The Robber Barons of Prison Tech

When it comes to the technological advances that have graced our ever-expanding, ever-crowded, ever-exploitative prisons, observers rightly tend to point out the insidious panopticon they’ve enabled: sophisticated surveillance and security networks that ensnare the lives of nearly 2 million people locked up throughout the United States. But the technology that prisoners themselves use and depend on is frequently overlooked. Those very tools, proffered as a lifeline, often become another means of punishing both incarcerated people and their communities, largely because the profiteers from this multibillion-dollar sector prefer to keep it that way. Through partnerships with private prisons and contracts with state-helmed correctional institutions, name-changing private equity firms have come to dominate the provision of essential digital services to American prisoners. Why did private equity firms flock to this space? As Worth Rises’ Bianca Tylek told me, prison telecommunations operated in a market structure that was amenable to private equity firms’ key demand: to squeeze out as much money as possible in order to earn sky-high returns as a company investor or to juice business value upon resale. What makes all this even juicier for private equity is the fact that prison communications contracts give companies systemwide monopolies—incarcerated people and their families can’t choose a different service if they don’t like what’s offered in their prison.There is, however, a dim light at the end of the tunnel: Earlier this year, President Joe Biden signed the Martha Wright-Reed Act, written and approved by a bipartisan group of Congress members to instruct that the Federal Communications Commission “ensure just and reasonable charges for telephone and advanced communications services in correctional and detention facilities.”