Prison Phone Companies in Trouble for Trying to Ban In-Person Jail Visits, Lawsuit Alleges
An activist organization has filed lawsuits alleging a conspiracy between the governments of Michigan counties and prison phone companies. These lawsuits claim that a quid pro quo bribery scheme eliminated in-person visits to prisons to increase company profits, with a portion of those profits allegedly shared with county governments.
The Civil Rights Corps, a nonprofit organization dedicated to challenging systemic injustice in the US legal system, recently filed two lawsuits alleging a similar scheme in St. Clair and Genesee counties in Michigan. These agreements involved business relationships with county sheriffs based on the elimination of in-person visits to jails. Under the new systems, visitors to jails had to pay for phone calls with inmates, and the money from these calls was then shared between providers and counties, according to the lawsuits.
Conspiracy Allegations
For example, in the case involving Sheriff Mat King of St. Clair, St. Clair County, prison phone company Securus, and others related to the agreements, the litigants claim:
On September 22, 2017, St. Clair County officials decided to implement a new policy: a ban on family visits prohibiting people from visiting their incarcerated family members inside the county jail… The county’s decision was part of a quid pro quo bribery scheme with Securus Technologies, a for-profit company that contracts with jails to charge exorbitant fees to families of incarcerated individuals for communication services such as low-quality phone calls and video calls. County officials agreed to ban in-person visits to the jail in exchange for a substantial cut of Securus’s future revenues.
Denial of Allegations
ViaPath, formerly known as GTL, told the media that the company “denies the allegations in the lawsuit and looks forward to the opportunity to defend the claims made against it.”
Securus Technologies, on the other hand, stated that the case was “misguided and without merit. We look forward to defending ourselves, and we will not allow this lawsuit to detract from our successful efforts to create significant and positive outcomes for the consumers we serve.”
Gizmodo contacted ViaPath and Securus, as well as the sheriff’s offices of St. Clair and Genesee counties. We will update this story as they respond.
