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Our latest comments urging the FCC to regulate advanced communication services in correctional facilities.

by Alison Walsh, February 12, 2016

Spurred by our January 2015 report, Screening Out Family Time: The for-profit video visitation industry in prisons and jails, the Federal Communications Commission requested further comment on the regulation of advanced communication services such as video visitation and electronic messaging (or “email in prisons”).

Building on our last series of comments to the FCC, in which we identified solutions to four unresolved issues in the prison phone industry, we recently submitted comments calling for oversight of video visitation and electronic messaging.

Our latest video visitation comments encourage facilities to employ video systems that charge users on a per-minute basis and do not require advanced scheduling. We also highlight examples of video visitation companies attempting to profit from contracts that mandate the elimination or restriction of in-person visitation, and point out the danger in allowing government officials to cede control over visitation policies to private companies. Demand for video services should be achieved through reasonable pricing and flexible scheduling, not at the expense of traditional in-person visitation.

Our new report, You’ve Got Mail: The promise of cyber communication in prisons and the need for regulation, documents the benefits and drawbacks of electronic messaging in correctional facilities. And our comments on this topic affirm the FCC’s jurisdiction over electronic messaging, arguing that this emerging technology warrants FCC protection.

We recommend that the FCC put these safeguards in place to ensure that these new technologies facilitate communication rather than take advantage of people with no other options.

Our newest staffer comes to us from the Fair Housing Council of Oregon and The Massachusetts Fair Housing Center.

by Peter Wagner, January 28, 2016

Alison WalshPlease welcome our new Policy & Communications Associate, Alison Walsh.

Alison is a 2009 graduate of Vassar College with a degree in American Culture, where her weekly classes with people incarcerated at the Otisville Prison and Dutchess County Jail through the Green Haven Prison Program introduced her to the need for prison reform.

Welcome Alison!

New report finds electronic messaging in prisons and jails is a product of questionable value at inflated prices

January 21, 2016

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: January 21, 2016

Contact:
Bernadette Rabuy
brabuy [at] prisonpolicy.org

report thumbnailEasthampton, MA — Given the extreme distances that separate incarcerated people from their families, technological innovations that allow more frequent and faster communication between incarcerated people and their families would be a welcome improvement. A new report by the Prison Policy Initiative finds that while many facilities are still stuck in the last century, the growing number of facilities experimenting with electronic messaging are all too often providing incarcerated people and their families a product of questionable value at inflated prices.

The report, You’ve Got Mail: The promise of cyber communication in prisons and the need for regulation, analyzes the current state of electronic messaging in correctional facilities. The report finds that electronic messaging — which is often referred to as “email for prisoners” — actually has very little in common with the email services available to free-world users. For example:

  • Some electronic messaging systems are “inbound only.” With these systems, free-world users are able to electronically send a message to an incarcerated person, but the incarcerated person must respond with a handwritten letter.
  • While email is free for those of us in the free-world, private companies charge incarcerated people and their families anywhere from 5¢ to $1.25 per message to communicate electronically.

“Calling the electronic messaging offered to incarcerated people and their families ‘email’ would be an insult to email,” explains Stephen Raher, author of You’ve Got Mail. “Once again, it seems that the prison phone giants are providing more of the same old exploitation rather than providing true innovation.”

The report builds on the Prison Policy Initiative’s work uncovering the previously hidden prison and jail phone industry and exposing the harmful trend of video visits replacing traditional in-person jail visits. The report was submitted to the Federal Communications Commission in response to its request for comments on advanced communication services in prisons and jails and provides the FCC with nine recommendations. The report also offers seven other recommendations for legislators, state public utility commissions, and correctional administrators, all with an eye toward transforming electronic messaging from a poorly designed and expensive technology to a fair and reasonable tool for communication.

You’ve Got Mail: The promise of cyber communication in prisons and the need for regulation is a collaboration between Prison Policy Initiative and pro bono legal analyst Stephen Raher of the organization’s Young Professionals Network. Stephen’s previous work with the Prison Policy Initiative provided a first-of-its-kind analysis of high-fee release cards.

The report is available at: http://www.prisonpolicy.org/messaging/report.html

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In response to the FCC's request for comments, we submitted four analyses of unresolved issues

by Aleks Kajstura, January 21, 2016

In response to the FCC’s call for further comments on their regulations of the prison and jail phone industry, we submitted our analysis of and recommendations on four unresolved issues:

  • Single Calls: we explain how the FCC’s attempt to rein in “single call” programs left a significant loophole that can be easily closed.
  • Western Union and MoneyGram: we highlight an unintentional loophole in the FCC’s regulation of fee-sharing schemes between the phone companies and money transfer providers, and suggest that the FCC could instead copy Alabama’s solution to the problem.
  • Bundling unrelated services: we outline how bundling phone services with unrelated financial and other technology services is creating a growing opportunity for companies to create an end run around the FCC’s current regulations in the short term as well as undermine the FCC’s long-term goals of fostering a self-regulating ICS market through competition.
  • Video visitation: we updated the FCC on issues surrounding video visitation, showing that a national consensus has developed acknowledging that the growing trend of video visitation replacing traditional in-person visitation is a major step in the wrong direction and providing 5 recommendations for regulation.

    • Reply comments are due February 1, and can be submitted online for docket number 12-375.

Massachusetts House unanimously votes to end unnecessary license suspensions for drug offenses

by Bernadette Rabuy, January 15, 2016

Last week, the Massachusetts House unanimously approved H. 3039, which would repeal the state’s practice of automatically suspending driver’s licenses for drug offenses unrelated to driving.

report thumbnailLast year, our report, Suspending Common Sense in Massachusetts: Driver’s license suspensions for drug offenses unrelated to driving, found that the state automatically suspends the driver’s licenses of thousands of residents each year for drug convictions unrelated to driving. These suspensions make roads more dangerous, waste taxpayer and law enforcement resources, and prevent people with previous involvement in the criminal justice system from fulfilling responsibilities that require driving.

The Senate unanimously approved a stronger version of the bill last year. Next, legislators will likely negotiate a compromise, and then it will land on Governor Baker’s desk. The bill has broad support from Attorney General Maura Healey, the Massachusetts District Attorneys Association, sheriffs, and editorial boards all over the state. Stay tuned for next steps and for a Prison Policy Initiative report on the other states that have yet to reverse this ineffective relic from the War on Drugs.

by Chandra Bozelko, December 30, 2015

In its new report, “Policing for Profit,” the Institute for Justice (IJ) details exactly how law enforcement and prosecutors snatch “…hundreds of millions in cash, cars homes and other property – regardless of the owner’s guilt or innocence.”

While forfeiture is hardly a new proceeding, its use has clearly become overuse in the last 30 years if the IJ’s numbers are any indication. Annual deposits from forfeiture reached $4.5 billion, an amount almost 50 times higher than it was three decades ago.

Here’s a quick overview of how it works:

Civil forfeiture accounts for 87% of all government seizure, according to the IJ’s analysis. This fact is much more disturbing than the sheer amount of money and property involved. It means that criminal forfeiture accounts for only 13% of all government seizure of property. So almost 90% of forfeiture proceeds come from situations where citizens may have done nothing wrong: we’ve legalized plunder.

Calling civil forfeiture “one of the most controversial practices in the American criminal justice system” seems appropriate in light of the stories of victims of civil forfeiture told through the report.

  • In 2014, Charles Clarke had his life savings – $11,000 – confiscated at the Ciincinnatti/Northern Kentucky Airport when security officials thought his luggage smelled like marijuana. No drugs were ever found in his property and the mere suspicion as to why Clarke was traveling with such a large amount of cash (his bank had no local branches and his family was moving so he understandably wanted to keep his money with him) justified the seizure of every dollar the man had to his name.
  • Also in 2014, the IRS cleaned out Fairmount, North Carolina convenience store owner Lyndon McLellan’s entire business account – $107,000 – because the deposits to the account were less than $10,000 and the tax agency suspected him of “structuring” his deposits so as to evade certain reporting requirements. McLellan was not the person making the deposits – that was his niece – and she was only following the bank teller’s instructions because the smaller deposits meant less paperwork for the bank.
  • The same happened to Carole Hinders of Iowa, who deposited the proceeds of her cash only restaurant faithfully and honestly. The IRS saw a number of cash deposits and assumed that Hinders was somehow committing a crime, so the federal government’s tax arm seized $33,000 from her account.
  • Chris Sourovelis of Philadelphia almost lost his house when his son sold $40 of drugs outside his home. Sourovelis had to appear nine times in forfeiture court to keep his rightfully owned property when he hadn’t even been charged with, much less committed, any crime.

And, if these stores weren’t bad enough, the report exposes another level of insidious incentives in our forfeiture laws: equitable sharing. A program of ‘equitable sharing’ allows local and state law enforcement agencies to use federal laws to collect property for the federal government with the understanding that they will get a kick-back from the collective forfeiture pie.

There is hope that things are turning around and improving; just last week, the New York Times reported that the Department of Justice has placed the sharing program on hold because Congress took $1.2 billion dollars from the asset forfeiture program to cover budget shortfalls.

The biggest revelation of the Institute for Justice’s “Policing for Profit” report is that our justice system is no longer about public safety and stopping people who break the law. The United States has allowed justice to careen so out of control that it’s now unabashedly grabbing up the innocent and bankrupting them for the sake of government revenue.

2015 was a year of big victories for the Prison Policy Initiative. Beyond a record number of ground-breaking reports, our campaigns won major policy changes.

by Peter Wagner and Bernadette Rabuy, December 29, 2015

2015 was a year of big victories for the Prison Policy Initiative. Beyond a record number of ground-breaking reports, our campaigns took some very big steps forward and, in some cases, those victories culminated in major policy changes.

Here are some of the biggest wins in our campaigns this year:

Telephone justice

  • The Federal Communications Commission extended their regulation of inter-state calls to also apply to in-state calls, and further lowered the maximum rates and fees that can be charged. The FCC is also now requesting comments on closing the last of the loopholes, which include video visitation, email, etc.

Video visitation industry

    thumbnails of press coverage and editorial support on reining in the video visitation industry

  • Our report Screening Out Family Time: The for-profit video visitation industry in prisons and jails exposed county jails and private companies working together to replace traditional in-person visits with expensive video chats and grainy computer images.
  • Our report, combined with investigative reporting by Portland, Oregon’s Street Roots, led the Multnomah County Sheriff to announce that he would amend the county’s Securus video visitation contract to bring back in-person visits. This was the first time that a video visitation contract was ever amended to bring back in-person visits.
  • We collaborated with comedians to produce four hilarious short videos that take on the video visitation industry’s offensive claim that expensive, glitchy video visitation is just like Skype.
  • We shamed the largest provider of video visitation, Securus, into changing its policy of explicitly requiring, right in its contracts, that correctional facilities using its service ban in-person visitation. Because Securus has shifted responsibility for this repugnant decision to elected sheriffs, we now have more political leverage to encourage the use of video visitation as a supplement to in-person visitation and never as a replacement.
  • Thanks in part to our research and advocacy, a new law in Texas recognizes that virtual visits are not the same as in-person visits and mandates that each county jail provide a minimum of two in-person visits each week.
  • The Federal Communications Commission has requested comments on video visitation, due January 19, 2016.

Prison gerrymandering

Sentencing enhancement zones

Driver’s Licenses

  • Supported by our Suspending Common Sense report, the Massachusetts Senate unanimously voted to repeal a law which automatically suspends the driver’s licenses of people convicted of drug offenses unrelated to driving. This law, a relic of the War on Drugs, makes it harder for people with drug convictions to rebuild their lives. The unanimous support of the Senate and the strong state-wide editorial support from the Boston Herald to the Boston Globe to the Berkshire Eagle has us feeling good about our chances in the House.

Thank you for helping us do all of this work. Here’s to an even more successful 2016!

For more on these and other victories, be sure to see our most recent annual report.

2015 was another big year for ground-breaking data visualizations from the Prison Policy Initiative. These are our 10 favorites.

by Peter Wagner and Bernadette Rabuy, December 29, 2015

2015 was another big year for ground-breaking data visualizations from the Prison Policy Initiative. These are our 10 favorites:

pie chart showing the number of people locked up on a given day in the United States by facility type and the underlying offense using the newest data available in December 2015
From: Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2015 where we offer some much needed clarity on the size and scope of mass incarceration by piecing together this country’s disparate systems of confinement.

 

graph showing the incarceration rate for women per 100,000 women of founding members of NATO with the United States having a far higher rate than the other countries

We made this graph comparing the United States’ use of prisons and jails for women with its international peers for our report States of Women’s Incarceration: The Global Context.

 


We made this interactive graphic of “World Women’s Incarceration Rates If Every U.S. State Were A Country” for our collaboration States of Women’s Incarceration: The Global Context with Russ Immarigeon. See also, in the full report, our graph of the growth in women’s incarceration in prisons and jails from 1910 to last year.

 

As part of our collaboration with the Justice Policy Institute on The Right Investment? Corrections Spending in Baltimore City we made an interactive map showing how much the state of Maryland spends each year to lock up residents of each community in Baltimore and suggesting better investments.

 

Travis County, Texas video visitation price vs. usage
That price-gouging of families of incarcerated people reduces use of video visitation is just one of the findings from Screening Out Family Time: The for-profit video visitation industry in prisons and jails. (And don’t miss the full report for graphical illustrations of how video visitation works and why grainy video chats are not the same as in-person visitation.)

 

distribution of annual incomes for incarcerated men prior to incarceration and non-incarcerated men, ages 27-42

distribution of annual incomes for incarcerated women prior to incarceration and non-incarcerated women, ages 27-42

These two graphs were produced for our report uncovering the pre-incarceration incomes of the imprisoned by gender, race, and ethnicity and comparing them to people of similar ages of people on the outside. For the whole report, see Prisons of Poverty: Uncovering the pre-incarceration incomes of the imprisoned

 

So how large is 1,500 feet? That distance isn’t just a number; it’s taller than the Eiffel Tower, longer than 5 football fields, and it’s more than enough to blanket all of Connecticut’s urban areas in overlapping sentencing enhancement zones. With the help of two of our interns, Elydah Joyce and Arielle Sharma, and a member of our Young Professionals Network, Jacob Mitchell, we produced an animation that we expect will help other states follow Connecticut’s lead in rolling back the worst laws passed at the height of the anti-drug hysteria of the 1980s.

 

chart showing how many counties are overrepresented with Black people in prison compared to portion of Black people in free population

This chart from The Racial Geography of Mass Incarceration shows that in many counties Black people in prison are overrepresented compared to the portion of Black people in the free population. Notably, many of these counties are concentrated in the far left of the graph, where Blacks make up 20% to 60% of the prison populations yet less than 5% of the free population.

 

Two of the four maps provided show the large numbers of facilities dispersed widely across the nation that lacked racial or ethnic parity between incarcerated people and correctional staff in 2005. The final two maps show far fewer facilities that have achieved racial or ethnic parity. Facilities with parity are concentrated primarily in states or parts of states with large Black and Latino populations.
These maps from In prisons, Blacks and Latinos do the time while Whites get the jobs show that most correctional facilities with more than 100 incarcerated Blacks or Latinos are located in places where hiring Black and Latino staff in proportional numbers to the incarcerated population is extremely difficult. The small number of facilities that have such parity are, unsurprisingly, located in parts of the country with large populations of Black or Latino residents.
 

Our colleagues helped build momentum for criminal justice reform by providing key research and proposing reforms that could help our nation reduce its overuse of incarceration. Our favorites from 2015.

by Peter Wagner and Bernadette Rabuy, December 29, 2015

2015 was another year of growing momentum for ending mass incarceration. Our colleagues helped build that momentum by providing key research and proposing reforms that could help our nation reduce its overuse of incarceration. These are some of our favorite reports produced by our colleagues in 2015:

And don’t forget to check out our reports page for this year’s original Prison Policy Initiative research.

by Peter Wagner and Bernadette Rabuy, December 28, 2015

Earlier today, we published our list of the best investigative criminal justice journalism of 2015. Here at the Prison Policy Initiative we enjoy seeing journalists, artists, advocates, the public, etc. use our research in new, clever ways. Today, we share some of our favorite stories of 2015 featuring our work and staff:

  • Editorial: F.C.C. Makes Telephone Calls for Inmates Cheaper
    by The New York Times Editorial Board
    The New York Times, October 26, 2015
    Recognizing the FCC for its important step capping the rates of all calls home from prisons and jails, The New York Times Editorial Board calls for the FCC to do more to prevent future abuses:

    There’s one big task left: to apply similar rules to newer technologies — like email, voice mail and person-to-person video — which are subject to the same kinds of abuses found in the telephone industry.

    If you haven’t already, be sure to check out our January 2015 report on video visitation in prisons and jails, which was referenced in the editorial.

  • Editorial: Women Behind Bars
    by The New York Times Editorial Board
    The New York Times, November 30, 2015
    This editorial highlights our report States of Women’s Incarceration: The Global Context, calling for public scrutiny of our nation’s overuse of incarceration for women.
  • Screening visitors
    The Economist, January 24, 2015
    Spurred by our report on video visitation, The Economist explains why the growth in video visitation isn’t necessarily a happy development for families:

    Most jails let relatives make a few free video calls if these are conducted within the prison itself. But travelling a long way, only to sit behind a computer screen, is time-consuming and frustrating.

  • Technical difficulty: Sheriff Staton’s move to replace in-person visits at Multnomah County jails with video visiting raises questions
    by Emily Green
    Street Roots, January 21, 2015
    Breaking the story on Multnomah County, Oregon’s video visitation plans, this Street Roots article helped get the Multnomah County Sheriff to reverse his ban on in-person visits.
  • America’s Horrifying Mass-Incarceration System, In 1 Chart
    by Nick Wing
    Huffington Post, December 9, 2015
    This article uses our recent report, Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2015, to explain why ending mass incarceration will require an ambitious, comprehensive effort.
  • An offense that should come off the books
    by The Boston Globe Editorial Board
    The Boston Globe, September 21, 2015
    Referring to our 2014 report, Suspending Common Sense in Massachusetts, The Boston Globe calls for the immediate repeal of automatic driver’s license suspensions for drug offenses unrelated to driving, an outdated law from the tough-on-crime era of the 1980s and 1990s.
  • The Persuasiveness of a Chart Depends on the Reader, Not Just the Chart
    by Scott Berinato
    Harvard Business Review, May 27, 2015
    Berinato highlights our chart comparing the incarceration rate of the U.S. to those of other founding NATO members as a good example of a chart that creates an “immediate, visceral reaction.”
  • Video: Who profits from the billion-dollar prison phone business?
    Al Jazeera, September 30, 2015
    In this 5-minute video, hear from loved ones of incarcerated people and Executive Director Peter Wagner about how $1 per minute phone calls home from prisons and jails keep families apart.
  • Prison Vendors See Continued Signs of a Captive Market
    by David Segal
    The New York Times, August 29, 2015
    Columnist David Segal travels to the American Correctional Association conference to meet the companies who provide products and services to prisons to inquire whether the companies are worried about how “prison reform” might impact their bottom lines. (Spoiler: They aren’t scared, but for why, you’ll need to read the article.)
  • West Baltimore offers vivid reminder of failed mass incarceration policy
    by Amadou Diallo
    Al Jazeera, April 30, 2015
    Diallo uses our report, The Right Investment?, to provide some context about Sandtown-Winchester, the Baltimore neighborhood that Freddie Gray called home:

    Abandoned row houses and vacant lots dot this area, which is marked by high unemployment and low-performing schools — yet Maryland’s state budget allocates $17 million each year just to this single neighborhood. That money goes not to job training, family services or education, but solely to incarceration.

  • How Does Prison Gerrymandering Work?
    by Alex Mayyasi
    Priceonomics, October 20, 2015
    New to prison gerrymandering? Read this thorough article on how prison populations can distort political representation and then find out what solutions are out there.
  • Family visits make prisoners less likely to reoffend. But some states make visiting hard.
    by German Lopez
    Vox, October 22, 2015
    In response to our report that found that extreme distances actively discourage family visits, Lopez writes:

    Part of the visitation problem is also caused by mass incarceration itself. As states have struggled with overcrowding in their facilities, they’ve been more likely to turn to remote or out-of-state prisons to house inmates. But these far-off locations make it much more difficult for friends and family to reach inmates.

    Lopez then goes on to explain that making prison visits difficult for families of the incarcerated is shortsighted:

    The point of the criminal justice system is to keep us safe, and taking research-backed steps to prevent inmates from reoffending achieves that goal.

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