PPI TAKES A CRITICAL LOOK AT TABLET PROGRAM
The Prison Policy Initiative says that profits of e-messaging vendors are taking precedence over the tablet-based messaging tool’s potential to enhance connections between incarcerated people and their families.
“These tablets are often touted as ‘free’ but, in reality, are rife with hidden costs,” wrote PPI in their report, “The rapid & unregulated growth of e-messaging in prisons.”
“As tablets become more common, the companies providing them continue their relentless push to monetize every aspect of incarcerated peoples’ communications, reading, listening to music, and formal education,” said the report.
The group describes the proliferation of the tool within prisons as “explosive and unregulated” and the product itself as “shoddy technology.”
E-messaging is present in the federal system and at least 43 state prison systems, according to PPI.
Just a few vendors control the prison e-messaging market. Securus, branded as JPay, holds contracts in 22 states. GTL, also known as ViaPath, provides the service to another 15 states. Together, the two giants of the industry control 81% of the market. Another significant player is CorrLinks, a service provider associated with the Keefe Group family of correctional vendors.
These vendors have pivoted from telephone services, where pressure from advocates and regulators to lower prices has cut into profits, to the less regulated e-messaging niche.
The resulting product compares poorly with email, reports PPI. The group named a series of “common flaws in e-messaging that make it an inferior product.”
Those flaws include: no support for most attachments, no support for text and form-based documents, inability to share news stories and links, lack of support for non-English characters, unnecessary character limits, and questions about information ownership, wrote PPI.
The privacy of incarcerated users of e-messaging, as well as that of their outside contacts, is one of PPI’s key concerns.
“The quantity and sensitivity of information captured in e-messaging systems — from people on both sides of the prison walls — is staggering,” wrote the group.
The data includes names, addresses, credit card information and the contents of the messages. Venders provide very little information to users about how their data is stored, protected, or even used.
JPay’s privacy policy says it may share the data “with law enforcement personnel and/or correctional facilities and certain third parties for use in connection with and in support of law enforcement activities.”
GTL/ViaPath describes the capabilities of its service more boldly, promoting its product to correctional officials as a data-mining technology to “enable correctional facilities to easily review and analyze the networks, relationships, and connections associated with their inmate population.”
PPI’s concern is that users of the product, whether inside or outside prisons, don’t know who can see or use their information and have no assurance that it won’t be improperly accessed. They are subjects of a “surveillance tool that targets people based on nothing more than their contact with an incarcerated person,” wrote the group.
Another concern of PPI is the cost of e-messages to incarcerated users and their outside contacts. Those costs range widely, from no charge per message in Connecticut, to fifty cents in Alaska and Arkansas.
The fifty-cent cost seems tied roughly to the cost of a first-class stamp and that serves as its justification. PPI wrote, “The price of a stamp has nothing to do with the cost of providing electronic messages, so there is little justification for tying the two products together.”
In some systems, both the incarcerated user and the outside contact pay a fee for the same message. In other cases, vendors charge incarcerated users a rate per minute to read incoming or compose outgoing e-messages, similar to a telephone charge.
Correctional facilities stand to realize substantial savings from e-messaging, wrote the organization, and those savings should be used to foot the bill for the system.
Therefore, PPI argues that the service should be free to incarcerated users and their outside contacts.
