Prison Telecom Monopolies & Michigan Counties Sued For Kickback Deals That Banned In-Person Visits To Boost Phone And Video Revenues
from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept
However terrible telecom monopolies are in the free world, they’re arguably worse in prisons. For decades, journalists and researchers have outlined how a select number of prison telecom giants like Securus have enjoyed a cozy, government-kickback based monopoly over prison phone and teleconferencing services, resulting sky high rates (upwards of $14 per minute at some prisons) for inmate families.
Most of these pampered monopolies have shifted over to monopolizing prison phone videoconferencing as well. And the relationship between government and monopoly is so cozy, several of these companies, like Securus, have been caught helping to spy on privileged attorney client communications.
There’s not much in the way of oversight, so the problem just keeps evolving. Case in point: Ars Technica notes that a civil rights group has filed a two new lawsuits against two Michigan counties, two county sheriffs, and two prison monopolies, Securus and Viapath (formerly known as Global Tel*Link Corporation, or GTL.
The lawsuits allege that Michigan banned in-person visits in order to maximize revenue from voice and video calls as part of a “quid pro quo kickback scheme” with prison phone companies. It’s something the group states has become increasingly common over the last decade as telecom monopolies lobby governments and private prison contractors to ban in-person visits to make more money:
“Why has this happened? The answer highlights a profound flaw in how decisions too often get made in our legal system: for-profit jail telecom companies realized that they could earn more profit from phone and video calls if jails eliminated free in-person visits for families. So the companies offered sheriffs and county jails across the country a deal: if you eliminate family visits, we’ll give you a cut of the increased profits from the larger number of calls. This led to a wave across the country, as local jails sought to supplement their budgets with hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from some of the poorest families in our society.”
Much like telecoms out in the broader free world, government has such a cozy relationship with telecom monopolies, the incentive to hold them accountable for much of anything is largely muted. In instances like domestic surveillance, it’s often impossible to determine where government ends and private monopolies like AT&T begin.
One lawsuit documents how Securus lobbied to have in-person visits eliminated and video kiosks installed where in-person visitation centers used to be. A contract was signed that doled out kickbacks to government so they got a big chunk of the revenue, incentivizing prisons to keep inmate populations high:
“Securus pays the County 50% of the $12.99 price tag for every 20-minute video call and 78% of the $0.21 per minute cost of every phone call. The contract promises the County an entirely new revenue stream, as well as a minimum guaranteed annual payment of $190,000 paid up front. And the contract gives Securus the right to terminate its video call service or pay the County less money if the jail population decreases by more than 5% or if
the jail fails to ensure a minimum number of monthly paid video calls.”
Much with the broader prison industrial complex, it’s not hard to see how perverse financial incentives point in all the wrong directions. It’s also not hard to see how this sort of relationship can easily be sold to cash-hungry counties and municipalities as more profitable, safer, and more secure. A win all around, unless you’re a poor inmate family member with limited resources and no personal lobbyists.
Efforts to do something about prison telecom monopolies were scuttled by FCC boss Ajit Pai, whose former clients included Securus. Pai not only routinely opposed efforts by ex-FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn to drive change in the prison telco sector, one of his very first acts as FCC boss was to pull the rugs out from underneath his own lawyers as they tried to support those reforms in court (they, as intended, lost).
Filed Under: civil rights, inmate calling, inmate visits, kickbacks, michigan, prison industrial complex, securus
Companies: securus
Comments on “Prison Telecom Monopolies & Michigan Counties Sued For Kickback Deals That Banned In-Person Visits To Boost Phone And Video Revenues”
Does this include communication between client and attorney? If so, it looks like a tax upon ones right to appear before a court.
That’s just plain evil.
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But we must respect it. The rule of law is sacred.
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Respect is earned
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Rule of law is sacred, no matter what.
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“Rule of law is sacred, no matter what.”
Typical lazy pov
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It is! I don’t care if our government goes full Fourth Reich. It is our civic duty to uphold the rule of law, be they the laws of the Antebellum south or Nazi Germany.
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Ah, the rule of law? The 1st Amendment that protects freedom of speech is a law.
It’s almost as if the article is arguing that the government should use its authority to remove criminal’s civil liberties to the least extent necessary.
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Yeah. It allows the Nazis to foment a coup, but it gets regularly carved away to protect the rights of the wealthy over imaginary property among other things.
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Gotta keep the poor colored folk down.
We do not have a justice system. We have a legal system.
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We do not have a corrections system. We have a torture system.
Hoping the lawsuit wins - and forces change
You never know what the courts will decide, but common sense dictates that kickbacks become prohibited and a more reasonable visitation price be enforced.
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Our Circle of Clerics cited a witch-finder in sentencing innocent women throughout the nation to torture and death at the hands of religious nuts.
This seems to be a recurring theme in the US. Like we’ve spent 250 years building on a rotten foundation.
Humans and the belief that they are bad people we’re allowed to treat them like shit up until it happens to us or someone we care about and then the system needs to protect.
Honestly since they were caught turning over protected conversations I sort of hoped that they would be out of business, but hey the “donations” to politicians matter more than a bunch of evil poors being ripped off yet again.
How Didn't I Hear About This?
I didn’t hear anything about this until the Ars article even as a resident of Genesee County. The more I hear about it, the less I want to re-elect our county sheriff. I’ve even asked my mother who watches the local news every day if she heard about it and she hasn’t. There needs to be greater accountability of our local officials.
Rant Warning - capitalist becomes fascist
(short version = bad kitty!)
As long as a company/corporation can break the law and get away with it, including keeping the lion’s share of the illicit profits from the crime by simply giving government a small share, this behavior will continue and flourish, until it is too late to stop the process.
The process is called fascism.
Consider what would happen if civilians; citizens, not businesses, did these things. They would become the inmates of the factory prisons for life.
The problem lies in the laws that have been “lobbied” into existence by businesses whose only interest is more money this year than last year, forever.
The Corporation: a make believe but fully legal person, who; due to the lack of a physical presence, cannot be incarcerated when criminally convicted, and so must instead be “fined”. This is how government gets its kick-back share of the profits.
Lobbying that includes money, is bribery, plain and simple, but the law says it’s perfectly legal for businesses to do because companies pay politicians and law-makers to have the laws interpreted that way.
Lobbying is the primary attraction for bad actors to become politicians. Its a gold rush.
When the bad guys write the law, everyone else needs to fear the law. Even the bible warns about letting the merchant become king and I seldom go there.
Fascism is a business model. It succeeds in making the wealthy wealthier fast, by draining a nation’s resources and capital, legally.
The wealthy members of a successful and wealthy nation always bring that nation’s golden age to a close through fascism. It turns millionaires into billionaires, and they hope this time, billionaires into trillionaires.
To date, it has always been successful, because nobody ever suspects the wealthiest citizens, who need nothing, to be the very people behind the process of taking everything.
Can America prove its worth, by showing the world that a capitalist nation can defeat this capitalist-based legal degradation caused by simple greed?
We shall see certainly.
Governments are squeezing money out of us any way they can, why should criminals get a pass?
Governments are squeezing money out of us any way they can, why should oligarchs get a pass?
ftfy
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Possibly, but who says AC didn’t mean oligarchs when they said ‘criminals’?
Even though prisons and jails are often run by private companies, because those companies are hired by local governments and some kind of governmental approval is required before enacting certain policies (one would imagine), banning in-person visits seems like a violation of the First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and freedom of association.