In December 2023, Massachusetts became the fifth state to provide free phone calls in its prisons and the first in all local jails. Video calling and e-messaging were also made available at no cost [See: PLN, Mar. 2024, p. 15]. Those progressive reforms were the culmination of years of advocacy to reduce the excessive costs imposed on prisoners and their families simply to stay in touch, including efforts by the No Cost Calls Coalition.

The free phone calls and other communication options removed an “immense financial burden off some of the most disadvantaged households in the state,” declared Aaron Steinberg with Prisoners’ Legal Services. While the volume of calls from state Department of Corrections (DOC) facilities and jails more than doubled over the next year, the No Cost Calls legislation that resulted in free communications services also had unintended consequences.

Initially, there was a problem with supply and demand: too few phones for the increased number of prisoners who wanted to take advantage of the free calls, which led to fights. The distribution of tablets with a phone app in state prisons and some jails largely alleviated that issue but a larger one remained—the loss of lucrative phone revenue. ...

Over five years ago, in May 2020, Washington prisoners Michael Linear and Lonnie Burton filed a complaint in state court against prison telecom JPay LLC, which held the exclusive contract with the state Department of Corrections (DOC) to provide prisoners their “sole means of access to any electronic content, email, games, music, or internet access.” 

JPay, the prisoners said, had “abused its monopoly by devising a scheme that baits inmates into purchasing excessively priced products and services, withholds the terms and conditions on those products and services from inmate review, and subjects inmates to a protracted sham trouble-shooting process that neither results in a repair or refund.”

As the prisoners noted, the firm’s kiosks provided access to the terms of service only after they clicked a button accepting them—at which point the kiosk “timed out” within two minutes, long before they had a chance to locate and read the relevant terms. Worse, one of those terms they were forced to accept before they could review it was an agreement to submit to arbitration to resolve any disputes—including challenging excessive fees, like a $8.95 for a $40.00 deposit into a prisoner’s account. 

Sure enough, JPay responded with a motion to ...

On June 6, 2025, Julian Mendez, 46, a prisoner on death row at the Kern Valley State Prison in Riverside County, California, was killed by inmate Mario Renteria, 36, using a makeshift weapon, KGET in Bakersfield reported. During the attack, according to the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), guards ordered the men to “get down,” but the two prisoners ignored this command; the guards then used “chemical agents” in an attempt to break up the fight. Around this time, around 30 other prisoners rushed in and began striking Renteria. Guards, having lost control of the situation, launched “blast grenades” to disperse the crowd. 

Following the incident, the CDCR implemented a modified program to investigate a rise in violence and overdoses at certain facilities including Kern Valley. Medical and legal services remained in place during the program, but access to phones, tablet communications, and in-person visitations were suspended. As of this writing, on June 26, the state lifted the restrictions in nine prisons but kept them in place in Kern Valley and 11 others.  

Additional source: KTLA

On May 6, 2025, the Ohio Justice and Policy Center, a non-profit law firm, filed a lawsuit against the state Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections (DRC) over the practice of intercepting mail between prisoners and their attorneys. The practice, which is called the “Legal Mail Policy Variance,” was intended to intercept drugs and other contraband from being brought into facilities. It requires prison staff to make a photocopy of legal mail in front of the prisoner and—after handing them the copy or delivering it to their tablets—shred the original. This policy was introduced to four of the 28 DRC prisons across Ohio in 2024: the Southern Ohio, Marion, Lebanon, and Ross correctional institutions. 

The Ohio Justice and Policy Center contends that it often receives mail from prisoners which includes allegations against specific guards, and that opening and reading this mail could result in retaliation. “[This policy] opens the door for private correspondence to be viewed with total disregard for our client’s civil rights and First Amendment rights,” said Gabe Davis, the firm’s chief executive officer. “We are suing the department because this has to stop now.” According to state data, of the known sources for how drugs enter prisons in ...

Smart Communications Holding, Inc., provides a variety of communications services in prisons and jails nationwide, including phone calls, video calling, tablets and e-messaging. It’s best known for its mail scanning program, MailGuard, which digitizes correspondence sent to prisoners and provides the scans on tablets or kiosks. On November 30, 2024, the firm filed for federal bankruptcy court protection, citing increased competition and litigation.

Founded and run by Jonathan D. Logan, a former felon, the Florida-based company contracts with over 120 lockups in 29 states, generating gross income around $56 million in 2023. It rose to prominence in 2018 with a $13.5 million, three-year contract to provide mail scanning for the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, as PLN reported. But after competitors, including VendEngine, Inc. and TextBehind, began offering similar mail digitization services to correctional facilities, Smart Communications filed several patent infringement suits—claims rejected in 2022 by federal courts in Tennessee and Pennsylvania, which found that the company’s scanning process did not involve “patent-eligible subject matter,” as PLN also reported. [See: PLN, Sept. 2019, p.60; and June 2023, p.31.]

Apparently unable to effectively compete without those ineligible patents, Smart Communications then filed for bankruptcy. But a contributing factor was infighting between ...

Global Tel*Link (GTL), doing business as ViaPath Technologies, is one of the nation’s largest providers of carceral communications services, including phones, video calling, and e-messaging. Its subsidiaries include Telmate, LLC and TouchPay Holdings, LLC; the latter provides money transfer services for people to send funds to loved ones in prisons and jails. GTL has long been known for price-gouging and other abusive business practices, as extensively reported in PLN. [See: e.g., PLN, Dec. 2020, p.24.] 

On November 14, 2024, the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) took the Virginia-based company to task for some of those abuses, ordering it and its subsidiaries to pay $3 million in restitution and penalties. The CFPB identified three GTL practices that violated consumer protection laws.

First, the company had a “no refund” policy for most money transfers; when money transfers went awry, prisoners’ family members were forced to file chargebacks with their banks or credit card providers to recover funds. In some cases, they were told by GTL customer service staff to initiate the chargebacks. In response, the company would freeze the prisoners’ accounts and prevent them from receiving any additional funds until the chargeback fees were repaid—in some cases with an ...

He shot the cop. Or his co-defendant did. Or he did it, but with another uncharged codefendant.

Alabama prosecutors used all three theories to try Toforest Johnson and co-defendant Ardargus Ford for the 1995 murder of Jefferson County Sheriff’s Dep. William Hardy at a Birmingham motel. Ford was acquitted at trial in 1999, a year after Johnson was convicted—based not on eyewitnesses or physical evidence but on the testimony of Violet Ellison, who allegedly overheard his confession during a three-way phone call.

However, jurors were never told that Ellison asked for and was paid a $5,000 reward for her testimony. That information didn’t surface until 2019. Meanwhile, a series of appeals—one of which went all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) before a 2018 remand to the Jefferson County Circuit Court where Johnson was originally convicted—still failed to win Johnson a new trial. The state Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the trial court’s most recent decision in 2022, and SCOTUS declined to hear an appeal the following year. See: Johnson v. State, 2022 Ala. Crim. App. LEXIS 20 (Crim. App.); and Johnson v. Alabama, 144 S. Ct. 37, (2023).

That prompted Jefferson County District Attorney ...

n October 31, 2024, preliminary approval was granted to a settlement reached with the second of three prison telecom giants accused of illegal price-fixing. The suit was filed in June 2020 in United States District Court for the District of Maryland by the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), the nonprofit publisher of PLN and Criminal Legal News (CLN).

The class-action complaint lodged claims under the Sherman Antitrust Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1, and the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1964, against ViaPath Technologies, formerly called Global Tel*Link (GTL), and Securus Technologies, parent of JPay, as well as 3Cinteractive Corp. (3Ci), which handled billing, marketing and processing services for the other two Defendants.

The suit focused on single-call services for which the companies charged prisoners and their families approximately a dollar a minute for one-time collect calls from prisons and jails. Securus began offering its flat rate, single-call “Pay Now” service in 2010, charging $14.99 for a 15-minute call, as well as a “Text2Connect” service that cost $9.99 for a 10-minute call. GTL then started its own single call services, “Collect2Phone” and “Collect2Card”—both of which were offered at lower rates.

3Ci provided processing and billing for single-call ...

Historically, prisons and jails have been loathe to give prisoners access to technology. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) didn’t even allow prisoners regular access to telephone calls until 2009. Access to internet-based services, which the non-incarcerated take for granted, is also forbidden by prison officials who cite vaguely-expressed “security concerns.” In recent years, however, electronic tablets that include a variety of programs and ­services have proliferated behind bars.

What has caused this shift in the Luddite mentality of prison officials? Money, mainly. Corrections agencies almost always receive “commission” kickbacks from the revenue generated by fee-based content offered by tablet providers, which ranges from e-messaging and video calls to music downloads and games. The two primary tablet vendors are GTL/ViaPath Technologies, headquartered in Virginia, and Dallas-based Securus Technologies. They are also the nation’s leading prison and jail phone service providers.

Both are owned by private equity firms and have long histories of price-gouging prisoners and their families. Other companies that supply tablets and e-content include Edovo, Inmate Calling Solutions (ICSolutions) and Keefe Commissary Network.

In the business model they all use, corrections officials can select the programs and features available on tablets that are usually provided to prisoners at ...

The Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC), a notorious federal jail in Brooklyn, New York, has made the news repeatedly thanks to some high-profile detainees held there to await trial. But federal prosecutors have also charged nine detainees for a series of assaults on fellow detainees, including two murders.

Additionally, as of mid-September 2024, 25% of the lockup’s staff positions were vacant. A little over a month later, on October 28, 2024, multiple federal agencies, including the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) Office of the Inspector General (OIG), conducted a sweep that uncovered a trove of contraband drugs, electronics and weapons. That led to smuggling charges against a guard. Earlier that same month, a detainee was also charged in a murder-for-hire plot that resulted in the death of a woman outside a New York City nightclub; the killing was allegedly arranged using a contraband cellphone.

On top of that, the almost three-decade-old MDC has been cited for maintenance problems, power outages, raw sewage and conditions so “inhumane” that some federal judges have refused requests from government prosecutors to detain defendants there, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Aug. 2024, p.24.]

In a bizarre incident, MDC guard Leon Wilson, 49, a 23-year veteran ...