Last fall, the children in Flint, Mich., were blocked from seeing their parents at the Genesee County Jail. In 2012, a company called Securus Technologies struck a deal with the county, offering financial incentives to replace jail visits with video calls, the New Yorker reports. Families would pay fees that could exceed a dollar a minute to see their loved ones on an often grainy video feed; the county would earn a cut of the profits. “A lot of people will swipe that Mastercard and visit their grandkids,” a county official said. A few years later, the county went after an even steeper commission. In the sheriff’s office, a captain named Jason Gould helped negotiate a deal with a Securus competitor called Global Tel*Link (or GTL, now known as ViaPath), which included a fixed commission of a hundred and eighty thousand dollars a year, plus a sixty-thousand-dollar annual “technology grant,” and twenty per cent of the revenue from video calls. The jail chose not to restore families’ access to in-person visits. County sheriffs across the country were making similar deals with Securus and GTL, which resulted in millions of dollars in commissions. Many of those counties replaced in-person visits with the companies’ video calls.
“For decades, families and advocates have been working to push back on this industry,” said Bianca Tylek, who runs the nonprofit Worth Rises. “Finally, in the past handful of years, we’ve seen incredible wins.” In 2020, through a pandemic provision, the federal government made phone calls from its prisons free. So far, five states have followed suit. Last year, President Biden signed a bill allowing the Federal Communications Commission to cap what the agency’s leadership has called “predatory” pricing in some prison and jail communications. County jails across the country had long since filled their visitation rooms with digital kiosks run by Securus and GTL. “The word ‘visit’ for these calls is a joke,” Tylek said. “If I call my sister in Miami on FaceTime, I don’t tell her, ‘Hey, I’m visiting you in Miami!’