Wync News New York Prisoners Can One Again
The Price of Calling My Mom From Prison
For incarcerated people similar me, admission to communications comes at a steep cost.
John J. Lennon is a contributing writer for The Marshall Projection and a contributing editor for Esquire. He'due south currently incarcerated in Sullivan Correctional Facility.
Mom will probably die before I become out of prison. Her Parkinson'southward has advanced over the years, so she can't visit. Until recently, I'd accepted that I'd never come across her once more. But lately, she's been sending me xxx-second videos: Mom and Magic, her fat, 1-eyed black cat, showing me love through the seven-inch screen of a tablet fabricated past a service provider chosen JPay. It costs her about a dollar to ship each message; to me, they are priceless.
In 2019, JPay, which is owned by the prison communications firm Securus Technologies, gave more 40,000 prisoners in New York State correctional facilities complimentary tablets. The company also installed kiosks where we sync our devices to send and receive emails (and videos) and download purchased music, games and movies. The tablets were free, but we have to pay fees, sometimes steep ones, to access content and communicate on them. They brought u.s.a. into the 21st century. But now Securus is facing challenges.
On Dec. 20, 2020, Worth Rises, an advocacy group, ran a full-page advertizement in The New York Times calling on Tom Gores, a businessman whose private equity firm owns Securus, to divest from the visitor. Across JPay, Securus owns phone contracts for many state prisons and county jails across the state. Charges tin can go as high as $xiv for a 15-minute telephone call. Worth Rises opposes whatever private companies that seek to turn a profit from incarceration. "If Black Lives Matter, what are you doing about Detroit Pistons owner Tom Gores?" the advertizing asked, calling him a prison profiteer.
Several years ago, I interviewed Bianca Tylek, executive director of Worth Rises, about her work campaigning against commercial interests in prisons. I appreciated her passion. I reached out to her once again recently and told her that the JPay engineering was pretty life-changing in here. No i but JPay was stepping upwards to provide us this access to technology, I said. Ms. Tylek told me that it was all pretty complicated. "There's no doubt that there's a engineering science gap in prisons and jails," she said, "Merely the travesty hither is that government agencies are allowing corporations with a long history of predation to fill this gap, largely because they get a cut of the profit and access to data."
I don't pretend to ignore that Securus has some pretty indefensible pricing practices. Just while its phone contracts have long stirred controversy, its JPay tablet program offers a window to the world, a tool to teach us, to inspire us, to build a network and career and to fifty-fifty earn income while in prison.
In 2001, I was a drug dealer, and I shot and killed a man in Brooklyn. I was 24 with a ninth grade didactics, and I wound upwards with 28 years to life. I've been in over 19 years. Today I'thousand a contributing editor for Esquire. Years agone in Attica, I learned my craft in a creative writing workshop. Until recently, I'd use a typewriter with a seven,000 grapheme memory while listening to cassettes on my Walkman. I'd use snail mail service or dictate timely pieces to my editors over the phone in the prison yard.
When the tablets came in a couple years ago, I could cut and paste. I had email. I started pitching more than pieces, hitting more deadlines, doing more than back-and-along editing with colleagues as I'm doing right now in my prison cell, thumb-tapping a revision of this piece while jamming to my playlist.
Considering of Covid-nineteen, we've been on lockdown in New York'south prisons. Visits are suspended. We are in our cells 23 hours a day. In my facility, we get one hour of rec, 8 people at a time in the cellblock mutual area, to shower, to use the phone, to sync our tablets on the kiosk.
Worth Rises argues that one in three families go into debt taking care of their incarcerated loved ones (though non all of that is spent on communication), and most of those conveying that burden are women of color. Nosotros on the inside need to bear some personal responsibility and brand better choices. If our families are struggling, we should make fewer, shorter calls.
But Securus doesn't exactly play fair, either. The company charges us egregious fees to put money into our prepaid telephone accounts: My brother refills mine for me, and gets charged several dollars for every $fifty he puts in — the maximum he tin can transfer in a unmarried transaction. It's my money, earned from freelancing, only it's still a hassle for him. The transaction looks so irregular that Visa often emails my blood brother to see if his credit bill of fare was stolen. A spokeswoman from Securus wrote in an email, "Securus Technologies is working to make the tools incarcerated Americans and their loved ones utilize to stay connected as affordable and accessible as possible."
Securus has provided a lot of gratis calls and JPay messages to incarcerated people in New York during the pandemic. We're grateful for that and for Worth Rises' advocacy.
The organisation is far from perfect. But without Securus, who will offer the same tablet engineering and infrastructure? Not the government or nonprofits, at least not so far. Though fifty-fifty Mr. Gores said in an interview last week, "I think this industry actually should be led probably not by individual folks. I think it probably should exist — I'll go killed for saying this — but the nonprofit business, honestly."
Ms. Tylek told me there is a tech nonprofit called Ameelio that is close to offering incarcerated people a communications production. Simply I don't know if a service that is not driven by turn a profit will exist sustainable.
I fence that there is room for compromise. It's important to understand how Securus technology has inverse our lives. The best way to practice that is for the company to hire incarcerated people, some of whom are brilliant and business concern-minded, every bit consultants. That would enable more people to earn income while incarcerated, every bit well.
The truth is, we are consumers in prison house. I subscribe to the Sun New York Times in print, for example, which costs me hundreds of dollars a yr. Considering the paper is pricey, I'm the but one who gets it, and in that location'south always a line in the cell block to read information technology later on me. I honey impress — the texture, the smell — but I wish I had the option to subscribe on my tablet at the discounted digital rates available to the full general public. Currently, nosotros can only access news through an aggregated Associated Printing news feed on JPay. According to a spokeswoman with Securus, the tablets don't offer traditional WiFi access to news sites because of "security purposes."
For now, at least, JPay gives us a crucial tether to our loved ones on the outside. I download a video message from Mom. Parkinson's has progressed, contorting her movements and expressions. I smile and weep. "Come here, Magic. Let'south tell Johnny we love him."
John J. Lennon is a contributing writer for The Marshall Project and a contributing editor for Esquire. He's currently incarcerated in Sullivan Correctional Facility.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of messages to the editor. We'd like to hear what yous think nigh this or whatever of our articles. Here are some tips . And here's our email: letters@nytimes.com .
Follow The New York Times Stance section on Facebook , Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram .
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/12/opinion/prison-internet-technology-jpay.html
0 Response to "Wync News New York Prisoners Can One Again"
Post a Comment