A Captive Audience
How private companies are getting rich off of US prisoners and their families.
You’re arrested in Texas. After posting bail, an ankle monitor is affixed to your leg for GPS tracking while you await trial. The county — and, by extension, taxpayers — pay a daily monitoring fee to keep track of your location. Your court date comes and things don’t go your way. In prison you’re given a free tablet to keep you occupied. It was donated by a company dedicated to your rehabilitation.
You have to buy digital “stamps” to message a loved one, and they do the same to message you back. When you run out of funds, your family deposits some money into your account so they can keep in touch. One boring night, you rent a 30-minute episode of a TV show for $2. It’s gone the next morning.
You’d love to listen to music or play a game, but at over $40 for an album and $16 per month for a few tablet games, you can't afford it. Your family is still paying off your lawyer, and you don’t want to burden them further. You decide to go without. You fall asleep to the soothing sounds of inmates quarreling and complaining about their cases.
You’d never know that the companies that built your ankle monitor, charged the county daily to track you, donated your tablet, sold you digital stamps, charged your family a processing fee for their deposit, rented you a $2 TV show, and charge exorbitant fees for music, games, and digital books are actually one and the same.
That company is Aventiv Technologies. Through its brands Aventiv, Securus Technologies, Securus Monitoring, and JPay, it is the digital tollbooth between over 1.2 million inmates and the outside world.
Aventiv
It’s difficult to overstate the reach of Aventiv. As a privately held company, it is not required to share much about itself, but there are a few things we do know.
Aventiv is a piece of the massive private Platinum Equity portfolio, nestled snuggly between Cision (the leading PR and marketing platform), and the Detroit Pistons basketball franchise. As of 2014, the company held a prison communication market share of around 20%, but it’s been growing rapidly.
In a November 2022 update, Aventiv claimed to serve over 3,450 law enforcement and corrections agencies across North America and over 1.2 million incarcerated individuals. That’s 1.2 million out of an estimated 2 million total inmates in state and federal prisons, local jails, juvenile detention facilities, and immigration detention centers in the US and Canada.
Note: Aventiv did not respond to repeated requests for information, and declined to speak on the record.
If you or a loved one are convicted of a crime that requires jail or prison time, odds are you’ll become familiar with one or more of Aventiv's systems. If you are the one in trouble, your introduction to the umbrella corporation may begin even before your trial.
In 2013, Securus Technologies acquired a company called STOP. Founded in 2004, STOP (Satellite Tracking of People) was a leader in the emerging GPS-based offender-tracking industry. STOP became the foundation for Securus Monitoring, which offers law enforcement agencies a one-stop solution for tracking offenders and those awaiting trial using its BLUtag GPS devices.
Data sent by the monitors doesn’t immediately go to the law enforcement agency in charge, however. The information first passes through the Veritracks proprietary monitoring platform, also owned by Securus. The company holds 36 unique patents for electronic monitoring.
If an alleged offender moves outside of their designated zone or attempts to tamper with the BLUTag device, an alert is sent to the agency and officers in charge.
GPS tracking of pre-trial defendants and offenders is not new. What is new, however, is that the company in charge of tracking them now has a profit motive for seeing them serve time behind bars. It all starts with a tablet.
Free* Tablets
JPay, part of Securus, regularly generates good-faith headlines by providing tablets to prisons across the country.
The benefits of the tablets are obvious. The devices include a wealth of reading material related to rehabilitation, though that is rarely cited as a reason for the tablets’ existence. Instead, they are positioned as communications and media devices.
Contact with friends and family gives inmates motivation to be on their best behavior, while ebooks, music, and other media keep their minds occupied.
Securus provides testimonials from other prison systems where the tablets are already used. Stats like a “60% decrease in staff assaults” and “40% decrease in offender-on-offender assaults” are cited. Some agencies are quoted as saying that violence had all but stopped once the devices arrived.
It's a deal for taxpayers, too. The tablets are often free, so no contracts have to be inked that would impact state budgets.
The most notable of the early tablet drops occurred in New York in 2018. Roughly 50,000 prisoners in several state prisons received the free tablets, and JPay positioned itself as a force for good, assisting in the rehabilitation process. But it wasn’t long before the generosity of the company was in question.
The pricing model for text communications meant that a few back-and-forth messages could easily cost several dollars. Adding photos or videos could double or triple the price. Media was even worse, with some songs costing as much as $2.50 each. Albums were priced upwards of $45. Public domain ebooks that are freely available online through Project Gutenberg weren’t free to inmates either. JPay charged $.99 for the privilege of one read-through. Re-reading the same book carried another charge.
In order for the incarcerated to make purchases, money had to be added to their JPay accounts by friends and family. Deposits as small as $10 made into an inmate’s account carried fees of as much as $4.15. JPay blamed third-party processing for those costs.
JPay estimated that it would make nearly $10 million off of the 50,000 donated tablets within five years. The company has not disclosed its realized revenue.
Stay Hooked
It’s in Aventiv’s best interest that inmates and their families connect through the tablet and the tablet alone. Not only does the company make money off of each call and message, but more tablet time means a higher likelihood of a larger purchase like a movie.
The tablets themselves are a loss leader, especially when they’re free, but the company more than makes up for their cost with the premiums it places on calls, messages, and especially media content. In a FAQ document provided to the Missouri Department of Corrections by JPay, the company addresses the suggestion that officers might take the tablets away if an inmate is behaving poorly.
“Policies and procedures will be developed to specify what types of violations will result in the offender losing tablet privileges for specified amounts of time,” JPay explains in the document. “But it is our goal to keep offenders connected to the tablets as much as possible so they are receiving all of the benefits that are offered.”
To that end, the company has adopted some interesting strategies to ensure that offenders are hooked to their screens.
During Valentine’s Day, free eCards were offered to families of inmates in several locations.
eCards, which are normally bought and sent through JPay, are only viewable on a tablet. Inmates in facilities that don’t offer free tablets — or those who wish not to use the tablets despite having access to them — may feel pressure to participate in free events like this and eventually consume paid content after becoming familiar with the device.
Similar tactics are often used by companies outside of a corrections setting, but there is no free market inside prison walls. If you want to send messages, pictures, or eCards to your loved ones, or occupy your time with a book or music, you have one option. The cost is set in stone, and the prices are far higher than anyone outside of prison would ever consider paying.
In some facilities, offenders who want to maintain their quality of life are forced to adopt the tablets whether they like them or not. Prisons where CDs were purchasable by inmates phased them out, requiring offenders to re-purchase their music digitally.
Promises Forgotten
In 2020, Aventiv claimed to have started a “multi-year transformation to hold [themselves] accountable” and improve the company’s image with inmates, their families, and the general public. After one year, the company said it had reduced the price of its phone call services and third-party processing fees. It boasted that it reduced the price of a 15-minute call to $2.25. Costs for music, video, and books were not addressed, though the company did eventually start providing Project Gutenberg books at no additional cost.
At the same time, the company launched a new JPay tablet. The JP6S features a larger, more vibrant touchscreen, longer battery life, and a more powerful processor. It’s an ideal platform for inmates to consume content.
Securus even published a hype video.
In a 2021 update to its commitments timeline, Aventiv claimed that it had reduced overall call rates by up to 25% compared to its pre-transformation model. Again, media costs remained the same. The company also hired 10 new senior executives.
There have been no updates to the company’s transformation plans since the end of 2021.
At the time of publishing, movies on the JPay tablets cost as much as $8 for a one-time rental, while individual TV episodes are priced at around $2. Music may be purchased individually or via a monthly subscription, depending on the facility and tablet model. It’s worth noting here that inmates with free tablets don’t take them upon release. Any purchases made while they served their sentence carry no license in the outside world.
Offenders who purchase a tablet are allowed to take the device with them, but there’s a wrinkle: JPay locks the devices within 30 days of an inmate’s release.
The tablets can’t be used when JPay initiates this lock, and the offender has to physically send the device to JPay in order for them to unlock it. If for some reason the device can’t be unlocked, JPay places the purchased media on a USB drive to be sent to the person.
Occasional sales bring the prices of movies and TV shows down to slightly more reasonable points. In speaking with inmates, I’ve learned that it’s during these brief sales periods that they stock up on content to watch and read.
It’s a transparent tactic, and it’s easy to see how temporary discounts can lure inmates in. Rent the first couple of episodes of a TV show during a sale, get hooked on the story, and before you know it you’re paying full price for the rest of the series. Easy money.
“Who Cares?”
“That’s a shame” and “They deserve it” are unfortunate sentiments shared by many who learn of Aventiv's practices. Some believe that inmates are lucky they have access to tablets at all, and the option to buy music or other media is even seen as a luxury.
You can always debate whether the tablets should exist in the first place. But if we’ve already agreed that incarcerated individuals should have access to a small selection of the content we enjoy outside of prison walls, we can’t simultaneously ignore the exploitative practices of companies like Aventiv and its brands.
We can’t laud the reduction in violent incidents as a result of these devices and then in the same breath assert that by breaking the law, offenders — and by extension, their families — willfully opened themselves up to monopolistic practices.
With its current strategy, Aventiv and its brands have bet big on the notion that the United States cares very little about its prison population.
So far, that bet is paying off.
Dude, your news letter is incredible. I Tweeted it out from the company account since my account is in limbo after becoming Musk's mom.
Damn this is bleak and thrilling at the same time. We’ll done!