“Free” Prison Tablets: In Promise and In Practice

The “free” prison tablet model has transformed the landscape of prison communications, providing many inmates with a personal device for communication, education, and recreational use—at a cost. Tablets have the potential to meaningfully improve the lives of incarcerated people and their correspondents, but they also carry substantial risks: exploitative pricing, inferior service, and state surveillance.

While technological developments within corrections facilities lag behind those in the outside world, new devices have gradually begun to diffuse across the “digital moat” surrounding prisons. This trend began with Mp3 devices in the early 2010s, then tablets for sale starting around 2012. Its current form, the “free” tablet model, is the latest iteration of a growing industry aimed at providing and monetizing entertainment, education, and communications services for incarcerated people—and, by extension, their friends and families.

Since 2017, many states have signed free tablet contracts, mostly with the two largest providers in the market: Securus and ViaPath (formerly GTL). As of 2022, at least 25 states have deployed tablets in their prisons—and within states with free tablet contracts, rollout across correctional facilities continues to expand.

The Promise of Prison Tablets

Tablets can vastly improve prisoners’ access to the outside world, providing opportunities for communication and access to larger libraries of educational or entertainment media.

Individual tablets can allow incarcerated people to communicate during wider windows of time than fixed phones or kiosks. They facilitate coordination with friends and family around work hours or time zones and allow people to make calls they may not have been able to otherwise. They offer text and video messaging functionality and can give inmates the opportunity to call from the relative privacy of their own cell rather than only from phones in public areas.

Tablets may also narrow the gap between demand and supply of communications services. Some states have made all prison phone calls free, improving access to communication but also overwhelming existing call infrastructure.  As of January 2021, San Quentin State Prison had only 119 phones for a population of 40,000, or approximately one phone for every 33 people. Tablets increase per capita access to call-capable devices, alleviating strain on fixed phones and avoiding long wait lines for call access. They may even provide limited access to communication and media for people in solitary confinement and mental health isolation, though such access is uncertain in practice.

Personal tablets increase access to recreational and educational programming. Existing tablets provide access to e-books, audiobooks, podcasts, news, sports, and movies, though these services are not usually free and catalogues are limited. Tablets are a more convenient option for storing media than storing stacks of books and CDs, allowing incarcerated people to acquire and keep a broader array of entertainment media.

At some facilities, tablets also provide access to Khan Academy materials (often on a limited or offline basis), textbooks, and LexisNexis—expanding incarcerated people’s ability to do legal research and draft documents. Access to legal services from within prisons can be extremely limited in the carceral context, whether due to constraints on how often or how freely a person can speak to their lawyer, or because that person doesn’t have a lawyer at all and is pursuing their appeal pro se. Tablets, if they live up to their promise, could begin to bridge that gap.

Beyond the specific content available on a tablet, these devices also allow for incarcerated people to interact with technology. While archaic compared to devices available outside of prisons, tablets are still an important tool for mitigating the tech shock people can face when released.

In Practice, Tablets Harm Inmates as Much as They Help

While tablets have the potential to improve carceral conditions, the “free” tablet model as it currently exists exploits inmates and often does not work at all.

Access to communication, entertainment, and educational media on prison tablets carries a steep price tag. A single external email can cost $0.35, a video attachment $1.00, audiobooks from $0.99 to $19.99 each, video visitation $0.25 per minute, and music albums up to $46.00. Building a media library on a tablet is a considerable investment – and that investment can be lost if a corrections facility switches between providers or an inmate is transferred to a different jail or prison. And upon release, former inmates lose their media libraries.

Though the FCC’s planned rate caps on call and message pricing are an important step towards addressing this problem, they are not a panacea—prison communication service providers will still extract value from incarcerated people and their families through exploitative pricing on service bundles, video communication, and media.

In many states, the funding structure of tablet programs incentivize Departments of Corrections to keep rates high—commission or “kickback” clauses offer a percentage of revenue from tablet services to the corrections facility. These clauses lead prisons to prioritize commissions when selecting among bids, rather than lowering costs to incarcerated people and their correspondents.

On top of already sky-high fees, prison communications providers employ a range of deceptive design practices to increase revenue. Inmates are regularly subjected to double payment schemes, where a friend or family member on the outside pays to send a message or photograph to an inmate, then the inmate must pay by the minute to view that message. And tablets are often designed to extract fees for services that by contract should be free. Some tablets include a baseline set of free services, along with a portal to pay-by-the-minute premium content. But inmates are often charged if they tab over to a free service once the inmate is on the paid window of the tablet. Such design choices are at best incredibly sloppy, but more likely intentionally deceptive.

Prison tablets are also notoriously unreliable, with technical difficulties and slow rollout impeding access to tablet services. Calls often drop or are so garbled as to be indecipherable. Media access is limited by slow internet connections, app shutdowns, and Wi-Fi outages lasting three to four hours at a time. To add insult to injury, customer service lines for service providers are often slow or outright nonresponsive.

Tablets are a New Vector for State Surveillance

In addition to high costs and unreliable service, tablets also substantially expand the scope of state surveillance within prisons. While surveillance of prison mail and calls is not new, one corrections officer’s read through of a letter differs substantially from the long term, indexable, searchable record generated by electronic communications. Due to bundling of services, a prison communications provider’s databases contain not only a complete record of an incarcerated person communications, including recordings of calls or video visits, but also their patterns of device usage, their taste in music, books, games, and their access to educational materials or legal research.

This increased scope of surveillance affects both incarcerated people and their outside correspondents. For inmates, it is usually impossible to speak confidentially with an attorney. Tablets may provide prosecutors with access to patterns of media consumption that the state may use to build on ongoing or new legal cases against them. For friends and family, use of e-communications systems requires disclosure of much more information than they would have divulged in sending a letter (including date of birth, social security number, email and postal addresses, and driver’s licenses or other government identification)—information that the state would otherwise not gain access to without a warrant.

These troves of data make prison communication companies a valuable target for malicious cyber actors, and so far, their security measures haven’t been up to the task. In 2015, and then again in 2019, Securus data breaches leaked incarcerated people and their correspondents’ personal information, call records, and location data. A 2020 breach of a ViaPath subsidiary exposed millions of incarcerated people’s identifiable information and personal correspondences online through an unsecured database. Personal data is also misused by prison officials with notionally lawful access: in 2022, a deputy US marshal was charged with stalking his acquaintances and their spouses  using location data from Securus. He got that data by submitting obviously fraudulent requests for data, and the company never noticed.

Well-founded fear of surveillance hangs over all communications between incarcerated people and their friends and family. Communication with people in pre-trial detention can be recorded and used against them in settlement negotiations or at trial, or simply to overwhelm poorly resourced public defenders’ offices. As one mother of two children described it to the New Yorker, self-censorship founded in fears of surveillance make calls between the two girls and their incarcerated father “a medicine and a poison at the same time.” Tablets, while increasing opportunities for communication with the outside world, also create communication insecurity—it can be difficult to connect to a loved one when every interaction begins with a mechanized reminder that someone is listening in.

What Can Be Done

Setting privacy- and security-preserving norms early is crucial to ensuring that prison tablets live up to their potential. Rate caps on calls and messaging are a good start—but there is still work to be done.

Courts. While courts have historically not been receptive to finding a reasonable expectation of privacy in prison communications, the scope of surveillance facilitated by the tablet system open the door to arguments that “digital is different.” The Supreme Court recognized in Rileyand Carpenter that digital devices offer a much wider window into people’s lives than available through other means, and that the data on these devices can be subject to Fourth Amendment protections even when any piece of it individually may not be. Advocates in this space could argue for a reasonable suspicion standard for access to tablet data, a probable cause requirement for warrantless searches of communications providers’ databases, exhaustion of other methods of investigation before seeking to access such databases, or even a full warrant requirement.

Legislatures. Legislators at the state and federal level should ensure that physical communications and education/entertainment media are not supplanted by digital counterparts. Tablets may be a powerful complement to existing systems, but they must not be allowed to become a substitute. Physical mail provides a way for incarcerated people to opt out of increased surveillance under tablets, communicate when tablet systems are down, and safeguard against total loss of digital records when a facility switches service providers. Legislators could also consider setting explicit guidelines for selection of service providers, prioritizing the lowest possible cost to incarcerated people and their families, and set guardrails on when, why, and how much information law enforcement can request from companies like Securus or ViaPath.

Agencies. The FTC and FCC should both be involved in oversight of prison communications companies. The FCC’s rate caps and fines against these companies for privacy violations are an important first step, but further work can be done to make tablet services affordable, combat unfair and deceptive practices on the part of service providers, and prevent sale of incarcerated people’s data to third parties.