Over the previous decade, dozens of states and the Federal Bureau of Prisons have contracted with personal corporations to offer their incarcerated populations with digital tablets. These safe gadgets allow individuals in jails and prisons to alternate email-like messages with their family members, obtain cash, and obtain leisure and academic supplies. Some enable video visits.
Whereas tablets can hold imprisoned individuals extra linked to the surface, they arrive at a price. Costs and companies differ in accordance with the offers made by every corrections system, however customers are inclined to pay a charge for each message, obtain and deposit. With the typical jail wage maxing out at 52 cents per hour, households typically take in the price of staying in contact.
The 2 corporations that dominate the jail phone enterprise additionally command the pill market — ViaPath Applied sciences, rebranded from GTL, and Securus, which acquired JPay in 2015. Years of activism by incarcerated individuals, their households and advocates resulted within the Federal Communications Fee capping the price of jail cellphone and video calls final 12 months. However tablet-based merchandise stay largely unregulated.
As a result of jail telecom distributors are inclined to bundle their companies, corrections techniques typically contract with a single supplier, no matter high quality. And dozens of states make “commissions” from person charges. Inside this context, incarcerated individuals turn out to be the unwilling shoppers of a billion-dollar trade. Shakeil Value, one such person at New Jersey State Jail, explores one other facet of bundle offers: What occurs when a state switches suppliers?
Imagine in case you have been pressured to alter your cellphone supplier, and the brand new firm mentioned you wouldn’t be capable of hold the content material you have gathered during the last 10 years. How would you’re feeling? As somebody going through the same state of affairs, I might say: distraught.
This case started final March when the New Jersey Division of Corrections introduced that, after a decade, it was altering its “inmate communications supplier” from JPay to ViaPath. The digital memo they despatched was obscure and failed to say precisely how the transition would happen.
We may safely assume that ViaPath would change our tablets. We additionally figured the corporate would take away our present kiosks, the shared computer systems we sync up with our tablets to ship messages and obtain films, music and video games.
What we didn’t know was how a lot ViaPath would cost us or what would occur to all the things on our JPay tablets, which basically operate as arduous drives. The dearth of particulars heightened anxiousness among the many inhabitants at New Jersey State Jail as a result of we have been not sure of how the longer term would unfold.
Our wing representatives gathered our questions and considerations and took them to the administration. What they introduced again was principally, “They’re gonna get again to us on that.”
Eventually we realized that the ViaPath tablets might be facility-owned “loaners” that we’ll obtain freed from cost. However that “free” {hardware} can’t presumably cowl the private and monetary losses we’ll maintain once we both ship our JPay tablets residence or give them to the jail system for disposal.
My little 7-inch JP6 pill with its meager 32-gigabytes of reminiscence might not imply a lot to the state, but it surely holds a decade’s value of sentimental e-messages, photos and video messages from my household and mates. By altering distributors, I’ll lose entry to pictures from my son’s highschool commencement and movies of my grandchild saying his first phrase, taking his first step and driving his first bike. These things are priceless to me; a greenback quantity cannot measure their value.
I can calculate how a lot I’ve spent on JPay merchandise. Let’s begin with the price of exchanging e-messages. Like different jail tech corporations, JPay sells digital “stamps.” In New Jersey, they price 35 cents apiece and solely are available packages of 5, 10 or 20.
Every e-stamp covers a message with 20,000 characters or much less. Something over that restrict will price you or the one you love one other stamp. For those who connect a digital picture or greeting card to your message, that can take extra stamps. Clearly this provides up.
Snail mail was as soon as a viable different, however now it takes about three weeks to succeed in us. Within the title of safety, our family members should mail their correspondence — letters, pictures, drawings, postcards and greeting playing cards — to a processing heart in Las Vegas run by a non-public firm referred to as Pigeonly Corrections. Pigeonly scans the mail for unlawful substances and red-flag phrases and sends copies of mail marked protected to every jail for distribution by workers. This inconvenience all however ensures that our family members will use digital messages.
Subsequent, contemplate how a lot I’ve spent on {hardware}. Since 2015, my tablets have damaged or malfunctioned on three separate events. These gadgets price $75 apiece, so I’ve spent a complete of $225 on tablets that can quickly be out of date.
Then there’s the small fortune I’ve spent on downloads. Over the last decade that I’ve had a JPay pill, I’ve downloaded over 3,000 songs at $1.99 apiece. I’ve spent an estimated worth of $6,000 on music as a result of it’s my lifeline. I’m a hip-hop fanatic with a background as a rap artist, and I hearken to all the things from Rakim to Wu-Tang Clan to Jay Electronica.
I’m a gamer, too. I’ve downloaded 25 video games at $3.99 to $8.99, plus tax. I play my Chess, Sudoku and NBA Jams for hours at a time, typically whereas I’m listening to my music.
JPay sells its downloads for a one-time charge. As soon as you purchase the license to a music or sport, you need to use it everytime you wish to. Your purchases are saved on the cloud, and you’ll even take away gadgets out of your pill to create space, then obtain them once more at no extra price.
ViaPath, then again, operates a streaming service that fees charges for utilization on prime of downloads. On the time of this writing, even after greater than a 12 months, I nonetheless don’t know the price of streaming or how typically I must pay for it.
Even scarier is the prospect of paying per minute to ship e-messages and use media you’ve already bought. That’s what they do in Tennessee, in accordance with a March 2025 article in Jail Authorized Information. In that state, prisoners should pay 3 to five cents a minute to look at their films, play their video games — and sort their messages.
This vendor change may put a pressure on my already depleted funds. I solely receives a commission $1 per hour as a trainer’s assistant, and my workdays are 5 hours. Reality be advised, this $5 job is taken into account the most effective within the jail.
Not everyone seems to be phased by the change. Clarence Artis, a person who stays in a cell a couple of ft away from me, mentioned he’s wanting ahead to utilizing the video go to possibility on his ViaPath pill. (On JPay, now we have to make use of a public kiosk for video visits.) “Generally you must quit one thing to get one thing,” he advised me. “If I gotta quit these throwback tablets with all the things on em,’ oh properly. I wanna see my woman’s face once I speak to her.”
I completely perceive that not everyone in jail is confronted with the identical circumstances. If I’d solely bought one pill and 100 songs, it wouldn’t be that massive of a difficulty for me to alter distributors. Additionally, if I used to be going to be launched from jail in a couple of months or years, my place could be totally different. I would not be bothered by the seller change as a result of I might be residence, within the bodily presence of my family members, having fun with their smiles and laughter up shut.
Sadly, that’s not the case for me. I’m serving a life sentence, and I’m not eligible for parole till 2077. Many of the brothers right here at New Jersey State Jail are lengthy haulers. They do not are inclined to ship individuals right here with lower than a 30-year sentence. To depart from such private belongings is like dropping part of your existence.
For an answer, I’ve recommended that we hold the outdated tablets that we purchased in our possession. That’s what Idaho is planning on doing when it switches from JPay to ViaPath this month. Based on a February replace on the state’s corrections division web site, “residents” will be capable of maintain on to their {hardware} and use what they downloaded “till the pill stops working.” Prisoners may also have the choice of mailing the pill again to JPay in order that the corporate can put their downloads on a USB, unlock the pill and ship each to a house deal with. Their households and mates will be capable of use the unlocked pill.
I imagine it’s additionally technologically attainable to switch materials to a brand new vendor’s pill. When Ohio switched from JPay to ViaPath tablets in 2023, it reportedly allowed prisoners to switch all content material apart from video games. That June, the corrections division’s web site proudly pronounced it “the primary time in historical past {that a} correctional company has switched communication distributors with out the incarcerated inhabitants experiencing a lack of significant media information, comparable to messages, music, and pictures.” I’m unsure how properly the implementation truly went, however I hope my state at the very least tries to barter this type of deal.
New Jersey began utilizing ViaPath’s barely cheaper monetary companies in late March, and I’ve seen staff putting in new routers in my facility. However the gradual rollout and unanswered questions have made this vendor change irritating and worrying.
Many people come from poor communities. We’ve invested a lot — emotionally and financially — into these corporations, and once we take losses, it hits in a different way. These communication distributors exploit the truth that, as prisoners, we’re determined for leisure and methods to remain united with our households by way of these remoted instances. With this desperation ever-present amongst a captive market, corporations like JPay and ViaPath have solid a monopoly at our expense.
Shakeil Value is a poet and a printed writer. His guide, “P.E.A.C.E. in Jail,” is offered on Amazon. Shakeil has additionally printed articles as a contract journalist for Jail Writers and as a contributing author for the Jail Journalism Undertaking. As of at this time, Shakeil stays incarcerated at New Jersey State Jail as he fights to overturn his homicide conviction.
The New Jersey Division of Corrections (NJDOC) director of public data Christopher Greeder said that “the [d]epartment is presently reviewing extra companies to be offered by ViaPath and can talk any updates or enhancements to the incarcerated inhabitants after they turn out to be out there.”
He added that “kiosks might be eradicated and changed with tablets. If an incarcerated individual refuses a pill, they are going to be provided paper types to finish any duties wanted.”
Concerning Pigeonly’s mail supply instances, they said that it takes “sometimes lower than two weeks,” however varies relying on the pace of the USA Postal Service.
