The company, which said it aspired to become the “Apple of the US prison system,” was acquired by phone giant Securus last year. “We’re looking for products that an inmate would want to buy and a corrections facility would accept,” Ryan Shapiro, the founder of JPay, a prison financial services provider, told Bloomberg in 2012. While prisoners are barred from accessing the Internet, with some states explicitly banning access, companies have also expanded from offering calls and financial services to digital devices such as music players and tablets that meet prisons’ concerns about security. Private, for-profit prison phone companies such as Securus Technologies and Global Tel*Link, which have built up an effective monopoly on the industry, are increasingly offering bundles that include messaging services and Skype-like video visitation technology to jails and prisons, the report finds. Raher, an Oregon-based attorney.Īnd, in a more marked difference from the outside world, messaging systems are sometimes inbound-only, meaning that while an inmate can receive messages - after being screened by prison officials - they must respond by handwritten letter. Sending “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” via electronic message, for example, would take 27 separate messages with a 1,500 character limit, writes Mr.
![inmate inbox app inmate inbox app](https://cloudfront-us-east-2.images.arcpublishing.com/reuters/7B3OCCGIYBINZHKQDXPRAMOUT4.jpg)
The systems come with particular limits - preserving a message for posterity is often difficult, while many services have strict character limits of as high as 6,000 characters and as low as 1,500.
#Inmate inbox app pro
“Calling the electronic messaging offered to incarcerated people and their families 'email' would be an insult to email,” says Stephen Raher, a pro bono legal analyst for PPI who authored the report, in a statement.įifth graders as futurists: Imagining the world in 20 years On average, messages cost about 50 cents, though they can range from a low of 5 cents to a high of $1.25 for a text-only message, the group found. In contrast to what’s often thought of as the basic openness of e-mail, electronic messaging services for inmates are proprietary systems run by commercial companies, which charge inmates and families fees for each message they send. They’ve been the basis of manifestos – Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” is one – provided material for novels - the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky was forbidden to write in prison but later reconstructed his experiences as the novel “House of the Dead” – and even become the format of songs – such as the rapper Nas’s “One Love.”īut in the digital age, as e-mail has come to supplant handwritten words for people across the world, inmates in the US face a far different picture, according to a new report released Thursday by the Massachusetts-based Prison Policy Initiative (PPI). For incarcerated people - letters sent back and forth to friends and family can often be a lifeline to the outside world.