Prison Policy Initiative Executive Director Peter Wagner was asked to weigh in on video visitation in prisons and jails for The New York Times' most recent Room For Debate discussion:
Potential for Exploitation, or Innovation
by Peter Wagner
With proper regulation and oversight, prison and jail video communication has the potential to offer additional avenues for critical family communication. But if left unregulated, this market could follow the trajectory of the infamously broken prison telephone industry, dominated by the same corporations. In that market, companies compete not based on price or service, but rather on who can charge families the most and kick back the largest share of the revenue to the facility that awarded the monopoly contract.
If left unregulated, this market could become like the infamously broken prison telephone industry, dominated by the same corporations. Despite the inherent potential in video communication technology, families suffer when facilities use video to replace, rather than supplement, in-person visits. How is this possible? In order to stimulate demand for their video service -- which costs families $1 a minute or more -- companies like Securus are requiring jails in places like Maricopa County, Ariz., and Shawnee County, Kan., to
end in-person visits. The facilities go along with this because it saves staff time screening visitors and because the paid video visits generate revenue and kickbacks to the facility. These perverse financial incentives are obscuring more creative and humane ways to increase jail video business. One more creative video visitation company, Turnkey Corrections, has reasonable rates and offers discounts for calls on holidays as a way to introduce families to the benefits of a new additional method of communication.
The losers under this arrangement aren't just the families paying the hefty bills. It's everyone. It's clear from both common sense and social science research that allowing children, parents and spouses to maintain their family connections during incarceration makes it easier for everyone involved to succeed during and after the sentence.
Left unregulated, the video communication market is very likely to end up like the mostly unregulated prison and jail telephone industry: an unnecessarily expensive and counterproductive way to drive families apart in order to increase the corporate bottom line. Just this month, new Federal Communications Commission rules
took effect that finally, after a decade of advocacy, capped the cost of interstate calls home from prison at 25 cents a minute. But the F.C.C. still hasn't acted to lower the cost of in-state calls, and a lawsuit from the industry's largest players has stalled the agency's efforts to eliminate other outrageous practices, like charging $9.50 to process a credit card payment or $5 to process a refund.
It seems inevitable that video visitation will become a part of more correctional facilities. It's up to the American people to decide whether the technology will promote social stability by helping families connect, or will profit from driving families apart.
Peter Wagner, the executive director of the Prison Policy Initiative, is a co-author of the report "Please Deposit All of Your Money: Kickbacks, Rates, and Hidden Fees in the Jail Phone Industry."
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