I recently saw the face of a
friend whom I had never met before. In a video
call to a California state prison facility, I
was finally face-to-face—albeit via video
chat—with Dominic
Williams, who is serving a sentence of
life in prison without the possibility of parole
and who has spent the majority of his life
behind bars. Until recently, Williams and I had
been corresponding the old-fashioned way,
writing letters to one another for about 20
years. Although we spoke on the phone many years
ago, I hadn’t ever seen his face aside from
photos sent by mail. Now, thanks to new
regulations of the prison communication
industry, we were able to schedule a video
conversation with one another.
Prison communication has been a
booming business and is part of a web of
industries that depends on society’s propensity
to lock people up. As the advocacy group Worth
Rises has documented, “private
corporations have fully monetized crime and
punishment with the help of their government
partners.” More than 4,100 corporations extract
money from imprisoned people and their loved
ones, exploiting a community held hostage by the
prison industrial complex.
For decades, profit-based
companies leeched off of incarcerated people by
charging outrageous
per-minute rates for phone calls, simply
because they could. Communication with family
members—a critical aspect of maintaining
mental health in the most inhumane of
circumstances—can bankrupt families. Given that mass
incarceration in the United States disproportionately
targets low-income communities of
color, this is the same demographic that the
prison communications industry routinely
fleeces.
In June 2021, Connecticut, whose incarcerated people were
among the most exploited by the prison
communication industry, became the first state
in the nation to make prison calls free. Just
over a year later, California followed suit, although
advocates pointed out that the state’s county
jail system was left out (county jail phone
calls were separately capped at 7 cents per
minute). Several cities have moved to ensure
that the state is on the hook for phone calls to
and from prisons, and pressure
is growing to adopt such standards
nationwide.
What’s ironic, but unsurprising,
is that such regulations are coming too late.
Traditional phone calls are already becoming
obsolete in the world outside prison walls, and
corporations have rapidly moved to control and
monetize digital communications that are not as
well regulated.
Such corporate monopolies are
exceedingly lucrative. Katya Schwenk explained
in Jacobin that one major corporate
player, ViaPath Technologies, “has been tossed
between major private equity firms, bouncing
from Goldman Sachs and Veritas Capital to, most
recently, American Securities, which says its
portfolio of companies brings in $46 billion in
annual revenue.” Further, companies like ViaPath
are finding creative new ways to exploit the
imprisoned population for services such as
“music streaming, e-messaging, video calling,
and movies, all hosted on tablets, and all
monetized.”
The California Department of
Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) gave
out 90,000 free tablet devices to imprisoned people
throughout the state to use ViaPath’s services.
As a result, communication can be tantalizingly
instant—however, as I found out in the course of
arranging my video chat interview with Williams,
it will cost you. People behind bars and their
contacts are charged 5 cents for each email, and
20 cents per minute for video calls.
Further, I discovered the hard
way that even when charging a premium for its
services, ViaPath
Technologies, previously called Global
Tel Link (GTL), seems to feel
little incentive to provide efficient services.
After spending several days installing the GTL
app on various platforms and devices, depositing
money into an account, being caught in endless
loops within its buggy and poorly designed
systems, and being dropped by customer service
calls that went nowhere, I finally got a
response from the company via email that was
filled with unhelpful suggestions merely copied
and pasted from its website.
Take the irritation we have all
felt while trying to navigate corporate customer
service lines and multiply that by 10 or even
100 to get an inkling of the frustration felt
for a system that slowly chokes users who have
no other options. My experience is not
out of the ordinary. Olivia Heffernan and Steve
Brooks (who is an incarcerated journalist)
pointed out in the
Appeal, “CDCR and ViaPath have failed
to deliver on their promises.”
They quote Jesse Vasquez,
executive director of Friends
of San Quentin News, who said, “Nothing is free in
prison. We all know that. So as soon as one good
thing is announced, we pretty much know a bad
thing is going to follow.” And there is the crux
of the problem.
We cannot reform our way out of
the prison system. Incarceration is inhumane by
design, and tweaking the edges of a system
designed to dehumanize can end up legitimizing
it. Reforming the prison communications industry
as a way to make prison more humane is like
putting lipstick on a pig. It looks pretty for a
time and may have some short-term benefits, but
the underlying porcine nature of the system
remains intact.
While I was thrilled at the
ability to finally communicate in real time with
my friend, to actually see his face and have him
see mine, a video chat session is a poor
substitute for Williams’s actual freedom. A
brilliant, highly educated thinker, academic,
and author, his continued incarceration benefits
no one, other than companies like ViaPath. There
are millions of people like him in prisons,
jails, and detention centers across the U.S.
Williams apologized for the technical problems
we encountered while trying to arrange our video
chat. I responded, “Don’t apologize. It’s not
your fault; it’s the system.”
Abolishing the prison system, and its
adjunct systems of policing and criminal
justice, needs to remain an overarching
goal for anyone appalled by the
inhumanity of incarceration. It was
nearly four years ago that the racial
justice uprising of 2020 centered calls
to divest from policing and prisons and
invest in things that actually keep us
safe. Just as police reforms like body
cameras and chokehold trainings did
nothing
to reduce police killings,
regulating prison communications will do
little to change the fact that we continue
to keep millions of people physically
trapped in conditions that defy
imagination.
This commentary was
produced by
Economy
for All, a project of the
Independent Media
Institute.
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