Captive audience: How companies make millions charging prisoners to send an email

It's getting harder to tell who the criminals are...

Basic communications with their families should be a right not a commodity.

Maintaining a positive network of support is really important to their future success when they rejoin the community,” says Holly Kramer, a communications representative for the Michigan Department of Corrections, which has contracted with JPay since February 2009. “Electronic messaging can help facilitate that.”

"And we will nickel and dime that positive network of support to death," JPay, probably.

In the outside world there are numerous companies offering free email accounts—Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Mail.com—but inside prisons companies charge a fee, a token JPay calls a “stamp,” to send each message. Each “stamp” covers only one page of writing. Want to send photos of a nephew’s graduation, a niece’s prom dress or a new baby? Each picture costs an additional stamp. A short video clip? That’ll be three stamps. With the postal service, stamp prices are fixed, but JPay’s stamp prices fluctuate. Shortly before Mother’s Day, for instance, a stamp cost 35 cents; the price rose to 47 cents the following week. For a few hundred dollars, prisoners can skip kiosk lines by buying a tablet—a relatively expensive purchase that tends to lock them into JPay’s services.

I guess they could just give each prisoner an e-mail address, but then how would anyone profit while adding absolutely no value?

This is pretty ridiculous, I have no problems at all with a company profiting off of prison services, but this is as exploitative as the phone companies which provided dollar per minute phone calls years ago. Prisoners are in the care of the government, which is why sleeping with a prisoner is essentially considered rape in many places, even if consentual. The supreme court has stated that prisoners have a 1st amendment right to communicate with the outside world, I wish the government had a responsibility to make sure those under it's care are not exploited for using that right.