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 for charging per-minute prices for using the tablets. The devices are initially distributed free of charge to the 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 Project Gutenberg website and are therefore actually free of charge. The project puts online e-books of works that are in the public domain in the United States.
James Tager, who is responsible for freedom of speech issues at the PEN association, criticizes the fact that the state charges prison inmates for access to free books and also earns a share of the income according to the contract. “Not only is this a predatory policy that will actively prevent prisoners from reading, but it also rewards the state for making complicit in it,” explained Tager in a press release.
Possible cost trap for prisoners and families
The Appalachian Book Project, which promotes education and reading support for prisoners and book donations to prison libraries, calculates in a statementthat the average hourly wages of West Virginia prisoners 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 almost horrendous: for music, games and e-books, the five or three cents per minute mentioned, video calls with relatives even cost 25 cents per minute. Each 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 where there is no open Internet access. How Wired reported last year, these systems often turn out to be cost traps for prisoners or their families and are even supposed to partially replace real visits.
Lucrative collaborations in many states
Opposite the news site Reason a spokesman for the WVDCR said only that no inmate is forced to use the tablets and that the agency’s five percent commission is used for TV and visits for the prisoners. In addition, there are no restrictions on printed books.
Such restrictions had existed in the past: Among other things, printed books in Pennsylvania were banned from prisons in 2018 to be replaced by GTL tablets. The state had to withdraw the regulation after protests. There are similar lucrative collaborations as in West Virginia in numerous other states; Another well-known provider of multimedia services for prisoners is JPay, which offers MP3 players in prisons in Florida, for example, and earns millions in commissions from the state. The state of Florida had been sued by an inmate earlier this year for prison authorities confiscated older prisoners’ equipment and files without compensation when they switched to JPay.
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