By Charlotte West
Open Campus Reporter, Reprinted by permission
For over two weeks, every time I tried to log onto GettingOut, I got the same error message:
“We’re sorry, but something went wrong. We’ve been notified about this issue and we’ll take a look at it shortly.”
As an education reporter covering prisons, I use the messaging app primarily to communicate with incarcerated writers and sources. I talk to people in multiple facilities across several states on a fairly regular basis. Suddenly, to all of them, it seemed like I had just disappeared. I got emails from people inside via their outside contacts asking if I was Ok, I was no longer on their contact list, and all of our messages were suddenly gone.
The somewhat ironically named GettingOut is used by corrections departments in states including California, North Carolina, Oregon, Maryland, and Ohio. The company is a subsidiary of Viapath, a prison tech company formerly known as Global Tel Link (GTL). Together, Viapath and its biggest competitor, Securus, dominate more than 80% of the prison e-messaging market, according to a recent report from the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI). Prison telecom is an estimated billion-dollar industry.
When I couldn’t log onto the app, I tried to go through regular customer service channels, calling Viapath’s 1-800 number several times, usually to find out that the option to speak with a human had been disabled. At least six emails went unanswered.
Several other reporters had experienced the same disappearing account phenomenon, and it wasn’t until we played the journalist card that we got some answers from the company. Several executives agreed to meet with me last week. Matt Caesar, chief strategy officer at Viapath, was the only one who answered a few questions on the record. (The night before my meeting, my account and its content were restored).
It turned out that the glitch was due to “an unexpected issue during a system conversion from a prior provider to GettingOut” that affected around less than 1% of users, a Viapath spokesperson said in an email. The company declined to share the total number of users, but from previous reporting earlier this year we know that the company has deployed around 500,000 tablets in prisons.
Here’s the thing: Everyone has crappy customer service stories to tell, whether it’s an airline, a bank, or calling the Education Department about student loans. That’s not really what this story is about.
For people inside, it’s about cutting off a lifeline to the outside world, even just temporarily. And the fact that they have few options when something goes wrong. As College Inside contributor Lyle C. May — who was on the other end of the app issues — put it, “I’m in prison. I have no recourse.”
For me, it was annoying that I couldn’t log onto my account and spent several hours trying to fix the problem. But I had other communications channels, and I could spend time on it as part of my work day. I wasn’t trying to send a goodnight message to my partner or look at photos of my kids.
I asked Lyle about this. “Incarcerated people don’t have the luxury of picking and choosing how to communicate,” he said. “Speed and certainty of the contact are the two top concerns.”
Lyle, who is incarcerated in North Carolina, relies on his tablet to communicate with various editors as well as the academic adviser for his college program. While his adviser and I were the only two contacts that disappeared in this glitch, such problems imperil his professional life: We thought a short story (which, fittingly, was about the educational content offered on Viapath tablets) he had submitted to me was gone forever.
This kind of inconsistency of prison tech also makes getting a degree inside even more fraught. Losing contact with his academic adviser means that Lyle can’t quickly resolve issues related to completing his degree program, which is already a fraught process.
Lyle didn’t have another way to contact customer service or tech support. There’s an app on his tablet where he’s supposed to be able to submit support requests, but there’s no way to send a message, he said.
Lyle isn’t the only person I talk to inside who has had these tech issues. In Ohio, Heather Jarvis said that because the state is in the process of converting from Securus to Viapath, there’s a technician who is holding open hours for in-person support while they work out the kinks, but “the line is insane.”
So what did Viapath have to say about the challenges of customer support inside?
“In each of the facilities, there’s different methods that an incarcerated individual has to request a refund or contact our support,” Caesar said during our meeting. “And that’s generally through the tablet.”
Paying to be monitored and recorded
Once my account was finally restored, Lyle and I went back and forth about this issue for a few days. I sent him 45 messages at $.25 each for a total of $11.25, while Lyle estimated he spent about 120 minutes for another $1.20. So all in all, we paid Viapath $12.40 to discuss its business model.
(To put this in context, Lyle says that most people in North Carolina prisons make between $.40 and $1 a day. Lyle pays $15 for a package of 1,500 minutes — or around $.01 a minute — of messaging and entertainment. If people can’t afford to buy a package, they pay $.03 a minute.
There are practical implications too. Because incarcerated people don’t have something like Google Drive to back up their content, they often pay for messaging as a way to store their writing. The good news? Viapath assured me that no users lost their data with the glitch that I experienced last week and that data is backed up and restored.
That brings me to another set of issues that I saw this past week: privacy and information retention. The same companies that provide the messaging also provide phone services. As PPI put it, “There are … grave privacy concerns when one company controls all communications channels to which incarcerated people have access.”
The reason all that data is stored is a reminder that everything said or written over prison communication channels is being recorded. I asked Caesar about his in our meeting, but he agreed to answer only in writing. But generally, he said, the company’s retention policies vary based on the facility — lasting potentially multiple years — and their contract with correction agencies. And, the company retains everything from phone call to videos — “anything we’re recording and monitoring for,” he said.
This raises some important questions that educators will have to contend with as the tech landscape in prison continues to evolve. While people in prison have never had privacy when making a phone call, advances in technology allow an even greater degree of surveillance of incarcerated people — and their contacts on the outside — than ever before.
Colleges working in this space are starting to weigh issues of student privacy with ease and speed of communication. Should messaging systems only be used to send mundane information? Who is responsible for providing tech support if a student sends an assignment that suddenly disappears? If a student submits an essay on their tablet, could the content later be used against them?
All of these issues become especially relevant as prison tech companies continue to position themselves as providers of educational content — and in some cases education itself.
Lyle had some thoughts about this. Educators and others on the outside are naïve if they think that they aren’t being censored or they have any privacy when communicating with incarcerated people on digital platforms, he said. And practicality trumps privacy, because that doesn’t really exist in prison anyway.
“The problem with colleges waffling about that privacy is in thinking their flexibility extends to the incarcerated,” he said. “It does not. Incarcerated students have to communicate … by any means available, not necessarily the means they want.”
This story was co-published with Future Tense, a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.
