without paying Securus, she has to drive to the jail a full 24 hours in advance to schedule a visit the following day. The next day, she has a “visit” inside the jail visitation room, not exactly with Ballowe, but with a computer screen. When her ex-fiance’s face appears on screen, he is still sitting in his crowded cell, sometimes as other inmates walk past him on the way to shower.
It’s less like the stereotypical jail visit you see on a TV cop drama, with visitor and inmate separated across a table or by a sheet of glass, and more like a Skype chat, complete with annoying a two- or three-second stuttering lags in the video, Leisey says. And sometimes the sound is muddled by a strange echo that cuts into the visit. “You only get 25 minutes, so if half the time you’re trying to repeat yourself, it’s not like you’re getting the whole 25 minutes anymore.”
If she owned a computer, she could go for the pricier but easier option and “visit” Ballowe by video from the comfort of her own home. But unlike Skype — whose video and phone services range from free to cheap — Securus’ regular rate for a video chat to Hopkins County’s jail is pricey. Leisey, a single mother, is unemployed and can’t afford even the phone service. “I haven’t been able to talk to him in a couple of weeks,” she says.
In a world where I can get on Skype and talk to anyone, anywhere in the world for free, the fact that Securus gets away with this is simply obnoxious.
Not coincidentally, free on-site video visits are offered at the jail only three days each week. Remote visits — those visitors pay for — are more frequent. Clearly, Securus’ interest lies in encouraging visitors to use the remote system, and the county stands to gain, too. When Hopkins County signed its deal with Securus in 2012 the company agreed to give the county a 70 percent cut of its profits from video and phone calls. Securus anticipated the county would make $455,597 over five years. Instead, though, in the 2014 fiscal year Hopkins County has earned only $35,659.
Hopkins County is one of five Texas counties that adopted Securus’ video visitation and eliminated in-person, face-to-face visits afterward. Soon, Securus will bring its video chats to Dallas County. County commissioners here promise that in-person, non-video visits won’t be eliminated, but what will happen next is anyone’s guess.
The Texas Commission on Jail Standards, a state agency that creates guidelines for county and city jails, says that jails must offer inmates two free, 20-minute visits each week. If video visitation was just an option, researchers say, it would be an excellent tool to help inmates. Instead, video companies are exploiting a loophole in the rules and replacing the mandated two visits in the jails with free on-site video visits, operating on the theory, presumably, that meeting by video is equivalent to looking someone in the face, even if it is through glass in a crowded jail visiting room.
In September, the Dallas County Commissioners Court nearly approved a contract of its own with Securus that would have explicitly eliminated all in-person visits at the Lew Sterrett Jail in favor of video visitation. Judge Jenkins, who strongly opposes the practice of counties profiting from inmate fees, discovered the clause and alerted prisoners’ advocates, says Josh Gravens, a Dallas activist at Texas CURE, a prison watchdog group. Jenkins, with the help of activists, former inmates and their families who spoke out at the September meeting, persuaded commissioners to reject the initial contract. “We think in-person visitation is extremely important,” Jenkins said, speaking on behalf of himself and Gravens. “We think it’s wrong to make commissions, above cost [to] recoup, on families.”
Yet in a written statement to the county, Securus says cutbacks to Dallas’ current visitation policy will be necessary since the company is installing the kiosks at its own expense. “The capital required upfront is significant and without a migration from current processes to remote visitation, the cost cannot be recouped …” Securus wrote.
Sorry, but this is straight up evil. Securus knows exactly what its doing by writing this language into its contracts. It’s highly unethical.
Securus and its competitor Global Tel *Link have been buying out smaller companies and gaining control of the jail and prison telephone market since the early 2000s, but it took until 2013 for the FCC to finally act on complaints that the companies were ripping off families with excessive phone rates.
The market is estimated by Bloomberg News to be worth $1.2 billion, with about half of the correctional phone services contracts belonging to Alabama-based Global Tel*Link. Number two is Securus, with 30 percent of the market. Both are backed by investment banks–Global Tel*Link is funded by American Securities and Securus by Abry partners.
Families’ attempts to get around the high phone rates have spawned a new industry of services offering cheap jail calls, such as Cons Call Home. The rates for long-distance calls from prisons are substantially higher than local calls, so the services work by rerouting phone numbers that come in from Securus or one of its competitors to a cheaper line. Predictably, Securus has tried to put those companies out of business. When Securus has discovered that its number is being rerouted for cheaper rates, the company has responded by simply blocking the inmate’s account and cutting off the funds.
“Today I was told by Securus Technologies that I am masking my true identity and phone number and this is illegal,” a woman wrote to the FCC in 2012 after she purchased a Google Voice number to match the area code of where her husband was incarcerated. “I was told that I can face federal charges and so can my husband … I need to know if I am truly doing something illegal.”
She wasn’t. Securus asked the FCC to crack down on the third-party calls in a 2009 petition but in 2013 the FCC issued an opinion that Securus and Global Tel *Link had no right to block the calls.
Carolyn Esparza, a former social worker who founded Community Solutions, an El Paso nonprofit that provides social services to inmates and their families, says most people don’t have the heart to say no to an expensive call from an inmate. “It is addictive for the prisoner to be able to call home, to be able to call home, to be able to call home again,” she says.
Paul Walcutt, an Austin criminal defense lawyer, knew that Securus was recording the calls of his clients, and was more or less OK with it. Inmates are warned frequently that their calls are subject to recording. Sometimes, Walcutt says, the recordings have been presented in court and have hurt his cases, while other times they’ve helped. But his own conversations, he’d been assured by the Travis County Sheriff’s Office, were safely off-record to protect attorney-client privilege. After hearing rumors to the opposite, Walcutt asked the prosecutor’s office for a DVD of a client’s recorded calls. To Walcutt’s surprise, the first clip he played from the DVD was none other than a recording of a phone call between himself and the client.
Walcutt told the prosecutor, who he says assured him that they stop listening to the calls when they hear that it’s an attorney on the other end. “I think probably, the majority of prosecutors are ethical enough to not listen to that,” Walcutt agrees. “But can I be sure? No, I can’t.”
Of course you can’t be sure. Let’s not forget yesterday’s article: Innocent Army Veteran Framed by Louisiana Police and Prosectors Barely Escapes Jail Due to Cellphone Video.
Travis County doesn’t just use Securus’ phones. In May 2013, the local jails finished their transition to video visitation as Travis County Sheriff Greg Hamilton eliminated in-person visits.
Defending his county’s switch to video visitation, Cook points to the expensive phone system that Shawnee County jails use, which is also run by Securus. “If you look at the rates they charge for the telephone, the calls are outrageous, absolutely outrageous,” he says. “If I had the option to pay a lesser amount than I was paying for the telephone, by video, I would pay that in a heartbeat.”
Perhaps the problem is with Securus. This isn’t rocket science.
We learn more from a recent Mother Jones article:
On a chilly Sunday evening in December, a smattering of parents and small children trickled into a graffiti-covered concrete building on the grounds of the DC Jail. It was the last day to visit with prisoners before Christmas Eve, and some of the visitors were wearing Santa hats or bearing presents. The only thing missing was inmates. Three years ago, Washington, DC, eliminated in-person visitation for the roughly 1,800 residents of its jails and installed 54 video-conferencing screens in this building across the parking lot from the detention facility. The screens were installed, at no expense to taxpayers, by a Virginia-based company called Global Tel*Link (GTL), which had scored a lucrative contract for the facility’s phone service.
Now the only way families in the capital can see their loved ones in jail—many of whom have not yet been convicted of a crime and will be shipped out of state if they are—is to sit in front of a webcam for 45 minutes. (Two free weekly visits are allotted.) The video on the laptop-size screens often lags, creating an echo effect. It’s a cold, impersonal way to speak with someone a few hundred feet away. The effect, the Washington Post editorial board charged, has been “to punish prisoners and families.”
Yet video visitation is increasingly popular with correctional administrators lured by promises of lower costs, more revenue, and safer facilities. According to the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI), more than 75 counties and municipalities have replaced face-to-face jailhouse visits with video systems installed by industry giants like GTL and Securus, which are eager to squeeze money out of prisoners.
Take the deal Securus just inked with Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, to provide video visitation at six facilities and online. A 20-minute online video chat with a Maricopa County inmate costs $5. That’s the promotional rate; it then goes up to $12.95. The company is covering the $2.3 million cost of installing the on-site video in return for receiving all the profits from remote visitation until it hits 8,000 monthly paid visits—or roughly one per inmate. After that, the sheriff’s office will take a cut of the fees—another big selling point for cash-strapped cities and counties. Jails usually get somewhere between 10 and 30 percent of the profits from remote video visits after hitting certain traffic benchmarks.
With video visitation in place, it’s easy for jails to cut back on traditional visitation. When Dallas tried to introduce video visitation last year, it assured residents that face-to-face interactions weren’t going away. Its contract with Securus, however, called for just that—and sure enough, the county’s jails soon curtailed in-person visits. In a letter to county officials, Securus acknowledged that to make up for the cost of free on-site video visits, it had to steer visitors toward remote visits, which can cost up to $1 per minute.
Making money off captive consumers is nothing new. Until recently, many of the same companies now installing videoconferencing setups reaped huge windfalls by charging prisoners and their families more than a dollar a minute to talk on the phone. In 2013, the Federal Communications Commission intervened and set an interim rate of 21 cents per minute for prepaid interstate phone calls from prisons.
“Video has become a bigger and bigger deal in part to help replace some of the telephone revenue that’s been lost,” says Carrie Wilkinson, prison phone justice director at the Human Rights Defense Center.
And if jails aren’t sold on the financial windfalls of video visitation, there’s also the surveillance angle. The new video systems record and monitor both inmates and their visitors. Securus says that remote visitations “create new investigative opportunities”; a company called Guarded Exchange has partnered with Securus to offer “behavior analysis” of video chats. Another company, TurnKey, boasts that corrections officers can receive real-time notifications when inmates use its program; guards can even watch and listen in on visits from a smartphone. And its archived videos are “fully admissible in court.” What’s being billed as a curb against recidivism could also keep the jails full.
It would be one thing if these companies were merely providing an additional service. In contrast, they are writing into the contracts with the prisons that in person visitation must be eliminated. It’s a another heinous example of the cronyism that has come to dominate the U.S. economy in recent years.
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This is nation wide. And it is not news. Jails charge for everything. You need someone to put $$ in to your "jail account" if you want a full sized tooth brush and some tooth paste. Otherwise you can make due with the 2" lond one they give you.
I betcha, these Securus guys and gals at the end of the day go home, pet their dogs, cats, and children, do their yoga-bullshit and think they are “gewd people” and they are changing the world one video-conference at a time. Fucking cunts! ;-)
Looney
Just because the NSA likes video "visitations" don't mean the prison population does.
Petreus got caught by the same Squid he worked for, though a different tentacle. So did Spitzer and Weiner.
I can't wait to see general Alexander to be caught up in a wacky Internet-affair with little boys as well. ;-)
Looney
Dude, he blatantly perjured himself under oath in front of Congress and I doubt he was worried for 5 consecutive seconds about any consequences.
@Looney
Only if he pisses the wrong people off....
Which prison population are you talking about? The ones inside the walls or outside? Inside probably loves seeing the gf call in from home so they can see what they are missing. Outside probably hates that they don't actually have to get off the couch to go visit the 2nd and 4ths daddy.
They go to Church every Sunday. The RIGHT church too.
Church of Science and Technology?
Looney's description can't be more accurate, the whole "changing the world one blah blah at a time" mentality. It's the very lifeblood of SF startups - statists who think they're god's messengers for the latest and greatest shit you're forced to have.
This is a very depraved world we live in. Even Crito got to visit Socrates...
They and Corrections Corporation of America are some of the slimiest human beings on the planet. They are slavers protected by bribery.
cut them off, no visitors at all ever., fuckem
Your are a fucked up individual.
Maybe if you had a 18 year old son who's life gets wrecked by an angry father of a.16 year old hottie that enjoys giving him the occasional blow job you'd think differently.
Your head seriously needs to have the dents pulled.
What a heinous crime. That boy ought to be castrated as well /sarc
You are one sorry human being if you really mean that. I've hired numerous ex-cons over the years and have had excellent results. You're probably a fake ass Christian who preaches all the BS about salvation and then won't practice some common decency in your personal life by helping others who are truly less fortunate, got a bad deal in life or maybe got screwed by the system. Innocent or guilty, EVERYBODY deserves a second chance. And while they are in the clink doing their time they deserve to be treated decently. Get over yourself.
You are a fucking idiot.
Must be the guards want to keep a monopoly on drug moving?
Just another sign of our slide to oblivion.
pods
Private prisons = perverse incentives
Unless, of course, one owns the prison. Then it just makes good sense.
This is simply disgusting, utterly outrageous, and ultimately it just makes me sick. America has become such an ugly, vile place. It's like looking at the visage of a badly painted, used-up old whore who will say or do anything just to turn one more trick.
What is the address of the Secure Us offices in Dallas?
Better yet, whats the address of the guy running the show?
This shit needs to be taken OUT OF THEIR ASS!!!!
be optimistic, a global Bastille day is coming!!!
Not soon enough
Ooh, is that like an all day TV marathon of some show? I'll have to DVR it.. between seven reality shows, kardashian butt, facebook I don't have a whole lot of time left!
Having met a few prison guards over the years, I know that there are some decent ones but they don't last long in the system. Most I've met aren't much, if any, better than the prisoners.
The entire system is rotten, from the street to the Oval Office and everything in-between, squeezing pennies any way they can out of people who are often at the most vulnurable point in their lives.
Jails and prisons are some of the worst of it; hidden from view, shielded by law, protected from scrutiny, little or no accountability... Some of the lowest forms of life can be found in the American correctional system, and not speaking strictly of the inmates.
However, there are the rare and fair individuals who are employed by the system and who try to do right, but they have to always worry about getting set-up by their corrupt peers and managers. And you're right-- one can't last long on the job like that. At least I couldn't.
Need more prisoners too.
"prison calls"
a new reality series coming to Bravo
i mean, c'mon ... lets cut to the chase ... prisons sell the rights to these calls
i won't rest till i know how the Bubba - Loretta call went down ...
Guess that means no visitors for me, when I'm guesting at my local FEMA Resort & Inn !
Is there literally anything in our society that hasn't been corrupted and co-opted into the uttermost depths of depravity?
corruption is still the same as it was 100 years ago.
Banksters have not changed since... ever. And US folks made them perfect. The Rothschild shit lord could tell stories..
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No.
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V-V
Let's take this to the next level. Make enough laws and enough 24-hour surveilance that everyone is breaking some law or another, and everyone will quickly be caught. Then put everyone under houase arrest (allowed out only to go to their job) and charge them a high price for any video calls in or out of their home, er I mean "cell".
And you will get a big rebate when you install one into you kitchen and living room and bedroom and have them always on.
Human rights are over rated. In our day we got sent on a year long trip to Australia in manacles, and rolled and slid our way around the lower deck in feces and vomit, and totally loved it! There were no visiting rights or selfies back then pussies! You had the right to choke on your vomit and die like a disgusting pile of excrement, in-the-making. We have come a long way, all things considered, and the world is so much better now.
GOD SAVE THE QUEEN!
And her heirs and successors ... bloody marvelous people ... in what ways can we die for thee today, your noble and benevolent Excellencies?
Perhaps the advance force for the next crusades world war III???
Element, you make a great point. But back then you went to prison for actual horrible crimes (except debtors prison but I don't think treatment there was as bad as you suggest). These days you can get a lengthy sentence for picking your nose wrong (and it will be caught on a surveillance camera).
... and it will be analyzed to see if you were picking 'suspiciously'. But seriously, just because some things are better now is no excuse to revert back to a worse condition.
USA!! USA!!
It'll get worse before it gets better.
Jail and prison are not the same thing. Jails are what the counties run, and mostly house people awaiting trial or sentencing, or serving a year or less.
It's bad that crony capitalists are profiting off inmates in county jails. But a far worse human rights abuse occurs in the prison systems run by the states and the feds, where prisoners are housed for decades at a time. The use of solitary confinement.
https://www.aclu.org/dangerous-overuse-solitary-confinement-united-states
FEMA Camps in the wings
Now, explain to me how privatization saves the taxpayer money.
Hey, why not? I mean it isn't like we have any freedom or rights in this country any more.
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Mike Krieger is a certifiable nut. Absolutely batchit-crazy.
The wild paranoia, the rampant speculation.
You know how I know his batchit-crazy?
‘Cause for the first time in print, I’ve seen someone write down what I’ve always thought companies were doing for decades.
And I know I'm certifiably batchit-crazy!
Giving the stuff away at first, then… Got’cha!
Get you use to the process, get you hooked, like free heroin. Let you use the system, so it becomes habit.
Then comes the licensing fees, the administrative fees and fee, fee, fee!
Phrases like ‘ragging the puck’, ‘running the clock’ ‘slow rolling’ come to mind.
Remember when governments introduced the ability to renew your license on the Internet or a kiosk in a mall?
Then the ‘service fees’ started.
Fuck!
You’d think these bastards, being able to do it way cheaper, way faster, would just pass the savings on to you, not mentioning that YOU’RE fucking paying for it to begin with?!?
Think ISPs! Get ya hooked on that 29.95 about 10 years ago and then!? Start capping the download rates, while correspondingly, put in faster and faster download capabilities, upping your speed for free, while upping the cap cost, but not the cap, all the while, claiming the increased usage is slowing down the service, justifying the higher fees, for further capex. Rinse and repeat.
They’re no better than drug dealers.
Hell, I’ve been one.
Nobody worked like this! You’d be aired out in no time!
•?•
V-V
Life has choices. Bad choices can lead to other bad choices. We start young and grow old, and find that life is not always fair. We are not equal in health, beauty, intellect, quality of childhood, or any other quality you can name. Forget political correctness and make wise choices with what ever life mix you are given. Otherwise a jail is only one of the bad outcomes of life before our years run out.
Wise words ' are we there yet'
If Hitler had consulted with Securus and Global Tel*Link, the Nazis could've turned the death-camps into profit centres for their "final solution" and war efforts... If the quotas were met; otherwise the companies keep all the money.
Seriously, it's amazing and disgusting that modern US prisons have managed to profit from prisoners in ways that Nazis couldn't have even imagined.
Don't they already exploit their prison labor for decades?
Wait a minute- isn't there a great opportunity for advertising during these calls?
Someone ought to get on it!
Advertisements for what...? A do-it-yourself cell-made shiv kit?