The Impossible Math Behind Pay-Per-Minute Prison Messaging
Reading Time: 6 minutesI Pay by the Minute to Look at Pictures of My Parents. Prison Math Is Heartbreaking., In North Carolina prisons, we’re charged for every minute we want to look at family photos or read messages from friends., The real cost of prison e-messaging platforms l
It’s 7 p.m. at Central Prison in North Carolina, and I find myself in a familiar dilemma. I’m nearing the end of my last bundle of the prepaid minutes I use to send messages, which I bought from the private company ViaPath on the promise of communicating with the outside world at a rate of 1 cent a minute. I could purchase another bundle—but I’d be left without money for toothpaste or deodorant.
Throughout North Carolina, incarcerated people are forced to make similar calculations as they try to connect with kids, parents, spouses, friends, and professors. We pay for every minute we spend using messaging services, whether we’re typing, reading, or looking at photos. A 1,500-minute package costs $15 in North Carolina prisons, and if you can’t afford the bundle, you’re stuck paying 3 cents per minute. These prices might not seem exorbitant, but prison jobs in North Carolina pay 40 cents to $1 a day, and not every prisoner has access to a job. It could easily take a month’s worth of work to afford a $15 bundle without support from friends and family on the outside.
I’ve been incarcerated since 1997, when I was 19 years old. So, in 2020, when the North Carolina Department of Adult Corrections contracted with ViaPath Technologies (formerly known as GTL) to provide prisoners with tablets, we were excited, skeptical, hopeful, and cautiously pessimistic. This is prison, after all—good things always have a catch. The technology was so alien that no one really understood what it would mean for our lives in prison, especially those of us who had been in for decades, but we hoped that it would allow for better communication with friends and family.
It wasn’t until 2022 that Central Prison residents finally received ‘free’ Android tablets that host a number of free education apps, fee-based entertainment apps, a phone app, and the e-messaging GettingOut app. The oddly named GettingOut app allows incarcerated people to send messages of up to 1,500 characters to those registered on the app’s contact list. Similarly, people on the contact list can send messages and photos to the prisoner. The fee structure for those on the outside is different: They’re charged 25 cents per message or photo, whereas those of us on the inside pay by the minute to access the app, view messages or photos, and send messages.
Even though my previous experience on the internet ended with dial-up and Windows 2.0, I found the tablets to be fairly intuitive. It was obvious to me that the faster I read and typed messages, the less it cost. But not all of my peers were able to adapt. Many people in prison lack a high school education or GED, have learning disabilities, or are illiterate. These people struggle most with the tablets and ultimately end up paying more as they puzzle out how to use the apps. In this way, because the GettingOut app charges by the minute, it acts as a ‘literacy tax,’ as the Prison Policy Initiative noted in a recent report. It also means, the report highlighted, that companies are profiting twice off each message: ‘once when someone sends a message to their loved one in prison and again when that loved one reads it.’ North Carolina isn’t the only state using such a pricing system—some county jails and state prison systems (including Delaware’s) also use a per-minute model, as does the federal Bureau of Prisons.
As an incarcerated journalist, I’ve found that e-messaging has advanced my ability to communicate with editors, publishers, and other people in my network. Before the app, I spent hours copying drafts for a given article or essay. I would mail a physical copy of the piece, wait for a mailed response, and then have to recopy the piece by hand to incorporate edits before mailing it back. The app, in turn, has saved an enormous amount of time, postage, and headaches by cutting out the post office, and it also ended the need to have anyone type up my writing once it got to them, further reducing the hassle of submitting writing for publication. Whereas before, a handwritten article of approximately 1,000 words might take a total of three weeks to write, rewrite, fine-tune, mail, and get typed up and submitted to a publisher, now it can be done in less than a week. The cost of typing the article on the GettingOut app, which would take roughly 90 minutes, is less than $1.
Beyond longer pieces of writing, the pay-by-the-minute GettingOut app is also useful in sending chain messages. It might take 10 seconds for me to type, ‘Hi there! Here is the YouTube link for the Brooklyn Law School panel I was on,’ then copy and paste the link from another message. Recopying that message, pasting it on my thread with another contact, sending, and repeating the process a dozen times took me less than two minutes. Before I had access to the GettingOut app, this would have been impossible without someone on the outside sending a chain email on my behalf. In this case, GettingOut charging by the minute instead of the message is actually to my advantage.
To improve efficiency and reduce unnecessary time on the app, when I write longer pieces such as newsletters for my website (operated by friends on the outside) or articles for editors, I work through most of my revised drafts on paper, then type it up. If there is information I need to keep referring to—like an email from an editor, suggested revisions for longer essays or book chapters, or a report of some sort—I’ll have the person send me a hard copy through the mail.
My first test using the GettingOut app to produce a longer piece of writing was a book review of Christopher Seeds’ Death by Prison: The Emergence of Life Without Parole and Perpetual Confinement. I wrote several drafts on paper first, then divided it into numbered paragraphs to type and send. I had to balance the time spent typing against the cost of use and battery life to be sure I could get the review done in one sitting. The app’s autocorrect and personalized suggestions helped me along, though I fought through periodic glitches that dropped the app and didn’t allow me to save my work if the tablet went offline. After a few hours, with occasional breaks when I turned off the tablet, I got the review done—and, with the help of a professor on the outside, successfully submitted it to the academic journal Social Forces. The potential of the app excited me.
But my pursuit of more efficient communication is useful only for outgoing messages. The GettingOut app doesn’t make it cost-effective to look at a photo of a family member, reread messages from my friends, or feel closer to my parents. The bigger question is why a private company is profiting off the emotional pain of our confinement. What if I want to keep returning to the picture of a sunset in the Rocky Mountains, a deceased family member, or a friend’s dog? As long as I keep accessing these photos and messages—and long after someone on the outside paid 25 cents to send them—ViaPath will continue to profit from my quest for emotional connection.
In a March 21 phone call with a representative from ViaPath, George Wilkerson, a friend and fellow Central Prison resident, brought up the app’s by-the-minute fee for reading messages or viewing photos. According to Wilkerson, the ViaPath representative claimed that the company would eventually make accessing incoming messages and photos free but that there are no plans to make outgoing messages free. (ViaPath did not respond to emailed questions about whether it plans to continue charging for photo and messaging access, and as of this story’s publication, people incarcerated in North Carolina are still charged a per-minute rate.)
Complicating all this is the fact that the GettingOut app is often just finicky and hard to use for people in and outside prison. And although communication in prison has long been surveilled, funneling communication through a private company with unclear policies on data retention and use presents new challenges. The security A.I. that flags messages for content can sometimes have a mind of its own, and the messages it flags are then reviewed by a prison official. If innocuous, the message will be sent days later. If not, it gets denied. Keywords trigger the A.I., but so do certain combinations that seem threatening—colors associated with criminal organizations, mention of illegal activities, violent verbs, expletives, and some political content, for instance. Working around this requires using metaphors, euphemisms, or simple asterisks in place of vowels, which means being vigilant about what is typed and learning alternative phrasings. For example, one time I commented on a photo of a friend’s cat wading through the white snow. It got flagged for white. When my editor used GettingOut to send me edits for this piece, one message was flagged because it included the phrase hit send.
Altogether, I’m grateful that the GettingOut app has given me access to faster, more certain communication with friends, family, and the public. But no one in prison should be charged to view family photos or read messages from loved ones. The bigger, underlying fear I hear among incarcerated people—a fear I share—is that the migration toward profit-based digital communication will eventually completely erase our tangible connection to the free world. In North Carolina, this is already happening. We can no longer receive original physical letters; instead, we receive printed digital scans of mail, thanks to a private company named TextBehind. Even in-person visits in many prisons are being replaced with video calls. For companies such as TextBehind and GTL/ViaPath—and others like Aventiv/Securus, which owns JPay—ushering incarcerated people into the 21st century is a profitable business model. It functions under the guise of security and efficiency, but it leaves behind tangible human connection.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2023/06/prison-messaging-cost-gettingout-gtl-viapath.html
Ref: slate
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