By Michael McCutcheon and Ruby Hernandez
NORTHAMPTON, MA – A new report authored by Mike Wessler and the Prison Policy Initiative documents the extensive use of e-messaging in prisons and the immense profits companies have made in the new and unregulated industry.
According to Wessler’s report, text-based electronic messaging, or “e-messaging,” rose to prominence after regulators lowered the prices of prison and jail phone rates, which incentivized the companies behind those services to seek out the new and less-regulated industry of e-messaging.
While e-messaging itself can be rather attractive for inmates given its instantaneous communication, “high costs and shoddy technology have made e-messaging little more than the latest way these companies drain money from incarcerated people and their loved ones,” said Wessler.
The new report by the Prison Policy Initiative and Wessler sought to document the use of e-messaging across all 50 state prison systems, along with noting how much it costs, and whether there are protections in place “to protect incarcerated people and their families from exploitation.”
When the Prison Policy Initiative first examined e-messaging in 2016, “the technology was experimental, untested, and viewed skeptically by many correctional administrators.” However, the explosive growth of the industry has led to “at least 43 state prison systems and the BOP offer[ing] some electronic messaging option,” reads the report.
According to the report, despite the lucrative market, only two companies dominate the e-messaging sphere. Securus, under its JPay brand, and ViaPath make up more than 81 percent of the prison e-messaging market.
When e-messaging was first coming into prisons, incarcerated users usually had to queue in a line to use a kiosk that would send and receive their messages.
“Now messaging is commonly part of a computer tablet package,” writes Wessler, “where each incarcerated user is either assigned their own tablet or checks one out for a set period of time.”
While he notes the ease and convenience of such a system, he also goes on to point out that there are many hidden costs associated with every aspect of a tablet, particularly after the Covid-19 pandemic.
“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. There are also grave privacy concerns when one company controls all communications channels to which incarcerated people have access,” states Wessler.
Originally, the report by the Prison Policy Initiative documented a lowering in the per-message price of e-messaging since 2016, but companies have attempted to find ways to maximize profits.
Specifically, Wessler mentions bulk-pricing, which about half of the states that offer e-messaging include. Bulk-pricing requires that “customers pay a higher cost unless they prepay for larger blocks of messages…[Which] often results in people buying large packages of messages they may never use…[and] it charges the poorest people in prison – people who can only afford a small number of messages at a given time – the most money.”
However, the report also notes some states have an alternative to per-message pricing. In these states, while people sending a message into correctional facilities are charged per-message, incarcerated individuals are charged per minute to read and respond to messages.
Wessler notes “research has shown that people in prison often have lower literacy levels, meaning it takes them longer to send and read e-messages. Per-minute pricing acts as a literacy tax.”
Additionally, companies may charge twice for the same message, once when someone sends it and another when someone reads it, said Wessler, adding, “this complex pricing structure is one of the many problems with ‘bundled contracts,’ which give one company control over multiple services in a prison, allowing them to evade oversight and develop new hidden ways to sap money from incarcerated people.”
The lack of government regulation of corporations reflects one of the motivations for the continuing use of unethical prison and jail services, said the report.
In this way, Wessler argues that society has normalized this type of “kickback” behavior from corporations. However, the Prison Policy Initiative’s data on the states that do not have on-site commissions within their prison systems tend to have some of the lowest prices.
Amid this rising social issue, state and federal officials continue the debate on the capitalization of sending e-messages. As Wessler emphasized, “any price that includes kickbacks for the government is higher than it needs to be.”
Data collection through the e-messaging service from the imprisoned person and their families creates a pressing privacy concern, according to the article. The technology providers have lacked transparency of data usage and storage.
For instance, the privacy policy of JPay states that a user’s data may be shared “with law enforcement personnel and/or correctional facilities and certain third parties for use in connection with and in support of law enforcement activities.” This policy gives great discretion to the companies and not many answers to those cornered to use their service, said the author.
Wessler explains how ViaPath specifically further capitalizes and simultaneously surveils prison and jail populations.
Their approach differs by not having a broad privacy and data policy. Instead ViaPath markets “Data IQ,” which they claim “was designed to handle large volumes of data coming from multiple, disparate sources” to “enable correctional facilities to easily review and analyze the networks, relationships, and connections associated with their inmate population.” According to Wessler, this business tactic attracts many prison and jail systems.
While incarcerated people do have limited rights, Wessler does not believe it justifies the breach of data privacy both the receiver and sender of e-messages suffer. Instead, Wessler proposes “clear guidelines, procedures, disclosure requirements, and protections whenever e-messaging data is accessed by anyone other than an employee of the correctional facility that issued the governing contract.”
Wessler goes on to offer five suggestions to correctional administrators, legislators, and regulators that may improve the current state of e-messaging in correctional facilities.
The first suggestion is simply make the service free and eliminate costs for the parties involved. While he argues that standard paper mail is and should continue to be an option for communicating, the costs of shipping and receiving physical mail creates some barriers that lead prison and jail systems into an alternative.
The alternative, according to the article, is scanning and printing digital copies of incarcerated people’s mail. This practice has increased delayed mail delivery time rates both in the inside and outside of prison walls.
Wessler also notes that e-messaging also improves mail carrier processing, protects the option of physical mail, and encourages incarcerated people and their relatives to use the service more. It further relieves correctional facilities from the added obligation to process mail and distribute it.
The second suggestion Wessler offers is to add enhanced features to e-messaging systems, including allowing users on the inside to send traditional emails to anyone with an email address, and supporting documents, government forms, copies of news stories, and other attachments. Highly sensitive computer systems (like those run by courts and tax agencies) have figured out safe ways to do this. E-messaging companies should get on board and allow users to create, attach, send, and receive simple files like PDFs, website screenshots, and word-processing documents.
Also, Wessler suggests eliminating character limits; they’re restrictive, arbitrary, and technologically unnecessary. This would give users clear ownership over the content of their messages and a simple and free way to export their data to another program, like Outlook. Also, he said, allow non-English characters.
Wessler’s third suggestion refers back to on-site commissions, which Wessler believes should be eliminated. This would lower the per messaging cost and produce savings for the facilities. Once on-site commission is eliminated, he argues it would create business market competition among providers as opposed to the dominance currently in place.
Finally, he urges the need to define user privacy rights. Within those rights and protections, Wessler believes that “at a minimum, all correctional facilities should require that e-messaging providers’ privacy policies tell users information is stored, how long it is stored, how it is protected, who has access to it, and what happens if that data is inappropriately breached.”
