by Alan Prendergast

In a news cycle dominated by reports of war, plague and insurrection, a single press announcement from Global Tel*Link (GTL) managed to convey some of the oddest news of all. Flash: The creators of the nation’s most beloved children’s television show are joining forces with GTL, the nation’s largest provider of phone services to carceral facilities.

Big Bird is headed for the Big House. Bert and Ernie are facing hard time. The prison-industrial complex has made its way to “Sesame Street.”

The press release ballyhooed a $750,000 grant made by GTL to Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit production company behind “Sesame Street,” to develop educational and coping materials for children dealing with parental incarceration. It’s estimated that more than five million children in the U.S. have had a parent behind bars at some point in their lives, and the new materials would “strengthen connections for the whole family”—comforting kids, supplying tips to caregivers on how to talk to children about incarceration, and offering resources to imprisoned parents that “will highlight the importance of communication.”

The irony of GTL’s new alliance was hard to miss. Incarcerated people already have a deep appreciation of the “importance of communication,” thanks to ...

by Paul Wright

PLN has been reporting on the prison phone industry for at least the past 30 years, from its inception to its current stranglehold on most means of human contact between prisoners and the outside world. This month’s cover story by Alan Prendergast reports on the public relations efforts by Securus and now-renamed Global Tel Link to burnish their reputations as corrupt, greedy leeches who profit by exploiting the poorest people in America. Rather than ask why these companies are so exploitative, a better question is: Why do they exist at all?

The United States has around 2 million of the world’s 10 million prisoners, more than any other country. It is also the only country which has an industry totally dedicated to doing nothing more than extracting wealth from prisoners and their families at every level. I have researched what telecommunications services prisoners in other countries have. It should come as no surprise that in places as diverse as Ireland, Indonesia, India, the Philippines, the Netherlands, etc., prisoners use Skype, WhatsApp and similar services to communicate with friends and family at no cost to them or their families. As most of the U.S. and the world moves ...

by Ashleigh Dye

When prison telecom company Global Tel*Link (GTL) agreed to slash the price for calls that it charges detainees held by the Miami-Dade Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (DCR) in November 2021, it was only because advocates of the incarcerated convinced county officials to forfeit kickbacks the firm was contractually obligated to pay, effectively diverting money from federal COVID-19 relief funds to GTL in order make up the shortfall in the county budget.

Right at the federal cap on per-minute charges, GTL was charging fourteen cents for a minute of phone time to DCR detainees—$2.10 for a 15-minute call—providing a yearly revenue stream of $6.8 million. The county received 60% of that in a kickback euphemistically called a “site commission.”

After collaborating with prisoner advocacy group Beyond the Bars, though, the county agreed to forfeit those payments through the remainder of its current contract with GTL, which ends in July 2022, in order to reduce the per-minute call price to five cents for the approximately 4,000 people held in its three jail facilities.

“This is still way out of line with the trend towards ensuring free communication,” said Maya Ragsdale, the advocacy group’s executive director. “But it’s a ...

by Anthony W. Accurso

Prison phone services provider Global*Tel Link (GTL) agreed to a settle a long-running class-action on December 20, 2021, with changes to company policies and up to $67 million to compensate customers for seizing funds in any account that remained inactive for 90 days. Though the amount actually paid will likely be much less, GTL will also pay almost $19 million in attorney fees as part of the settlement.

GTL, which changed its name to ViaPath Technologies on January 4, 2022, provides telephone service to prisoners in almost 2,000 prisons and jails spanning all 50 states, holding a monopoly in most, just as its major competitors do. [See: PLN, Sep. 2021, p.12.]

Paying for calls usually occurs in one of three ways: (1) prisoners purchase a prepaid phone card, which incorporates a fee above and beyond the number of minutes covered by the cost of the card; (2) prisoners make “collect” calls, with the call recipient agreeing to pay an exorbitant rate for the call, which gets tacked on to their phone bill; or (3) the cheapest option, which involves the recipient creating an “account” preloaded with some amount of money to cover the cost of the ...

by Douglas Ankney

A suit brought by the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC) alleging a price-fixing and kickback scheme by prison telephone service providers Global Tel*Link Corp. (now known as ViaPath), Securus Technologies, LLC, and 3Cinteractive Corp. (3Ci), survived a motion to dismiss by Defendants on September 30, 2021.

HRDC, which has published Prison Legal News since 1990 and Criminal Legal News since 2017, filed the suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland on behalf of a putative class of Plaintiffs who have paid, or will pay, $9.99 or $14.99 to receive a single collect call billed by 3Ci for either Securus or ViaPath/GTL, pursuant to their inmate calling service (ICS) contracts with governments operating prisons or jails.

Though this particular battle is being waged over exploitative pricing, the longer war with these firms will also have serious constitutional repercussions. As reported elsewhere in this issue, Securus and ViaPath/GTL are engaged in protracted legal battles over the illegal recording of prisoners’ privileged phone conversations with their attorneys. [See: PLN, Feb. 2022, p.36.]

In this case, the first move was made by Securus, which in 2010 launched two calling services:

• ‘PayNow,’ which charges a fee of $14.99 ...

Company Walks From Similar Case in Maine

by David M. Reutter

In November 2021, a year after a federal district court in California approved a $900,000 settlement in a class-action lawsuit alleging Securus Technologies, Inc. unlawfully recorded privileged calls between detainees and attorneys, the prison phone giant was still fighting similar allegations in Maine.

The November 19, 2020, order and judgment by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California resolved a lawsuit filed on May 27, 2016, by two former detainees and a criminal defense attorney who used Securus’ telephone services to make calls to and from correctional facilities and whose calls were recorded. [See: PLN, Aug. 2016, p.15.]

As previously reported by PLN, Securus and private prison operator CoreCivic agreed to a $3.7 million settlement earlier in 2020 for engaging in the same illegal behavior at the federal Bureau of Prison’s Leavenworth Detention Center, where the recordings were shared with prosecutors. [See: PLN, Jan. 2021, p.56.]

More recently, another case was filed in Maine alleging that Securus had illegally recorded prisoners’ privileged calls with their attorneys in that state. But a federal judge decided on April 30, 2021, that plaintiffs had failed to allege ...

by David M. Reutter

On July 8, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit refused a request to rehear en banc a decision by a three-judge panel of the Court that three months earlier affirmed a grant of qualified immunity to a guard who monitored phone calls between a prisoner and his attorney at the now-shuttered Nevada State Prison.

As reported elsewhere in this issue, the erosion of prisoners’ Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable seizure of private consultations with defense attorneys is a troubling trend, especially with the out-sourcing of prison phone services to private companies who are more difficult to sue. [See: PLN, Feb. 2022, p.21.]

The underlying events in this long-running case occurred between May 2007 and January 2008, which is when the prisoner, John Witherow, and his attorney, Donald York Evans, alleged that guards Lea Baker and Ingrid Connally violated his Fourth Amendment rights and engaged in unlawful wiretapping by listening to their calls with one another. Witherow and Evans filed suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada, which dismissed their Fourth Amendment claim on November 5, 2009. See: Evans v. Skolnik, 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 104427 (D. Nev.). ...

While the Massachusetts Department of Corrections charges prisoners ten or 11 cents per minute for phone calls, the state’s sheriffs set their own rates individually. Some sheriffs charged more than 40 cents per minute.

Now, according to the Massachusetts Sheriff’s Association (MSA), all 14 sheriffs in the state have agreed to provide people incarcerated in their jails ten minutes of free phone usage per week and cap the charges for anyone using more than the allotted ten minutes at 14 cents per additional minute effective August 1, 2021.

MSA president and Suffolk County Sheriff Steven Tompkins said the sheriffs were aware of the need to maintain contact with friends and loved-ones to prepare prisoners for re-entry into society.

Another factor may have been a bill, S1559/H1900, backed by Prisoners’ Legal Services (PLS) and filed by State Senator Cynthia Creem and Representative Chynah Tyler, which would require the provision of free telephone calls to people incarcerated in the state’s jails and prisons. In promoting the bill, PLS mentioned the phone calls’ positive effect on re-entry and noted that prisoners’ children would also reap benefits of family contact during a vulnerable time.

However, its most powerful argument was that “[p]risoners and their ...

by Kevin Bliss

Louisville, Kentucky’s Metro Department of Corrections (MDOC) who operates the city jail has been ordered by the Metro Council Budget Committee to stop charging prisoners for phone calls from the jail by December 31, 2021.

MDOC currently contracts with Dallas, Texas communications giant Securus Technologies for its jail phone system. Current calls cost prisoners and their families $1.85 for 15-minute calls to local landlines, inter- and intrastate calls have additional per-minute fees. Calls to cell phones have a flat $9.99 fee.

Lawmakers told MDOC director, Dwayne Clark, to create a new plan eliminating phone fees for prisoners and families by the beginning of next year. The current plan is too much of a hardship on families of the prisoners. “We should not be funding our jail on the back of the families whose loved ones are inmates and should be doing all we can to keep families connected to their loved ones, to ease reentry and reduce recidivism,” stated Budget Committee Chair Bill Hollander.

Mayor Greg Fischer estimated the MDOC would generate revenue of $700,000 from telephone kickbacks for the year 2021. The city plans to use the better revenue forecasts and federal American Rescue Act funds” ...

by Chuck Sharman

On the heels of a May 2021 decision by federal regulators that sharply lowered rates prisoners and their loved ones pay for interstate calls, the California Public Utilities Commission (CAPUC) adopted a rule on August 19, 2021, which takes a hatchet to rates on intrastate calls—the lion’s share of the $1.2 billion U.S. market for prisoner calls, which currently run as high as $6.95 a minute in the state. The rule establishes a rate cap for the first time in the Golden State that now limits providers of “Incarcerated Person’s Calling Services” (IPCS) on an interim basis to a fee of $0.07 per minute.

Paul Wright, the director of the Human Rights Defense Center, a Florida nonprofit which publishes Prison Legal News and Criminal Legal News, provided expert testimony in the proceedings before CAPUC.

When the new rule takes effect on October 7, 2021, 45 days after it was both adopted and issued, it will provide immediate relief to nearly 77,000 prisoners held in California’s 249 local and county jails, plus almost 11,500 prisoners held in 16 federal prisons in the state. There are another 94,500 state prisoners held by the California Department of Corrections and ...