Lawsuits Allege Michigan Sheriffs Colluded To End In-Person Jail Visits and Price Gouge Families for Calls

Two class-action lawsuits say Michigan counties take cuts of the exorbitant costs of inmate phone calls while children go months without seeing their parents in person.

Two lawsuits filed this week accuse Michigan sheriff's offices of colluding with large prison telecom companies to end face-to-face jail visitations and then price gouge families who are forced to rely on expensive phone calls and video chats, in return for major kickbacks.

Civil Rights Corps, a criminal justice advocacy nonprofit, filed the two class-actions in Michigan state court, one in Genesee County and the other in St. Clair County, on behalf of multiple residents who say the visitation bans deprive children of the ability to hug their incarcerated parents. The lawsuits claim two major prison technology providers—Securus Technologies and Global Tel*Link (GTL)—dangled significant financial incentives in front of Genesee and St. Clair officials to install video chat kiosks in jails that would eventually replace face-to-face visits.

Civil Rights Corps argues this violated inmates' and their families' due process rights under the Michigan Constitution. In addition to damages, the lawsuit is seeking immediate injunctions ending the bans on in-person jail visits.

"This scheme violates Michigan law, offends basic principles of human connection and dignity, and imposes profound costs on families," Civil Rights Corps argues in the lawsuit filed against Genesee County. "It also harms individual and public safety without serving any compelling government interest."

As Reason has previously reported, jails and prison systems across the country started curtailing things like in-person visits, book donations, and physical mail over the last decade, replacing them with video services and electronic tablets. These changes were often made in the name of security and reducing contraband, an extremely serious problem in American prisons and jails. 

However, criminal justice advocates and civil rights groups say these practices are also reducing one of the most effective and widely agreed upon ways to improve outcomes for incarcerated people: regular family contact. 

And it's imposing significant costs on families. 

"Before in-person visits were prohibited, people detained at the St. Clair County Jail were able to talk with their loved ones face-to-face," according to the St. Clair lawsuit. "Children and parents could look into each other's eyes. Now, children and parents cannot do any of this for the months or years they are confined there."

"I can just barely cover my own rent and food," one plaintiff, Marie Bills, said in the St. Clair suit. "We only do phone calls; we can't do the video calls because they're too expensive and just not even close to being the same as seeing each other in person."

Persistent accusations of inhumane price gouging have led several jurisdictions to reconsider charging for inmate phone calls. In 2018, New York City made phone calls free for jail inmates. At the time it was generating $20,000 a day in phone fees from the Rikers Island jail complex. Last December, Los Angeles and the state of Massachusetts also made jail phone calls free.

However, phone and video chat revenues are significant streams of income for smaller counties.

According to the lawsuit, Genesee County's 2018 contract with GTL set the price of remote video calls at $10 for a 25-minute call. The county gets a 20 percent monthly commission on video calls, on top of at least $180,000 per year from GTL's phone call revenue and an annual $60,000 "technology grant."

And since in-person visitations ended, those revenues have sharply increased. Securus paid St. Clair County $154,130 in 2017 in phone call commissions, according to the suit. By 2022, that number had reached nearly $500,000.

"Well that is a nice increase in revenues!" a jail administrator for St. Clair County wrote after reviewing a graph of the county's annual revenue from jail calls, according to emails unearthed in the Civil Rights Corps' lawsuit.

"Heck yes it is!" St. Clair County's accounting manager wrote back. "Keeps getting bigger every month too [smiley face emoji]."

The defendants in the St. Clair lawsuit include St. Clair County Sheriff Mat King, Securus, and Tom Gores, owner of the Detroit Pistons and founder of Platinum Equity, which owns Securus.

The Genesee County lawsuit was filed against the county, Sheriff Christopher Swanson, GTL, and GTL CEO Deb Alderson.

Securus declined to comment, and GTL did not immediately respond to a request for comment.