prison phone calls – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Stories filed under: "prison phone calls"

Lawsuit Says Hudson County Jail Recorded Calls With Attorneys, Gave This Info To Prosecutors

from the a-snoop-too-far dept

Everyone’s aware (or should be) that all calls made from jail are monitored. Not all calls are recorded. There are exceptions, with the biggest being the one for calls made to attorneys representing jailed people.

Those are completely off-limits. These are privileged communications that cannot be monitored or recorded by the government. And yet, it seems to happen disturbingly frequently.

Part of the problem is that, in most cases, the monitoring of calls is automated and handled by third parties. The third parties make good money on every outgoing call. And if jail officials aren’t staying on top of things, everything gets collected. Once it’s collected, there’s really no reason to not take a listen to attorney-client calls (I mean, other than the rights violation). All you have to do then is just not get caught doing it.

For Securus and its incarceration customers, “getting caught” happened. A massive trove of hacked data included 14,000 recordings of calls between prisoners and their legal reps. Securus settled the inevitable class-action lawsuit five years later, covering 840,000inlegalfeesandshellingoutupto840,000 in legal fees and shelling out up to 840,000inlegalfeesandshellingoutupto20,000 to each affected inmate. It could easily afford to buy its way out of this since it has been known to charge upwards of $14 a minute for calls using its service.

The latest lawsuit to allege illegal recording of privileged communications has the potential to be another class-action lawsuit. It has been brought by a man currently serving time in a New Jersey correctional facility, who claims his attorney calls were not only recorded, but their content used against him by state prosecutors. (NJ.com was the first to report on this lawsuit, but while it can apparently erect a paywall, it apparently doesn’t have the capability to embed a copy of the lawsuit, much less link to it. So, Gothamist gets the leading link and the blockquotes.)

A man who was incarcerated in Hudson County, New Jersey, alleges jail officials and prosecutors there illegally listened to private conversations he had with his attorney while awaiting trial.

Yursil Kidwai says in a federal class-action lawsuit that jail officials secretly monitored phone conversations between him and his lawyer, which are privileged under New Jersey law, and then prosecutors used information shared in those calls to help build a sexual assault case against him.

The tech for recording calls en masse has existed for years. Plenty of players in the jail tech market have capitalized on this to extract exorbitant per-minute fees from a truly captive market. Correctional facilities not only benefit from the off-loading of this task to third parties, but they often directly benefit from the per-minute extortion racket by receiving a cut of every dollar generated by companies like Securus.

No third-party provider is being sued here. Just several facility officials and government prosecutors. As was stated above, listening in on privileged calls is super-easy. All that’s needed to get away with this is to not do anything stupid.

But everyone involved in this violation of rights screwed up, at least according to Yursil Kidwai’s lawsuit [PDF].

[Kidwai] learned of Defendants’ unconstitutional conduct only when Defendant HCPO [Hudson County Prosecutor’s Office] inadvertently produced in discovery copies of [HCPO Detective Ashley Rubel’s] memorandum to [Assistant Chief Hudson County Prosecutor Jane Weiner] and [HCPO Detective Sergeant Leslie Murphy] digesting the substance of Plaintiff’s attorney-client telephone calls.

At best, this could be charitably described as “sloppy.” This opens up the jail and the prosecutor’s office to all sorts of speculation, if not actionable claims. The inmate also claims other inmates have experienced the same sort of forbidden snooping, although the other person named was not so fortunate as to have been the beneficiary of an unforced error.

Since this is a proposed class-action suit, Kidwai is not seeking suppression of this evidence or a reversal of his conviction. (Reports suggest the case against Kidwai was so strong prosecutors definitely didn’t need to use anything obtained illegally, which makes you wonder why they chose to do so.) Instead, he’s seeking a court order blocking the HCPO and correctional facility from doing something they’re already not allowed to do. He’s also seeking unspecified monetary damages, but if it’s true this conviction wasn’t predicated on illegal monitoring of calls, it seems unlikely he’ll be able to demonstrate any monetary loss from these illegal actions.

Without a doubt, this sort of thing is common. What’s uncommon is the government getting caught doing it. Discovery — should the case get to that point — might prove to be very interesting.

Filed Under: attorney client privilege, hudson county, jail phone calls, new jersey, phone calls, prison phone calls, yursil kidwai

Connecticut Is Now The First State To Make Calls From Prisons Free For Inmates

from the long-overdue dept

Once you’re in jail, you’re just meat the government can abuse with near impunity. You belong to the state now and whatever happens to you is well-deserved — a sentiment not only felt by jailers but by an unfortunately large percentage of the US population.

You can be pressed into service, providing nearly free labor for the government, not to mention its favored government contractors — private businesses that enjoy the profit margin nearly free labor provides. Prison wages are inanely low. Costs for everything prisoners might want are insanely high.

While government officials enrich themselves by cutting every service to a bare minimum, private contractors are quick to hitch themselves to the money train, extricating massive amounts of wealth from literally captive audiences.

Like anyone else, inmates want to be able to speak to family members and loved ones. And a handful of private companies have stepped in to erect massive paywalls between prisoners and the people they wish to speak to. These programs have experienced exponential growth, thanks to private contractors cutting prisons and prison officials in on the profits.

But the money train has come off the rails in Connecticut. Last spring, the Connecticut House offered up a bill that would make prison calls free — aligning them with the services provided to everyone on the outside. The legislation would end one form of inmate profiteering: the charging of exorbitant fees by opportunistic middle men who realized locking down contracts with prisons meant never having to worry about competitive phone call pricing.

It was a long shot. Private contractors with considerable lobbying power were strongly opposed to losing access to this revenue stream. And those running jails and prisons were looking at losing access to a cut of service providers’ profits if the bill passed.

Unbelievably, the bill continued to receive legislative support. A couple of months after the Connecticut House passed its bill, the Senate passed one of its own. Less than month later, Governor Ned Lamont signed the bill into law, sticking it directly to Securus — a prison phone service provider with a long, ugly history of screwing inmates and their families with exorbitant per minute charges, recording privileged communications, and otherwise inflicting additional misery on people already experiencing plenty of misery already.

One year after receiving the governor’s signature, the law has gone into effect. As Worth Rises reports, prison phone calls are now officially and legally free in the state of Connecticut.

Connecticut is the first in the nation to make all calls free. Hopefully, more states will follow suit. And Worth Rises’ efforts have paid off in smaller ways elsewhere in the nation, paving the way for similar legislation in other states.

Pressured by Worth Rises and similar advocacy groups, the Federal Communication Commission last year imposed ceilings on the costs of interstate calls from convicted people in prisons and the mainly pre-trial detainees in jails. Before the FCC’s action, a handful but growing number of municipalities and states already were moving in that direction. Effective this July, Connecticut will become the first state where all calls between adult and juvenile incarcerated people and their families are free. And San Diego County, Calif. will offer an unlimited number of free calls of up to 15 minutes each for the incarcerated.

Starting Aug. 1, Massachusetts will offer the incarcerated up to 10 minutes of free calls weekly. Legislators in New York State legislators are considering a similar bill.

While we do want inmates to pay their debt to society, there’s nothing to be gained from bankrupting the innocent people who foot the bill for inmate calls — costs that cost as much as $14/minute. If we’re even going to pretend incarceration is tied to rehabilitation, erecting massive paywalls between inmates and the people who love and support them is not just counterproductive, it’s insanely mercenary.

Filed Under: connecticut, free calls, price gouging, prison, prison phone calls
Companies: securus

Connecticut Legislature Offers Up Bill That Would Make Prison Phone Calls Free

from the let's-get-this-trending! dept

A lot of rights just vanish into the ether once you’re incarcerated. Some of this makes sense. You have almost no privacy rights when being housed by the state. Your cell can be searched and your First Amendment right to freedom of association can be curtailed in order to prevent criminal conspiracies from being implemented behind bars.

But rights don’t disappear completely. The government has an obligation to make sure you’re cared for and fed properly — something that rarely seems to matter to jailers.

Treating people as property has negative outcomes. Not only are “good” prisoners expected to work for pennies a day, but their families are expected to absorb outlandish expenses just to remain in contact with their incarcerated loved ones. The government loves its paywalls and it starts with prison phone services.

Cellphone adoption changed the math for service providers. After a certain point, customers were unwilling to pay per text message. And long distance providers realized they could do almost nothing to continue to screw over phone users who called people outside of their area codes. Some equity was achieved once providers realized “long distance” was only a figure of profitable speech and text messages were something people expected to be free, rather than a service that paid phone companies per character typed.

But if you’re in prison, it’s still 1997. The real world is completely different but your world is controlled by companies that know how to leverage communications into a profitable commodity. As much as we, the people, apparently hate the accused and incarcerated, they’re super useful when it comes to funding local spending. Caged people are still considered “taxpayers,” even when they can’t generate income or vote in elections.

So, for years, we’ve chosen to additionally punish inmates by turning basic communication options into high priced commodities. And we’ve decided they don’t have any right to complain, even when the fees are astronomical or prison contractors are either helping law enforcement listen in to conversations with their legal reps or making it so prohibitively expensive only the richest of us can support an incarcerated person’s desire to remain connected to their loved ones.

Connecticut legislators have had enough. Whether it will be enough to flip the status quo table remains to be seen. But, for now, a bill proposed by the Connecticut House aims to strip the profit from for-profit service providers, as well as the for-profit prisons that pad their budgets with kickbacks from prison phone service providers. (h/t Kathy Morse)

Connecticut holds the dismal distinction of being the state with the most expensive prison phone calls in the country. But a new bill in the state legislature may soon make Connecticut the first state to make prison phone calls free.

Senate Bill 520 would require Connecticut state prisons to offer telephone or other communication to incarcerated people free of charge, at a minimum of 90 minutes per day. The state could not collect any revenue from operating these services.

Seems like a reasonable response. 90 minutes per day should make most calls from prisons free for all but the most talkative. And I hope those profiting from these services socked some money away for a legislative rainy day. They’ve certainly had the opportunity. As this report notes, prison call services raked in over $13 million in fees in 2018 alone. There’s no reason to believe this amount declined in 2019 or 2020, especially when 2020 gave people millions of reasons to avoid in-person visits with anyone.

The bill [PDF] is short and sweet — somewhat of a surprise considering it was crafted by public servants who often seem to believe they’re being paid by the word. Here it is in its entirety:

AN ACT CONCERNING THE COST OF TELECOMMUNICATION SERVICES FOR INCARCERATED PERSONS.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives in General Assembly convened:

That title 18 of the general statutes be amended to require the Department of Correction to provide voice or other telecommunication services to incarcerated persons free of cost for a minimum of ninety minutes per day.

Statement of Purpose: To provide certain cost-free telecommunication services for incarcerated persons.

As it says on the tin, the purpose of the legislation is to provide prisoners with free phone calls, rather than allow them to be subjected to per-minute fees last viewed as “reasonable” sometime in the early 1990s. (And only viewed as “reasonable” by long distance providers, not the captive market they provided service to. [And “captive” means people who have few options in terms of service providers, not just those locked behind physical bars.])

Expect significant pushback. And it won’t just be coming from prison phone service providers like Securus. It will also come from local law enforcement agencies which receive a percentage of these fees — something most people would call a kickback, even if law enforcement continues to argue that it isn’t.

If this passes, this will be the first successful effort that covers a whole state. Pockets of prison phone fee resistance have been found elsewhere prior to this (New York City, San Francisco) but it has yet to be implemented at state level. This bill would be the first to make it illegal to charge for prison phone calls across an entire state.

This is the sort of legislation that should be adopted across the nation. Prisons — for better or worse — are a public service. They shouldn’t be subject to the predatory behavior of private companies. Making it prohibitively expensive to talk to loved ones should be considered “cruel,” if not “unusual.” It serves no deterrent effect. All it does is enforce the unspoken fact that people in prisons are no longer considered “people.” That’s not how our justice system is supposed to work.

Filed Under: connecticut, prison, prison phone calls

Prison Phone Monopoly Securus Under Fire Again, This Time For Doling Out Everybody's Private Phone Location Data

from the don't-pass-go,-don't-collect-$200 dept

Mon, May 14th 2018 10:44am - Karl Bode

For years now we’ve noted how a company by the name of Securus has managed to obtain a pretty cozy, government-supported monopoly over prison phone and teleconferencing services. Like any monopoly, this prison monopoly has pretty traditionally resulted in not only sky high rates upwards of $14 per minute for phone calls, but comically poor service as well. It’s something advocates (like outgoing FCC staffer Mignon Clyburn) have been trying to rectify for years, only to have Trump FCC boss Ajit Pai completely deflate those efforts last year.

But Securus’ monopoly — and the government pampering and cronyism that helped create it — has other additional costs as well. Interstate inmate calling service (ICS) companies effectively buy their privileged positions from local governments, who then expect some favors in return. For example, Securus was recently accused of routinely spying on privileged inmate attorney communications, information that was only revealed after Securus was hacked in late 2015. Given the generalized apathy for prison inmates and their families (“Iff’n ya don’t like high prices, don’t go to prison son!”) reform on this front has been glacial at best.

Meanwhile, the problems caused by these government-sanctioned monopolies continue to pile up. A recent court case has also exposed how some law enforcement officials also make routine use of a Securus service that helps track people?s cellphones without court orders. While the service is marketed to government as a way for law enforcement to track fleeing drug treatment or even Alzheimer’s patients, zero oversight means it’s routinely abused. In this case, the law enforcement official used the Securus service to not only track members of the general public, but Judges and other law enforcement officials as well:

“The service can find the whereabouts of almost any cellphone in the country within seconds. It does this by going through a system typically used by marketers and other companies to get location data from major cellphone carriers, including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon, documents show.

Between 2014 and 2017, the sheriff, Cory Hutcheson, used the service at least 11 times, prosecutors said. His alleged targets included a judge and members of the State Highway Patrol. Mr. Hutcheson, who was dismissed last year in an unrelated matter, has pleaded not guilty in the surveillance cases.”

In addition to being another warning about the threat of government-pampered monopolies, the scandal again highlights how our nonexistent to lax consumer privacy laws (especially for wireless carriers) routinely come back to bite us. In this instance, Securus was easily able to buy cell carrier location data, then upload it to a company portal. Law enforcement officials can then easily plug in a cell phone number to track its location, provided they supply an “official document giving permission.” Overview of the validity of these documents appears to be half-assed at best.

We’ve long noted that wireless carriers routinely sell browsing, location and other data to absolutely everyone, and while these companies insist that “anonymizing” the data protects user identities (it doesn’t), the rules governing the use of such data are laughable at best. Efforts to then pass more meaningful privacy protections then get quickly and repeatedly scuttled by influential lobbyists, as companies fight tooth and nail against any measures that could possibly hamstring user data monetization efforts.

As you might expect, Securus took no ownsership of the scandal or the routine abuse of private data:

“Securus requires documentation and reasonably relies on the professionalism and integrity of our law enforcement customers and their counsel. Securus is neither a judge nor a district attorney, and the responsibility of ensuring the legal adequacy of supporting documentation lies with our law enforcement customers and their counsel.”

Senator Ron Wyden, meanwhile, has fired off a letter to FCC boss Ajit Pai (pdf), lamenting the fact that the oversight of this entire process is the glorified equivalent of a “pinky promise”:

“I recently learned that Securus Technologies, a major provider of correctional-facility telephone services, purchases real-time location information from major wireless carriers and provides that information, via a self-service web portal, to the government for nothing more than the legal equivalent of a pinky promise. This practice skirts wireless carrier’s legal obligation to be the sole conduit by which the government conducts surveillance of Americans’ phone records, and needlessly exposes millions of Americans to potential abuse and surveillance by the government.”

Securus is the perfect storm created by lax privacy rules, rampant cronyism, the government’s tendency to pamper and embolden monopolies, and the routine skirting of wiretap and privacy law by corporations and law enforcement alike.

Filed Under: ajit pai, fcc, law enforcement, location data, prison, prison phone calls
Companies: securos