They also operate the e-mail system that can be used to send e-mail to/from inmates (using a JPay tablet, of course). You have to purchase 'stamps'. For e-mails.[1]
"One stamp corresponds to one 6000 character message (about the length of one handwritten page), or one attachment."
"JPay’s correctional email service is faster than regular mail, with inmates usually receiving emails within 48 hours." (emphasis added)
Looking up the pricing for a random facility[2], it's $18 for 40 'stamps', each one of which is good for 1 small attachment or 'page' of text. This is fucking extortion.
Services like JPay are frequently used in the prison system to replace existing systems, not just to supplant them. It may be made the only way to deposit money into the prison commissary, for instance. Or the availability of video chat through JPay may be used as an excuse to limit the availability of in-person visits. And so on.
The biggest problem might be the lack of a "prisoner system in the US." The US has a Federal prisons system and 50 different state prison systems. Each system makes their own rules.
Federal prisoners may have access to send and receive email, through a system called CorrLinks. I think it is standard across all BOP facilities. At the state level, JPay.com does provide a means to contact inmates via email. Inmates cannot send email.
There are several companies which provide a means for friends and families of inmates to go online and order items for inmates, at least on the state level. Access Securepak (https://www.accesscatalog.com/) may be the largest. You pick the state and only authorized items are listed, packages are restricted to X times per year, a certain weight or dollar amount, etc. I think Texas runs their own online commissary.
From my friend who was in: they get some daily time, and all their email is monitored. I could send him mail, but it was through the prison's website, not a regular email.
I imagine the web surfing they can do is fairly limited, but I didn't ask.
I also found out that you can buy anything in prison, including a cell phone, or drugs. Ratting out the people who actually sell the stuff is a great way to get yourself killed.
One of the details that I'm not seeing in the article is does this apply to State prison, Federal prison, or both? Based on my experience in Federal prison I expect that it's more targeted at State prison since I often talked to other inmates that were vocal about the atrocious rates they experienced while in those systems.
In Federal prison the phone and e-mail system is still pretty bad, but not as bad. We often joked that it was like going into a time machine nearly 25 years in the past where "phone minutes" were still a thing and they even invented the idea of "email minutes".
On the note of "email minutes" they actually charge you for the entire time you are in the system which includes wrestling with their UI/UX which has obviously been "fine tuned" to be as abusive as possible to drain your email minutes. They also remove basic features like copy/paste and in general most of the basic typing features you take for granted every day like holding CTRL or SHIFT to navigate between words or type over existing words. This is again another cheap tactic to ensure that generating text output is as slow as possible. There are similar tricks that are used to slow the progress of reading messages. (FWIW printing messages is somewhat possible and costs about $0.70 per message since you can't combine them into multiple on the same page and the font size during printing is large)
Entertainingly this creates a class of inmates that are highly adept at navigating this stupid system and can churn out messages faster than anyone else combined with decent typing skills and knowledge of all the failures of the system. It's not a bad "hustle" as it's actually pretty impactful to help people send messages to their loved ones.
Fun story! While I was doing my time I setup a script that uses puppeteer to scrape the front page of HN itself and tried to get the most interesting stories per week. It would then generate a PDF and email it to my friends who would print it out and send it to me, so I actually had a weekly digest of HN in my inmate mail. Originally I didn't know how absurd the rules would be about keywords and such (spoiler, they're not very strict and mostly only concerned with overt things) so I had a mapping of words that would get modified like the word "Hacker" became "Wacker" and "Auth[entication]" became "Lock" as a way to avoid spooky headlines like "Hacker Steals Authentication Codes" would become "Wacker Steals Lockentication Codes" - it was crude and ended up not being neccessary so a friend of mine modified the script to remove it upon request. I had originally wanted to hook the whole thing up to a printing API to automate the process (the entire thing was thrown together a week before I had to surrender) but the various printing APIs weren't really capable of handling the rules for inmate mail about page limits, colors, labeling, etc.
You neglect to mention the inmate has to pay for each scanned card or letter, which most inmates can't afford. And you can't write on it, because it's on a screen, so if you're sending crosswords, the inmate can't do the crossword now, which is very demoralizing so they'll just ask you to stop sending them. There is another service where they can pay an exorbitant fee for a printout though. It's also very difficult to read scanned handwritten letters even if you pay for the printout. Inmates will ask you to stop sending Christmas cards because it's not worth it for you, and it's not worth it for them. It costs them more than what the card & postage cost you. Also the screens are pretty shitty so when they break down, it takes months to get a replacement.
The worst thing is the lies about why they're doing this. They think we're stupid. They don't really care about prisoners getting sick from possible drugs on the letters. If they really cared about this issue they would screen the letters for drugs, which would be easier & cheaper than scanning and reprinting them, or they would provide healthcare in prisons (they don't), or they could even stop corrections employees from bringing in the drugs in the first place.
Many prisoners get daily e-mail access. For outsiders there's either a web portal or an app. With the app you get a push notification when there's a new message. It's almost like texting, except it takes a few hours for any message to go through. Roundtrip can be a few more hours since e-mail access from the inside isn't continuous.
Glad this person had a computer program in their prison. I think most prisons have basically no real computer access except for a horrible "email" service called corrlinks. Very embarrassing for the US.
They have email, internet, social media and video chat in jail. It costs a lot of money but they have the ability to access the internet. The library has free or reduced cost internet but the tablet in the cell is the big bucks.
Sendapackage was created by a former inmate, and its story struck me as a great example of a promising niche that is in plain sight, yet only a member of that niche would go through the work to make it a business:
> Though it might surprise many who have no experience with prison, sending packages to loved ones doing time can be, as thousands of local families know, a Kafkaesque process. Beyond the hassle of going to several stores to assemble a package, and then having to take it to the post office or UPS, is navigating a welter of rules governing what is allowable.
> The New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision publishes a list, currently more than 20 pages long, of who can send what, and how, and what is permitted and what is not. Food cannot contain poppy seeds; emery boards must be “nonmetallic”; boxer shorts and briefs must be of a solid color only.
> “I thought there had to be a better way,” said Chris Barrett, Sendapackage’s founder, who seems to have discovered that way on the Internet. The items that Mr. Barrett’s service sells online (as well as through its catalog) have all been chosen in advance to adhere to the extensive directives put in place for gifts by the corrections department. His selection is comprehensive and diverse enough that the company bills itself as “New York’s inmate superstore.”
Not taking away from Pigeon.ly's announcement, just happy to see another business in this underserved, neglected niche (not sure how sendapackage.com is doing as I've never yet had the need to use it)...any service that makes it easy to navigate the data of the prison system is an overall net benefit to the public, as it impresses the need upon the system to provide this data.
Given the lede paragraphs of the OP, I thought Pigeon.ly would also deal with the problem of getting released inmates onto their feet and connected to jobs and resources...that seems orthogonal to their current products but seems like it could naturally grow from their network of inmate/relative contacts.
Every time they try to do this, part of the effects are to ban prisoners from receiving books. If you can't receive physical mail... how do you get books to read?
Once they remember this is a thing, they say that prisoners have to read only "e-reader" books from approved vendors at inflated prices and limited selection -- or if they are lucky, they can still get physical books from only approved vendors at inflated prices and limited selection. (the latter which prisons are always trying to do even before/without limiting paper mail too).
Not being able to receive mail is bad enough, but the consequences on receiving books are even worse. One of the few avenues to self-improvement, education, or even just recreation prisoners have.
The way we approach prisons are insane. We take people who have done something from their worst selves, and put them in an environment which seems almost designed to force them to continue to practice being their worst selves, with no other paths available.
While profiting off inmates may seem predatory to some extent, it does offer a service that was not there before the dotcom age.
When we look at prison communication back in the day, it was through locally wired telephone systems. The loved one or family member had to physically be present to speak to the person, but with technology something like an ekiosk (essentially the same types you see at newer airports, olive garden, etc), this does not have to be the case. You can be halfway across the world and still have more than just a phone call with someone who is incarcerated using the internet.
Prison phones are a commodity but now it seems to be legalized in a sense with this type of kiosk gateway for buying news, watching TV shows, etc.
I've done a bit of work with prisons before, the restrictions for equipment inside of it are absurd. Everything is considered a weapon in prison. I can only imagine the amount of censorship involved with this gateway though, its like bigbrother 1984
What I mean is is there some service that they only have available via the tablets and not some other means? Paper letter vs email, video chat vs in person visit, &etc...
As Sharlin says, getting into the prisons. There are other companies, like CorrLinks and AccessCorrections. (I believe CorrLinks has all of the federal prison system, in addition to some states.) These systems can work both ways or one way. For example, federal prisoners can email back and forth via CorrLinks; while some systems, only allow incoming email, which is printed out and provided to the prisoner.
1: http://www.jpayinc.com/email_videograms.html
"One stamp corresponds to one 6000 character message (about the length of one handwritten page), or one attachment."
"JPay’s correctional email service is faster than regular mail, with inmates usually receiving emails within 48 hours." (emphasis added)
Looking up the pricing for a random facility[2], it's $18 for 40 'stamps', each one of which is good for 1 small attachment or 'page' of text. This is fucking extortion.
2: http://www.jpay.com/Facility-Details/Kentucky-Adult-Institut...
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