New Price Caps Won’t End Exploitation Baked Into Prison Communications Industry

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted in July to implement tighter price caps on phone and video call services in prisons and jails. The $1.4 billion industry of prison communications will now attempt to continue to squeeze a profit under these restrictions. The FCC decision was the result of 2022 legislation signed by President Joe Biden, entitled the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act. There are a few other reforms present in the new FCC ruling, including a provision that greatly reduces the kickback incentives that telecommunications companies pay jails and prisons. All these reforms are long overdue, direly needed, and yet almost completely superficial.

Like most criminal legal system reforms, the legislation serves to distract and obfuscate true societal progress. This idea of deceptive reform has been explored through the lens of the police body camera, most perceptively by Alec Karakatsanis. These types of reforms frame the underlying problem as necessary; police and prisons are cast as inevitable.

This isn’t the first time the FCC has weighed in on the predatory practices of prison telecommunications companies. In 2015, the FCC tried to regulate this industry, with less defined language, but a D.C. District Court of Appeals overturned the regulation in 2017 on the basis that the FCC, a federal governing body, did not have jurisdiction over local telecommunications. The telecommunications companies, however, were already pivoting, seeing the writing on the wall. Their response was to offer supposedly “free” tablets to adults in custody.

The first time I encountered a digital tablet while incarcerated was at Warner Creek Correctional Facility (WCCF) in Lakeview, Oregon. Lakeview is a tiny town in the Southeastern part of the state with a population of 2,487, according to the 2022 census. It can kindly be described as remote. Having a visitor on the weekend felt like a small miracle, as the next-closest population center was nearly two hours away. The tablets presented to us were life jackets behind bars.

At WCCF, there was absolutely no programming or classes, aside from the state-mandated GED program. There was nothing that could be labeled as rehabilitative. Retributive, sure, we had that in spades. The guards were surly, combative and dying for someone to break a rule. The counselors were unresponsive and actively did their best to do absolutely nothing. Everyone, from the staff to the prisoners, did not want to be there.

The tablets introduced there were a sorry excuse for 21st-century technology, but they were immediately and immensely popular. Many of the people using them at WCCF were using a digital tablet for the very first time in their life. For the first few weeks, I would show people how to use them and then listen and watch as they marveled at the possibilities. All the best and worst elements of digital life (silly games, limited web browsers, music and movie apps) were suddenly made available, right there at our malnourished, connection-starved, bored-out-of-our-minds fingertips.

I remember one guy I tutored with telling me, “You can even check the stock market on them.” Like most times when I heard something similar in reference to incarcerated life, I had to fight the urge to reply, “You know where you can do that too … on the outside. In the free world.”

None of these new services came cheap, and most of us could not afford them on our measly prison salaries. There was a three-cents-a-minute version and a five-cents-a-minute version of the tablets. The three-cents-a-minute version was usually a promotional gimmick, used to get people hooked on specific apps (be it movies, music or games) for an unspecified period before they moved those apps back to the five-cents-a-minute version. There was also a video calling feature that required both participants (on the inside and outside) to pay. To my knowledge, there wasn’t a single feature on our prison tablets that could not be done for free on the outside. In the real world.

These also weren’t state-of-the-art tablets. They were constantly breaking, or the network wasn’t set up to handle them and they would crash. Sometimes the tablets would crash right after allowing you to log in because of a local or network issue. But not before charging you for that full minute of nothingness.

Throughout my prison stint, the tablets were almost a welcome exploitation. As much as we grew frustrated with them, they also became essential to mentally surviving incarceration. The first thing any “correctional” officer would threaten to take away if they weren’t getting what they wanted was the tablet access.

Not only are tablets egregiously expensive and exploitative, but they can also erode the other small ways prisons and jails can provide connection to the outside world. In some states, tablets are used to justify the elimination of physical mail. They have also been used to replace physical books, including the Bible. They have even been used as an excuse to eliminate in-person, physical visitation.

In 2020, I was sent to jail during the height of the pandemic for a technical violation of parole. Like most punishment centers across the U.S. at the time, in-person visitation was eliminated under the premise of public health and safety. Often, we were only let out of our two-person cells for an hour each day: 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the afternoon.

The phones were always swarmed during those brief periods outside of the cell. The days they weren’t were days when we weren’t let out of our cells at all. Because of the possibility of being locked down all day, my cellmate and I were constantly hoarding a tablet so that we could still call our loved ones using a new phone feature that required earbuds with a microphone and a pitch-perfect cadence to get your voice password to work.

For 112 days I sat in jail not knowing when I would get released. I had stopped believing it was going to be soon after a couple weeks. I had stopped believing that the pandemic was going to change anything about the punishment bureaucracy. It had stopped occurring to me, every time we were on lockdown for health and safety reasons, that the best thing for public health and safety would be for me to be in my own home.

Four years later, I am sure that the Martha Wright-Reed Act will marginally improve things for incarcerated people and their families. I am also sure that people of color, poor people and the undereducated — both inside and outside of prison — will continue to be exploited in this country regardless of any reforms. Until we start fundamentally divesting from the punishment bureaucracy and start investing in true public safety initiatives — affordable housing, public education, better access to treatment and more public health centers, just to name a few — it will be more of the same: exploitation until there is an outcry and then a pivot to something more profitable.

Warner Creek Correctional Facility is a perfect example of this. In 2021, it was announced that it would be closing by July 2022. It was a move estimated to save taxpayers $44 million annually. Because Lake County officials derided the closures and bemoaned the loss of revenue and jobs it would cause in the county, the governor at the time caved and reversed her position, and WCCF remains open to this day.

The state could have implemented training into numerous other fields for prison employees losing their jobs. They could have opened a call center, a firefighting center, a data entry center, a public works expansion, an adult education center — all fields that adults incarcerated at Warner Creek Correctional Center currently work in for pennies on the dollars. The state did none of these things.

Instead, WCCF opened a new “Transitional Community Unit” that the Oregon Department of Corrections website claims provides “a more normalized environment.” The photo attached to the press release shows two adults in custody playing video games. WCCF is still physically located far away from where most adults in custody will be paroled. Hours away from employment centers, treatment centers, transitional and permanent housing providers, and the friends and family that are so vital to reintegration into society. There is nothing normal about that and it only leaves a gap ripe for further exploitation.

We should not live in a society where expensive, ineffective, exploitative, tax-payer-funded institutions are allowed to exist because of their so-called necessity to local economies. Yet, if we continue to fall for the illusion of reform in sheep’s clothing, that is exactly what will continue to happen. The next reform might tackle exorbitantly priced telehealth providers or exploitative online educational programs in prison, but the problem will be the same. If we allow fundamental needs to go unmet, enterprise will be there to provide them — at a cost.