Two lawsuits filed this week accuse Michigan sheriff’s offices of colluding with large prison telecommunications companies to end face-to-face prison visits and then imposing prices on families forced to rely on expensive phone calls and video chats, in exchange of huge bribes.
Civil Rights Corps, a nonprofit criminal justice advocacy organization, filed two class actions in Michigan state court, one in Genesee County and the other in St. Clair County, on behalf of several residents who say visitation bans deprive children of the ability to hug their incarcerated parents. The lawsuits allege that two major prison technology providers, Securus Technologies and Global Tel*Link (GTL), offered significant financial incentives to officials in Genesee and St. Clair to install video chat kiosks in prisons that would eventually replace visitation face to face. .
The Civil Rights Corps argues that this violated the due process rights of inmates and their families under the Michigan Constitution. In addition to damages, the lawsuit seeks immediate injunctions ending the ban on in-person prison visits.
“This scheme violates Michigan law, offends fundamental principles of human connection and dignity, and imposes profound costs on families,” the Civil Rights Corps claims in its lawsuit against Genesee County. “It also harms individual and public safety without serving any compelling government interest.”
AS Reason has previously reported on jails and prison systems across the country started to reduce things like in-person visits, book donationsAND physical mail over the last decade, replacing them with video services and electronic tablets. These changes were often made in the name of safety and reducing contraband, an extremely serious problem in American jails and prisons.
However, criminal justice advocates and civil rights groups say these practices are also reducing one of the most effective and widely agreed upon ways to improve outcomes for incarcerated people: regular family contact.
And it is imposing significant costs on families.
“Before in-person visits were banned, people incarcerated in the St. Clair County Jail were able to speak with their loved ones face-to-face,” according to the St. Clair indictment. “Children and parents could look each other in the eye. Now, children and parents can’t do any of that for the months or years they are confined there.”
“I can barely cover rent and food,” one plaintiff, Marie Bills, said in the St. Clair lawsuit. “We only make phone calls; we can’t do video calls because they are too expensive and not even remotely comparable to seeing each other in person.”
Persistent allegations of inhumane price gouging have led several jurisdictions to reconsider pricing for inmate phone calls. In 2018, New York made telephone calls to prisoners free. At the time he was making $20,000 a day in phone charges from the Rikers Island prison complex. Last December, The Angels and the state of Massachusetts he also made prison phone calls free.
However, phone and video chat revenues represent significant revenue streams for smaller counties.
According to the lawsuit, Genesee County’s 2018 contract with GTL set the price of remote video calls at $10 for a 25-minute call. The county receives a 20% monthly commission on video calls, plus at least $180,000 a year from GTL’s phone call revenue and an annual “technology grant” of $60,000.
And since in-person visits ended, that revenue has increased dramatically. According to the lawsuit, Securus paid St. Clair County $154,130 in 2017 in commissions on phone calls. By 2022, that number had reached nearly $500,000.
“Well, that’s a nice increase in revenue!” wrote a St. Clair County jail administrator after reviewing a chart of the county’s annual revenue from jail calls, according to emails uncovered in the Civil Rights Corps lawsuit.
“Heck, yes it is!” The St. Clair County Accounting Officer responded. “It just keeps getting bigger and bigger every month [smiley face emoji].”
Defendants in St. Clair’s lawsuit include St. Clair County Sheriff Mat King, Securus and Tom Gores, owner of the Detroit Pistons and founder of Platinum Equity, which owns Securus.
The Genesee County lawsuit was filed against the county, Sheriff Christopher Swanson, GTL, and GTL CEO Deb Alderson.
Securus declined to comment and GTL did not immediately respond to a request for comment.