Le’Essa said that if she had a chance to speak with Gores and others in the industry she’d tell them, “Children need to see our parents. Some kids’ whole entire lives are changed if they can’t, and now they’re on a whole different trajectory.”
The modern prison-communication industry emerged four decades ago, after the federal government broke up A.T. & T.’s Bell System. New phone companies competed for customers by slashing prices. But inside prisons and jails a different model developed: telecom companies persuaded local officials to sign exclusive service contracts in exchange for hefty commissions. The costs of these commissions were passed along to incarcerated “customers” and their families, who lacked consumer choice. Price gouging was the inevitable result. By the nineties, prison phone-call prices in some jurisdictions had soared to twenty dollars for fifteen minutes.
In the early two-thousands, private equity entered the picture. Dozens of smaller companies were consolidated into two national juggernauts: GTL, which is backed by the private-equity firm American Securities, and Securus. “The American prison-communications market was appealing to private equity, in part because prisons and jails are recession-proof,” Elizabeth Daniel Vasquez, the director of the Science and Surveillance Project at Brooklyn Defender Services, told me. Various players within the industry experimented with monetizing nearly every aspect of incarcerated people’s daily lives, charging five cents a minute to read books on tablets, selling digital “stamps” required to send messages to people on the outside, and imposing steep fees on family members who sent funds for the commissary. Companies also began offering digital surveillance services that had soared in popularity after 9/11, including facial-recognition software for video calls and voice-identification technology.
“For decades, families and advocates have been working to push back on this industry,” Bianca Tylek, who runs the nonprofit Worth Rises, told me. “Finally, in the past handful of years, we’ve seen incredible wins.” In 2020, through a pandemic provision, the federal government made phone calls from its prisons free. So far, five states have followed suit. Last year, President Biden signed a major bill allowing the Federal Communications Commission to cap what the agency’s leadership has called “predatory” pricing in some prison and jail communications. But county jails across the country had long since filled their visitation rooms with digital kiosks run by Securus and GTL. “The word ‘visit’ for these calls is a joke,” Tylek said. “If I call my sister in Miami on FaceTime, I don’t tell her, ‘Hey, I’m visiting you in Miami!’ ”
Platinum Equity said that by the time it acquired Securus, in 2017, the company’s contracts no longer stipulated that jails end or reduce traditional visits. Tom Gores even told the Detroit Free Press, “Ultimately, I think this industry really should be led probably not by private folks. I think it probably should be—I’ll get killed for saying this—but the nonprofit business, honestly.”
Platinum Equity says it supports changes to the industry. In a statement, it said that Securus products “provide an important connection between the incarcerated and their friends and families, but those products are not intended as a replacement for in-person visitation.” But many of the jails where Eliza Fawcett and I examined contracts are refusing to restore regular in-person visits or are actively replacing them with commercial video calls. When I asked Platinum Equity whether Gores would consider offering video visitation only to jails and prisons that retain in-person visits, the company declined to comment. A spokesperson for Securus told me, of the St. Clair lawsuit, “The case against us in Michigan is misguided and without merit.” ViaPath similarly denies the allegations in the lawsuit filed against GTL in Genesee County. A ViaPath spokesperson said, “Remote virtual visitation helps families who find the travel time and expense to visit in person burdensome.” (Most families I met would agree—if the calls were higher quality, more affordable, and offered alongside in-person visits.)
Teresa Hodge, who heads the advisory board for Securus’s parent company, makes this argument in more personal terms. Hodge was previously incarcerated in federal prison, and now runs a reëntry organization called Mission: Launch. “What kept me feeling human and sane was my connection to my family,” Hodge told me, of her time in prison, where she had access to phone calls but not to video-conferencing technology. As Hodge sees it, communities’ frustration with Securus is “misplaced,” and should be directed toward the criminal-justice system.
Tylek sees it differently. County jails “replaced all these visiting rooms, and they’re not turning back,” she told me. “The damage has been done.”
In St. Clair County, the financial incentives were stark. Public records I reviewed showed that, after the jail eliminated in-person visits, call commissions almost tripled, from $154,131 in 2017 to $404,752 the following year. In February of 2018, a jail administrator wrote a cheerful e-mail to colleagues: “Well that is a nice increase in revenues!”
The county’s accounting manager replied, “Heck yes it is!,” adding, “Keeps getting bigger every month too.” (Sheriff Mat King, of St. Clair County, declined to comment on the litigation. But King and the county filed a brief that noted, “There is nothing illegal or unethical about a County seeking other sources of revenue to lessen the burden on taxpayers.”)
In Flint, Karla Darling told me, “Once a week, you’d get a free video visit, but only at very restricted times, and if that didn’t fit your schedule it was ‘Fuck you, you won’t see your family.’ ” A couple of times, Darling said, she had to choose between keeping the heat or gas on in the house and paying the GTL bill. She found that the quality of the calls was so poor that half the time Le’Essa and Addy couldn’t hear their dad; on some occasions, the jail failed to even get him to a kiosk for the call. (A spokesperson for Genesee County declined to comment, but Sheriff Christopher Swanson said that he had created some opportunities for in-person visits and was committed to providing more. “I fix problems,” he told The New Yorker. “I celebrate families.”)
Le’Essa told me that she’d been learning on TikTok about attachment styles, and was thinking about the trauma that can result from severing core-caretaker bonds. “I actually remember how, the first time my dad got locked up, when I was about three years old, we were allowed to go see him in person at the jail,” she said. “That’s how I found out, ‘Oh, this is what my dad looks like, and this is what he smells like, and this is what he feels like.’ ”
Back then, Le’Essa remembers, her sister was “just a bald little baby with a big old head,” and Adam got to hold her for an hour at a time. Now, at fifteen, Addy told me, “Not seeing my dad is causing real harm.”
Last Valentine’s Day, I travelled through a snowstorm to Flint. I’d come to join a team of young investigators from Civil Rights Corps and Public Justice as they met with prospective plaintiffs in living rooms, community centers, and coffee shops. A couple of private law firms are involved with the litigation effort, too, which they call the Right to Hug campaign.
I met up with Susan Li, a twenty-two-year-old Columbia graduate, who’d flown in from Brooklyn; two of her colleagues at Civil Rights Corps had driven from Chicago. Since October, Civil Rights Corps investigators had been visiting Le’Essa and Addy, who often had a rabbit draped over her shoulder or Lily the lizard in her hand. That day, though, they took me with them to the snow-encrusted home of a large family, the Lyles.
The breadwinner, Troy Lyle, had been locked up in the Genesee County Jail for more than a year, awaiting trial. (According to Swanson, more than ninety-eight per cent of the jail’s current population is unsentenced; many inmates await trial in the facility for years.) Troy and his wife, Onisha, had been together for two decades—they’d met at a high-school sleepover, where he’d asked, “Can I take a picture with you?” Since Troy’s arrest, Onisha had been raising their nine kids alone.
Onisha had told us to come by the house around 4 P.M. But when we arrived the kids let us in; Onisha wasn’t home yet. An hour passed, then another. “Mom didn’t work like this until Dad went to jail,” the Lyles’ seventeen-year-old, Shanyla, said. Onisha had mostly been a stay-at-home parent; Troy had made a decent living at an auto-body shop. Now Onisha went to work at a factory at 6 A.M., leaving the cleaning and the child care to Shanyla, who was trying to complete high school remotely. “It’s too much,” Shanyla said. “I’m overwhelmed, and I’ve had to grow up, but I’m tired of being here with the kids while they make a mess all day.”