Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog
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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 Jonesarticle:
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.
