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.

Comments

[Brian DuBridge]

I hope the suit is massively successful! These elitists profiting from the miseries of the poor and disadvantaged need to be curtailed and punished! Jail time is prescribed way too easily instead of prevention of the abuses of price gouging and excessive laws created by those same elitist's faction for their enrichment, which cause people to be desperate and act out.

[Earth-based Human Skeptic]

Did you just have a role in the local production of Les Miz?

[MasterThief]

I don't like the perverse incentives and agree that the cost seems excessive. Still, I wonder whether the price is in part to ration a limited resource. To a degree, I'm apathetic to the situation because I don't believe prisoners deserve many freedoms, privileges, or rights.
Is part of the cost due to some requirement for a third party to monitor, record, and store these calls?
If this is an instance of several entities colluding to take massive profits from people without alternatives then it is a problem. If these fees aren't being partially used to increase capacity then that is also a problem.

[Earth-based Human Skeptic]

Yeah, I worry about trying to turn prisons into profit centers, but it would be nice if they did not cost taxpayers, either.

[EdG]

Nationally, incarcerated workers produce more than $2 billion per year in goods and more than $9 billion per year in services for the maintenance of the prisons. More than 80 percent of prison laborers do prison maintenance work.

Here's an example from Oklahoma: The Oklahoma Department of Corrections has four contracts with private telemarketing firms that operate call centers in six state prisons. The companies pay DOC a $7.25-per-hour minimum wage for each of more than 200 incarcerated individuals, but the prison telemarketing program pays prisoners $1.45-per-hour, generating a $5.80-per-hour income for each working prisoner.

[freedomwriter]

Treat people like animals do not cry when they emerge as animals.

[DenverJ]

"I’m apathetic to the situation because I don’t believe prisoners deserve many freedoms, privileges, or rights." This story is about jails, not prisons. Many, if not most, people in jail are still awaiting trial, and have not yet been convicted of anything. They are trying to call their boss, their relatives, etc, and are being gouged.

[freedomwriter]

There is no justice in the justice system. Want to know why there is defund the police. Look no further.

[AT]

Honestly, it's 2024. There's no reason to not modernize prisons.

Every inmate in an individual cell, complete with wall-mounted cot and toilet/sink/shower combo. Ration the water with timers. A tablet behind plexiglass, built into the wall, controlled by a basic remote accessible to the prisoner that allows for viewing of books, film, music, educational material, and incoming-only videocalling usable at their discretion. Strictly limit the contacts list to immediate family only and record all calls (to avoid proxy gang activity). Three complete square meals a day. Fresh clothes every other day. Fresh linens every week. Toiletries as requested. Various hobbycraft available based on risk-potential. All through a slot under the door. Cells are climate-controlled, and monitored by a series of cameras (think, the size of your selfie-cam in your phone) built into the walls of the cell.

And then leave the inmates in the cell.

The only time they come out is A) Medical attention when needed; B) Family/Legal visitation; and C) an hour a day of yard time to get some fresh air and sunlight and to stretch their legs. But randomize who goes out when, to avoid collaborative activity. No basketball, no pool tables, no weight benches. No commissary, no incoming care packages/contraband, no work programs. Any power outage or cyberattack immediately results in full lockdown requiring cell-by-cell manual lifting.

They stay in the cell, and the taxpayer assumes the full cost of the prison and inmate care. Inmates have minimal interaction with other inmates, guards, and prison staff; their cell is now their world. Pod life.

It can be made humane enough to avoid 8A considerations, and if anyone wants compromise, sentencing to such a place could be offset by less time served there. There's no reason not to make them coed, since all the inmates are isolated and randomized yard time could be set to exclude males from females. (The trans garbage is flat out ignored.) Potential for physical/sexual abuse is minimized. Potential for in-house criminal activity is minimized. Potential for criminal activity by proxy is minimized.

And build them in towers. Five floors for administration, barracks, logistics, and IT - and then the cells/yards are built on increasing floors above that.

This is very, very easily accomplished and a whole lot cheaper to implement than the obsolete methods we're using now.