Biblio Bites (Mini-Sode #3) - Free is Free, Unless You're In Prison

Welcome to another edition of “Biblio Bites;” as always, I’m Nikki Gee. If you’re just joining me, these are shorter episodes dedicated to news from the world of libraries.

Today’s topic is prisons – specifically, their libraries and predatory tech companies taking one of the few freedoms left to inmates and putting it behind a paywall.

Let’s take the second one first.

There are several companies that provide tech software and services to correctional institutions; chief among them are Securus Technologies (and their subsidiary, JPay), and Global Tel*Link Corporation. While their products and services might differ slightly, their overarching goal, if you will, is the same – connecting inmates to the outside world, whether via video calls, or tablets stuffed with multimedia.

On the surface, that sounds great – video calls can close the distance between the incarcerated and loved ones who can’t visit regularly due to geography; books and media are more accessible; and so on. When one discovers that many of these tablets are given to correctional institutions at no cost to taxpayers, it almost sounds noble.

Hold that thought bubble – I’mma pop it.

So, if the taxpayers aren’t paying for this, who is?

The inmates. And their families. At exorbitant rates. Even for things that should be free.

On their website, Global Tel*Link (or GTL for short) touts their tablet solutions as revolutionary in the correctional facility space – both for inmates and administration. Their Inspire brand tablet offers video visits, phone calls, messaging, educational content, job and life skills, and multimedia – games, music, movies, and ebooks.

While the website claims a lot of available free content, Mother Jones reported in October 2018 that GTL charged 38 cents for an email, up to $7.99 for a 48-hour movie rental, and $24.99 for a monthly digital music subscription such as Spotify, with a much, much smaller catalog. Securus, through JPay, charges $10 for a 30-minute video call.

Many inmates do work, but according to the Prison Policy Initiative, incarcerated people make, on average, 14 to 63 cents an hour. This study was last completed in 2017, but I’m sure not much has changed in two years. The PPI actually found that wages were higher in 2001; in the intervening years, seven states lowered their maximum wages, and South Carolina stopped paying their inmates wages at all. Finally, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, and Texas were not paying prisoners for work performed, at least in 2017. (Still true in Florida as of 2019).

So, if you’re making $1-5 dollars a day, how do you afford any of this? If you have family, they can send money in to be placed in your account, but once again, there are fees. JPay’s legal agreement states that, unless you send in a money order, there are fees, which vary depending on the state and the correctional institution. For an example, at the Powhatan Correctional Center in Virginia, sending up to $20 to an inmate online costs $2.95, and $3.95 over the phone, while Hudson Correctional Facility in New York has fees of $1.99 and $2.99 online, and $2.99 and $3.99 by phone (instead of one tier of 0 to twenty, they have 2 to 9.99 and 10 to 19.99).

If you watch Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, he did a very thorough segment on all of these prison injustices in August 2019; it’s worth twenty minutes of your time and goes into a little more depth than I can here. I will link the YouTube clip in the show notes.

Alright, so you can’t afford to listen to music or watch movies; at least there’s always books! Especially the free ebooks on the tablets. That’s the way to get around the system, right? Use the free tablet, read the free books?

Oh, if only that were true.

Despite the fact that the books loaded on these tablets are from Project Gutenberg’s library of public domain – and therefore, free – titles, GTL has found a way around charging for the book itself; instead, they are charging a reading fee of 5 cents per minute of reading time. This has been going on for a while, but most recently came to light about a month ago, when the West Virginia Department of Corrections got some shiny new tablets from GTL. Right now, there is an introductory reduction in the fees to 3 cents per minute, but, once again, think about how little an inmate makes, if they make any wages at all.

The Appalachian Prison Book Project puts it thusly:

The paperback version of 1984 is about 330 pages. It will take a person who is able to read 30 pages per hour about 11 hours to read the novel. At the discounted $0.03/minute usage fee, 11 hours of reading a free book will cost a person about $19.80—and this is if you don’t stop to think or re-read.

Going back to the Prison Policy Initiative chart, West Virginian inmates earn between 4 and 58 cents per hour. Taking the average of 30 cents an hour, an inmate would have to work over 60 hours just to read this one title.

And yet, many correctional systems in the United States are going digital and accepting these tablets, while simultaneously doing away with in-person visits and print books. The reason, of course, is money. The West Virginia prison system, to continue with our example, receives a 5% kickback from the total revenues of this program, something that they don’t receive from face-to-face interactions or libraries inside the prison walls.

Which is another problem. Libraries in correctional institutions are generally understaffed – usually first against the wall during budget cuts - and have to make do with aging collections. There are many programs that exist to send books to prisons, either directly to inmates or to the libraries, but in recent years, several states’ Departments of Corrections have pushed arbitrary bans on books or publishers.

In New York State in 2018, the DOC stated that they would only accept packages to prisoners from a handful of approved vendors. Huge backlash erupted within days and Governor Cuomo hastily reversed the policy. Arizona, Mississippi, and other states have lately imposed restrictions on books sent to correctional institutions. The claim from New York was that books can be used to send contraband to inmates, but they open everything send to them before distributing anyway, so if this was a regular problem, they’d be able to recite some statistics, but there are no mentions of these. Many who work with books-to-inmates programs posit that it’s to save time and money in the mail room, and in some cases, to gain kickback from vendors, much like the GTL tablet racket.

Even if libraries can receive donations from the outside, there are restrictive and arbitrary book bans in place in many correctional institutions. The explanation is to prohibit those books that might encourage criminal behavior or are obscene or overly violent, but PEN America, a nonprofit organization that attempts to protect freedom of expression and human rights through the creative arts, cites civil rights works and works critical of the American penal system are generally banned. However, it is difficult to determine the policies for each correctional institution, as these are not publicized.

PEN America, in a paper published earlier this year entitled Literature Locked Up, cites some arbitrary examples of book bans they had collected:

• A prison in Ohio stopped a donation of a biology textbook to an inmate, because nudity.

• Tennessee did not allow a book about the Holocaust to be sent in because, again, nudity.

• My favorite is this one, however: an institution in New York wanted to ban a book of maps of the Moon, as the book could “present risks of escape.”

Certain states have lists of banned books that run into the tens of thousands: Texas has a list spanning 10-15k titles, Florida 20k, and Kansas 7k. Every state’s number cannot be known, however, because the only way to obtain many of these is from a Freedom of Information Act request. PEN also notes, however, that the list may still not reflect the entire scope of the banned books at that location, as they don’t state if they have been altered or amended, or an official notification of rejection might never have been filled out.

What can be extrapolated is that bias is inherent. Not only from the knowledge that many civil rights works and books about the African-American experience tend to be on prison ban lists, but also the pushback against donations of books themselves. Who makes up the majority of prisoners in the United States? According to the Prison Policy Initiative, black people make up 40% of the incarcerated population despite representing only 13% of US residents.

Let’s be honest here: the reason for the exorbitant fees and the limiting of knowledge (despite prisoners having just as much right to read as those of us outside the bars) is because the United States is for profit, always. Education has been shown to reduce the recidivism rate, but we only care about punishing offenders beyond taking away their physical freedoms. Reform is necessary but considering how many private institutions make their money off the backs of inmates AND their weary families, it’s doubtful change will happen anytime soon.

We could go so much deeper, but that’s beyond the scope of this show. I really encourage you to read the PEN America report, as well as the Prison Policy Initiative report about Mass Incarceration in America; it’s very eye-opening and worth your time. Both of these, as well as all of my other sources, are available in the show notes. In addition, I’ve included some ways you can help if you would like to donate books or materials. The website is: http://bit.ly/4gotlib

That’s all for now. I’m Nikki Gee at the Forgotten Library. Thanks for listening.

HOW YOU CAN HELP:

This LibGuide from the American Library Association has links to several programs to donate books and materials to prison libraries and inmates: https://libguides.ala.org/PrisonLibraries/bookstoprisons

Sources:

Appalachian Prison Book Project. (November 20, 2019). How Much Does it Cost to Read a Free Book on a Free Tablet? https://appalachianprisonbookproject.org/2019/11/20/how-much-does-it-cost-to-read-a-free-book-on-a-free-tablet/

GTL website – www.gtl.net

Inklebarger, T. (June 1, 2018). Restricting Books Behind Bars. American Libraries. https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2018/06/01/restricting-books-behind-bars-prison-libraries/

Oliver, J. (August 4, 2019). Prison Labor. Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjqaNQ018zU [Youtube video]

Riley, Tonya. (October 5, 2018). ‘Free’ Tablets are Costing Prison Inmates a Fortune. Mother Jones. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/10/tablets-prisons-inmates-jpay-securus-global-tel-link/

Sawyer, W. (April 2017). How much do incarcerated people earn in each state? Prison Policy Initiative. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2017/04/10/wages/

Sawyer, W. and Wagner, P. (March 19, 2019). Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2019. Prison Policy Initiative. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2019.html

Tager, J. (September 2019). Literature Locked Up: How Prison Book Restriction Policies Constitute the Nation’s Largest Book Ban. PEN America. https://pen.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/literature-locked-up-report-9.24.19.pdf