Over the previous decade, dozens of states and the Federal Bureau of Prisons have contracted with non-public firms to offer their incarcerated populations with digital tablets. These safe units allow folks 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 folks extra linked to the surface, they arrive at a price. Costs and providers fluctuate based on the offers made by every corrections system, however customers are inclined to pay a payment for each message, obtain and deposit. With the typical jail wage maxing out at 52 cents per hour, households usually soak up the price of staying in contact.
The 2 firms 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 folks, their households and advocates resulted within the Federal Communications Fee capping the price of jail telephone and video calls final yr. However tablet-based merchandise stay largely unregulated.
As a result of jail telecom distributors are inclined to bundle their providers, corrections methods usually contract with a single supplier, no matter high quality. And dozens of states make “commissions” from consumer charges. Inside this context, incarcerated folks turn into the unwilling shoppers of a billion-dollar business. Shakeil Value, one such consumer at New Jersey State Jail, explores one other facet of bundle offers: What occurs when a state switches suppliers?
Imagine if you happen to have been compelled to vary your cellular phone supplier, and the brand new firm stated you wouldn’t have the ability to hold the content material you’ve got gathered during the last 10 years. How would you’re feeling? As somebody going through an analogous state of affairs, I’d say: distraught.
This example 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 exchange 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 pieces on our JPay tablets, which basically operate as laborious drives. The shortage of particulars heightened anxiousness among the many inhabitants at New Jersey State Jail as a result of we have been uncertain of how the longer term would unfold.
Our wing representatives gathered our questions and issues and took them to the administration. What they introduced again was largely, “They’re gonna get again to us on that.”
Eventually we discovered that the ViaPath tablets shall be facility-owned “loaners” that we’ll obtain freed from cost. However that “free” {hardware} can’t probably cowl the private and monetary losses we’ll maintain once we both ship our JPay tablets house or give them to the jail system for disposal.
My little 7-inch JP6 pill with its meager 32-gigabytes of reminiscence could not imply a lot to the state, but it surely holds a decade’s value of sentimental e-messages, footage 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 using his first bike. This stuff 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 firms, JPay sells digital “stamps.” In New Jersey, they price 35 cents apiece and solely are available in 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. If you happen to connect a digital picture or greeting card to your message, that may take extra stamps. Clearly this provides up.
Snail mail was as soon as a viable various, however now it takes about three weeks to achieve us. Within the identify 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 secure to every jail for distribution by employees. This inconvenience all however ensures that our family members will use digital messages.
Subsequent, think about how a lot I’ve spent on {hardware}. Since 2015, my tablets have damaged or malfunctioned on three separate events. These units price $75 apiece, so I’ve spent a complete of $225 on tablets that may 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 pieces 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, usually whereas I’m listening to my music.
JPay sells its downloads for a one-time payment. As soon as you purchase the license to a tune or recreation, you should utilize it everytime you wish to. Your purchases are saved on the cloud, and you may even take away objects out of your pill to create space, then obtain them once more at no extra price.
ViaPath, alternatively, operates a streaming service that expenses charges for utilization on high of downloads. On the time of this writing, even after greater than a yr, I nonetheless don’t know the price of streaming or how usually 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, based on a March 2025 article in Jail Authorized Information. In that state, prisoners should pay 3 to five cents a minute to observe their films, play their video games — and kind 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 instructed, this $5 job is taken into account probably the greatest within the jail.
Not everyone seems to be phased by the swap. Clarence Artis, a person who stays in a cell a number of toes away from me, stated he’s trying ahead to utilizing the video go to possibility on his ViaPath pill. (On JPay, we’ve to make use of a public kiosk for video visits.) “Typically you need to quit one thing to get one thing,” he instructed me. “If I gotta quit these throwback tablets with all the pieces on em,’ oh effectively. I wanna see my lady’s face after I speak to her.”
I completely perceive that not all people in jail is confronted with the identical circumstances. If I’d solely bought one pill and 100 songs, it wouldn’t be that huge of a difficulty for me to vary distributors. Additionally, if I used to be going to be launched from jail in a number of months or years, my place could be completely different. I would not be bothered by the seller change as a result of I would be house, 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. A lot of the brothers right here at New Jersey State Jail are lengthy haulers. They do not are inclined to ship folks right here with lower than a 30-year sentence. To depart from such private belongings is like shedding part of your existence.
For an answer, I’ve steered that we hold the previous tablets that we purchased in our possession. That’s what Idaho is planning on doing when it switches from JPay to ViaPath this month. In line with a February replace on the state’s corrections division web site, “residents” will have the ability to maintain on to their {hardware} and use what they downloaded “till the pill stops working.” Prisoners can even 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 tackle. Their households and mates will have the ability to use the unlocked pill.
I imagine it’s additionally technologically potential 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 aside 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 recordsdata, equivalent to messages, music, and pictures.” I’m unsure how effectively the implementation really went, however I hope my state a minimum of tries to barter this type of deal.
New Jersey began utilizing ViaPath’s barely cheaper monetary providers 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 swap irritating and tense.
Many people come from poor communities. We have now invested a lot — emotionally and financially — into these firms, and once we take losses, it hits in another way. These communication distributors exploit the truth that, as prisoners, we’re determined for leisure and methods to remain united with our households by means of these remoted occasions. With this desperation ever-present amongst a captive market, firms like JPay and ViaPath have solid a monopoly at our expense.
Shakeil Value is a poet and a printed creator. His guide, “P.E.A.C.E. in Jail,” is on the market on Amazon. Shakeil has additionally printed articles as a contract journalist for Jail Writers and as a contributing author for the Jail Journalism Mission. As of right now, 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 info Christopher Greeder acknowledged that “the [d]epartment is presently reviewing extra providers to be supplied by ViaPath and can talk any updates or enhancements to the incarcerated inhabitants after they turn into out there.”
He added that “kiosks shall be eradicated and changed with tablets. If an incarcerated individual refuses a pill, they are going to be supplied paper types to finish any duties wanted.”
Relating to Pigeonly’s mail supply occasions, he acknowledged that it takes “sometimes lower than two weeks,” however varies relying on the pace of america Postal Service.
