An authority in the US state of West Virginia, which operates state prisons there, has come under fire for a questionable deal with a private provider of multimedia tablets. Civil rights organizations accuse the West Virginia Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation (WVDCR) of rip-offs because they charge a minute to use tablets. The devices will initially be distributed free of charge to inmates of ten state prisons.
Both the Appalachian Prison Book Project and the American authors’ association PEN are particularly offended by the fact that reading e-books costs 5 cents per minute. The price is temporarily reduced to three cents for the introduction, but the books that are offered via the system of the provider Global Tel Link (GTL) all come from the website of Project Gutenberg and are therefore actually free of charge. The project puts e-books online of works that are in the public domain in the United States.
James Tager, who is responsible for questions of freedom of expression at the PEN Association, criticizes the fact that the state imposes costs on prisoners for access to free books and, according to the contract, also earns on the income. “This is not only a predatory policy that will actively prevent inmates from reading, but it also rewards the state for making themselves an accomplice,” Tager said in a press release.
Possible cost trap for prisoners and families
The Appalachian Book Project, which promotes education and reading promotion for inmates and donates books to prison libraries, calculates in a statement that the average hourly wage for prison inmates in West Virginia for their work behind bars is between four and 58 cents. On the other hand, the prices for the various functions of the tablets are downright horrific: for music, games and e-books it is the five or three cents per minute mentioned, video calls with relatives even cost 25 cents per minute. Every digital message sent in the provider’s closed chat system also costs a quarter of a dollar.
Such systems for contacting family members are no longer uncommon in US prisons that lack open Internet access. How Wired As reported last year, these systems often turn out to be cost traps for prisoners or their families and are even intended to partially replace real opportunities for visits.
Lucrative collaborations in many states
Across from the news page Reason A spokesman for the WVDCR merely stated that no inmate would be forced to use the tablets and that the agency’s five percent commission would be used for TV and visiting offers for the prisoners. In addition, there are no restrictions on printed books.
Such restrictions had already existed in the past: Among other things, printed books in Pennsylvania were banned from prisons in 2018 to be replaced by tablets from GTL. The state had to withdraw the regulation after protests. There are also lucrative collaborations similar to the one in West Virginia in numerous other states; Another well-known provider of multimedia services for prisoners is JPay, which, for example, sells MP3 players in prisons in Florida and brings the state commissions in the millions. Florida State was sued by an inmate earlier this year for confiscating older devices and files from prisoners without compensation when they switched to JPay.
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