Captive Audience: Counties and Private Businesses Cash in on Video Visits at Jails

Amy Silverstein

Visits at Hopkins County Jail use to take place face to face through glass, but the county eliminated that practice when Securus signed a contract to profit from video visits.

Securus and its competitor Global Tel *Link have been buying out smaller companies and gaining control of the jail and prison telephone market since the early 2000s, but it took until 2013 for the FCC to finally act on complaints that the companies were ripping off families with excessive phone rates.

"This is a tiny, dark corner of the telecommunications market, and they weren't looking, and it took that long to organize enough political pressure to get the FCC to prioritize this," says Peter Wagner, executive director of the Prison Policy Initiative, "and for people to realize that this affects millions and millions of people."

The market is estimated by Bloomberg News to be worth $1.2 billion, with about half of the correctional phone services contracts belonging to Alabama-based Global Tel*Link. Number two is Securus, with 30 percent of the market. Both are backed by investment banks--Global Tel*Link is funded by American Securities and Securus by Abry partners.

It's a business setup that "creates another incentive to cash out," Wagner says. "There are two kind of strategies with a product like this. One is that you price it cheaply and you encourage people to use your product, and you make it up in volume. Then there's the short-sighted proposal, which is you charge as much as possible, and then you jam on all these little additional fees to eat up the customers' money and you don't care whether they like using your product."

Telephones, like the videos, offer a valuable service that wasn't available to inmates before. In Texas prisons, inmates used to be allotted just one five-minute phone call every 90 days before the state signed a contract with Securus. "In all fairness to Securus," says Darryl Stewart, whose son is incarcerated in Missouri, "if they would stop billing for calls you didn't get, they would be doing a real service." Stewart plans to take the company to small claims court for billing him for calls that he says he missed. His son often calls when he's not around to answer. "They seem to have a phone [in the prison] available 24/7."

Families' attempts to get around the high phone rates have spawned a new industry of services offering cheap jail calls, such as Cons Call Home. The rates for long-distance calls from prisons are substantially higher than local calls, so the services work by rerouting phone numbers that come in from Securus or one of its competitors to a cheaper line. Predictably, Securus has tried to put those companies out of business. When Securus has discovered that its number is being rerouted for cheaper rates, the company has responded by simply blocking the inmate's account and cutting off the funds.

"Today I was told by Securus Technologies that I am masking my true identity and phone number and this is illegal," a woman wrote to the FCC in 2012 after she purchased a Google Voice number to match the area code of where her husband was incarcerated. "I was told that I can face federal charges and so can my husband ... I need to know if I am truly doing something illegal."

She wasn't. Securus asked the FCC to crack down on the third-party calls in a 2009 petition but in 2013 the FCC issued an opinion that Securus and Global Tel *Link had no right to block the calls.

In 2003, a Washington, D.C., grandmother named Martha Wright filed a class action lawsuit against the Corrections Corporation of America for the phone calls that she said had cost her thousands of dollars over the years. A judge sent the case to the FCC, and the agency finally decided in 2013 to cap all interstate phone and jail prison rates at 24 cents per minute.

Despite the FCC's crackdown, Global Tel*Link and Securus can still tack on high fees for things such as using a credit card or setting up an account. More recently, customers say Securus has added mysterious "taxes" to their bills that weren't there before the FCC ruling.

"They are charging a flat rate of $3.15 per call and an additional $2 for taxes, bringing one call to a total cost of $5.15," says a complaint from a Milwaukee customer, sent to the FCC this July. "Sometimes the facility phone hangs up within 1 minute of speaking, and charges you the whole $5.15."

In Dallas, Securus currently provides phone service to the jail and will continue to do so under a new agreement. Securus says people who pay by credit card through the phone in Dallas will be charged a convenience fee "up to $4.95." Using a credit card, Securus says, is one of its "optional services that incur convenience fees or a minimum funding amount."

Carolyn Esparza, a former social worker who founded Community Solutions, an El Paso nonprofit that provides social services to inmates and their families, says most people don't have the heart to say no to an expensive call from an inmate. "It is addictive for the prisoner to be able to call home, to be able to call home, to be able to call home again," she says.

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