by David M. Reutter
On September 10, 2021, a California court set aside an award by the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) of a contract to Global Tel Link Corporation (GTL) for telecommunications services for California prisoners.
The ruling disrupted GTL’s rollout of new tablets to state prisoners under the contract, which in turn had stuck a dagger in the heart of a tablet rollout underway by competitor Securus Technologies’ JPay, expanding on a pilot program launched at five state prisons in 2017.
At stake is the lucrative market for prisoner gaming, reading and listening material delivered via the tablets, which are also used to make audio and video calls. Those once made up the lion’s share of profits for prison communications firms, until the Federal Communications Commission began to reign in their outrageous rates. [See: PLN, Sep. 2021, p.12.]
As that saga was unfolding, in August 2020, CDCR and the state Department of Technology solicited bids by way of a request for proposals (RFP) followed by negotiations pursuant to the Public Contract Code Section 6611. The bids were to be evaluated under a system assigning each a maximum of 2000 points, 30% of which were allocated ...
by Ashleigh N. Dye
On July 1, 2022, a new Indiana law took effect that caps the price charged for phone calls in state prisons and jails. With the change, those held by the state Department of Corrections (DOC) now pay 12 cents per minute for a call. However, since most state prisoners don’t make much more than that per-hour working a prison job, the new rate still means they can afford a 15-minute phone call just once or twice a week.
Despite the price cut, the law is projected to increase call revenue as prisoners and detainees place calls more frequently at the new, lower price. Conveniently, that also locks in profits for phone service providers like GTL, which was able to kick back $12.6 million of its revenue from DOC prisoners to the state in the 2021 fiscal year. That kickback was not used for prisons or prisoner programming but to upgrade computer technology on the state government campus in Indianapolis.
Still, the sponsor of House Bill 1181 in the state senate, Sen. Jon Ford (R-Terre Haute), insisted that cutting the price of phone calls will reduce recidivism by enabling inmates to stay connected to their families. State ...
by Cooper Quintin and Beryl Lipton
This article was first published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation on September 7, 2021. It is reprinted here with permission.
Prison wardens and detention center administrators have, for years, faced what they believe to be a serious problem. While they can surveil every aspect of the lives of the people imprisoned in their facilities, they typically have no ability to violate the privacy and civil liberties of the friends and family of incarcerated people. Fortunately for prison administrators, Securus, notable for overcharging inmates for the privilege of communication with their loved ones, has done some thinking on the problem.
Earlier this year, Securus received approval for a patent describing a method of “linking controlled-environment facility residents and associated non-resident telephone numbers to ... e-commerce accounts associated with the captured telephone number” and “information about purchases made by a non-resident associated with the accessed e-commerce account.”
In other words, the patent imagined a way to capture the phone numbers of everyone a prisoner talks to, including friends and family, and to use that information to scrutinize their e-commerce purchases. (Note: After EFF published this post, Securus told EFF that it will not build the ...
by Alan Prendergast
In a news cycle dominated by reports of war, plague and insurrection, a single press announcement from Global Tel*Link (GTL) managed to convey some of the oddest news of all. Flash: The creators of the nation’s most beloved children’s television show are joining forces with GTL, the nation’s largest provider of phone services to carceral facilities.
Big Bird is headed for the Big House. Bert and Ernie are facing hard time. The prison-industrial complex has made its way to “Sesame Street.”
The press release ballyhooed a $750,000 grant made by GTL to Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit production company behind “Sesame Street,” to develop educational and coping materials for children dealing with parental incarceration. It’s estimated that more than five million children in the U.S. have had a parent behind bars at some point in their lives, and the new materials would “strengthen connections for the whole family”—comforting kids, supplying tips to caregivers on how to talk to children about incarceration, and offering resources to imprisoned parents that “will highlight the importance of communication.”
The irony of GTL’s new alliance was hard to miss. Incarcerated people already have a deep appreciation of the “importance of communication,” thanks to ...
by Paul Wright
PLN has been reporting on the prison phone industry for at least the past 30 years, from its inception to its current stranglehold on most means of human contact between prisoners and the outside world. This month’s cover story by Alan Prendergast reports on the public relations efforts by Securus and now-renamed Global Tel Link to burnish their reputations as corrupt, greedy leeches who profit by exploiting the poorest people in America. Rather than ask why these companies are so exploitative, a better question is: Why do they exist at all?
The United States has around 2 million of the world’s 10 million prisoners, more than any other country. It is also the only country which has an industry totally dedicated to doing nothing more than extracting wealth from prisoners and their families at every level. I have researched what telecommunications services prisoners in other countries have. It should come as no surprise that in places as diverse as Ireland, Indonesia, India, the Philippines, the Netherlands, etc., prisoners use Skype, WhatsApp and similar services to communicate with friends and family at no cost to them or their families. As most of the U.S. and the world moves ...
by Ashleigh Dye
When prison telecom company Global Tel*Link (GTL) agreed to slash the price for calls that it charges detainees held by the Miami-Dade Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (DCR) in November 2021, it was only because advocates of the incarcerated convinced county officials to forfeit kickbacks the firm was contractually obligated to pay, effectively diverting money from federal COVID-19 relief funds to GTL in order make up the shortfall in the county budget.
Right at the federal cap on per-minute charges, GTL was charging fourteen cents for a minute of phone time to DCR detainees—$2.10 for a 15-minute call—providing a yearly revenue stream of $6.8 million. The county received 60% of that in a kickback euphemistically called a “site commission.”
After collaborating with prisoner advocacy group Beyond the Bars, though, the county agreed to forfeit those payments through the remainder of its current contract with GTL, which ends in July 2022, in order to reduce the per-minute call price to five cents for the approximately 4,000 people held in its three jail facilities.
“This is still way out of line with the trend towards ensuring free communication,” said Maya Ragsdale, the advocacy group’s executive director. “But it’s a ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
Prison phone services provider Global*Tel Link (GTL) agreed to a settle a long-running class-action on December 20, 2021, with changes to company policies and up to $67 million to compensate customers for seizing funds in any account that remained inactive for 90 days. Though the amount actually paid will likely be much less, GTL will also pay almost $19 million in attorney fees as part of the settlement.
GTL, which changed its name to ViaPath Technologies on January 4, 2022, provides telephone service to prisoners in almost 2,000 prisons and jails spanning all 50 states, holding a monopoly in most, just as its major competitors do. [See: PLN, Sep. 2021, p.12.]
Paying for calls usually occurs in one of three ways: (1) prisoners purchase a prepaid phone card, which incorporates a fee above and beyond the number of minutes covered by the cost of the card; (2) prisoners make “collect” calls, with the call recipient agreeing to pay an exorbitant rate for the call, which gets tacked on to their phone bill; or (3) the cheapest option, which involves the recipient creating an “account” preloaded with some amount of money to cover the cost of the ...
by Douglas Ankney
A suit brought by the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC) alleging a price-fixing and kickback scheme by prison telephone service providers Global Tel*Link Corp. (now known as ViaPath), Securus Technologies, LLC, and 3Cinteractive Corp. (3Ci), survived a motion to dismiss by Defendants on September 30, 2021.
HRDC, which has published Prison Legal News since 1990 and Criminal Legal News since 2017, filed the suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland on behalf of a putative class of Plaintiffs who have paid, or will pay, $9.99 or $14.99 to receive a single collect call billed by 3Ci for either Securus or ViaPath/GTL, pursuant to their inmate calling service (ICS) contracts with governments operating prisons or jails.
Though this particular battle is being waged over exploitative pricing, the longer war with these firms will also have serious constitutional repercussions. As reported elsewhere in this issue, Securus and ViaPath/GTL are engaged in protracted legal battles over the illegal recording of prisoners’ privileged phone conversations with their attorneys. [See: PLN, Feb. 2022, p.36.]
In this case, the first move was made by Securus, which in 2010 launched two calling services:
• ‘PayNow,’ which charges a fee of $14.99 ...
Company Walks From Similar Case in Maine
by David M. Reutter
In November 2021, a year after a federal district court in California approved a $900,000 settlement in a class-action lawsuit alleging Securus Technologies, Inc. unlawfully recorded privileged calls between detainees and attorneys, the prison phone giant was still fighting similar allegations in Maine.
The November 19, 2020, order and judgment by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California resolved a lawsuit filed on May 27, 2016, by two former detainees and a criminal defense attorney who used Securus’ telephone services to make calls to and from correctional facilities and whose calls were recorded. [See: PLN, Aug. 2016, p.15.]
As previously reported by PLN, Securus and its main competitor in the prison phone market, Global Tel*Link (now known as ViaPath), agreed to a $3.7 million settlement earlier in 2020 for engaging in the same illegal behavior at the federal Bureau of Prison’s Leavenworth Detention Center, where the recordings were shared with prosecutors. [See: PLN, Jan. 2020, p.56.]
More recently, another case was filed in Maine alleging that Securus had illegally recorded prisoners’ privileged calls with their attorneys in that state. But a federal judge decided ...
by David M. Reutter
On July 8, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit refused a request to rehear en banc a decision by a three-judge panel of the Court that three months earlier affirmed a grant of qualified immunity to a guard who monitored phone calls between a prisoner and his attorney at the now-shuttered Nevada State Prison.
As reported elsewhere in this issue, the erosion of prisoners’ Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable seizure of private consultations with defense attorneys is a troubling trend, especially with the out-sourcing of prison phone services to private companies who are more difficult to sue. [See: PLN, Feb. 2022, p.21.]
The underlying events in this long-running case occurred between May 2007 and January 2008, which is when the prisoner, John Witherow, and his attorney, Donald York Evans, alleged that guards Lea Baker and Ingrid Connally violated his Fourth Amendment rights and engaged in unlawful wiretapping by listening to their calls with one another. Witherow and Evans filed suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada, which dismissed their Fourth Amendment claim on November 5, 2009. See: Evans v. Skolnik, 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 104427 (D. Nev.). ...
