Since 2023, nearly all of the more than 90,000 prisoners locked up by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) have been assigned a tablet that can make calls, receive messages, and access other apps. But currently, a massive shift is underway that is disrupting these services for prisoners as the CDCR switches from one tablet vendor to another.

The transition is months behind schedule and, according to CalMatters, it has already led to increased text messaging charges at the first prison it has been fully introduced to. In a recent bidding war between two companies, Securus won out and signed a four-year, $189 million contract with the CDCR to replace its chief competitor Viapath/Global Tel Link. Taken together, Securus and Viapath hold a tight grip on the incarcerated telecommunications market, with the former holding 3,400 contracts with prisons and jails across the country and the latter close to 2,000.

By the end of 2025, Securus tablets were supposed to get rolled out in every CDCR prison. But most state prisons are still stocked with Viapath devices and will not transition until later this year. Although California is one of only five states that cover the cost of phone calls by incarcerated people, Securus still charges prisoners for messaging and streaming. And while Securus’s contract showed that it charged less for these services than Viapath, some prisoners and their families were being charged more than the 3 cents per message that was promised.

At the end of March, however, after advocates complained and CalMatters asked questions about the fees, Securus quietly went back to the original price and issued a $10 credit to every prisoner at the California Institution for Women in Chino.

Beyond the potential for price-gouging, moving from Viapath to Securus has created a more immediate disaster. As prisoners exchange one tablet for another, they will be unable to transfer their stored data, meaning that they stand to lose access to personal photos, videos and messages they’ve received since 2023. This is because Securus does not offer a way to store or save the data to a separate device, and prisoners can not access cloud-storage apps like Google Drive or Dropbox.

 Prisoners are, instead, limited to a single option: paying to physically print their photos and messages page-by-page before the Viapath tablets get permanently turned off. 

Source: CalMatters