There are a number of interesting aspects to this deployment of new communications technologies in the Oregon state prison system. First, MP3 players will be able to receive text messages and photos. Also, for the first time, inmates can be contacted from the outside by phone. Family and others can leave a voice mail of up to three minutes on the prison payphone system. Wouldn’t a secure prison cell phone solution that uses a single device for music, photos, text messages, outbound and inbound calls (with no maximum time limit), voice mail and even video visitation be more efficient than multiple devices, platforms, and kiosks?

Most Oregon inmates are finding it cheaper to phone home, and state officials hope they burn up the lines.

Flat-rate calls are part of a wave of new technology rolling out in the state’s 14 prisons. Starting this week, the state’s 14,200 inmates can buy MP3 players to receive text messages and photos, and to buy and store music. Another system will enable them to “video visit” families who are often hundreds of miles away.

State Corrections Department officials expect the technology to drive down recidivism and cut prison costs that now consume nearly a dime of every dollar in the state’s general fund budget. Studies show inmates who have outside contact are less likely to commit new crimes once they are freed.

“We know scientifically that visiting is good not just in order to create safe prisons,” said Colette Peters, director of the Oregon Department of Corrections. “It actually improves public safety and prevents future victimization.”

The system won’t cost taxpayers. The contractor, Telmate of Ontario, will cover equipment costs. Inmates and their contacts will split service costs. The Corrections Department will continue to collect commissions on the phone system totaling $3 million a year, which it spends on inmate programs.

Prison workers, able to contact inmates directly through voice or text messages, expect to save time.

“This enhances our productivity tremendously in ways we couldn’t ever use tax money to fund. The cost would be prohibitive,” said Kelley Morton, a Corrections Department policy manager. “This is very good for the taxpayers and DOC.”

Under the new phone system, launched July 1, inmates in Oregon prisons pay a flat rate for domestic calls. That raised the cost for local calls. But now a call from the big prison in Ontario to Portland or Eugene costs $4.80 for a 30-minute chat, down from $15.85. Inmates and their families deposit money to cover the calls and can pay online through Telmate in addition to paying by mail or in person.

For the first time, inmates can be contacted from the outside by phone. Family and others can leave a voice mail of up to three minutes. Experience elsewhere shows messages don’t sit for long.

“The average length of time for a voice mail to be picked up is a couple of hours. And no one is telling them they have a message,” said Christopher Ditto, Telmate marketing director.

Video visits are expected to be another popular feature with inmates. The online chats are scheduled, and the outside contact pays the fee. The service starts next month in the two most remote prisons — Snake River Correctional Institution in Ontario and Warner Creek Correctional Facility in Lakeview.

Prison officials are most eager to get Snake River online. It’s the state’s largest prison with nearly 3,000 inmates — most from the west side of Oregon. To visit in person, many families have to drive six or more hours.

Inmate Brian K. Yancy, 35, convicted in 2005 in Jackson County of robbery and assault, served five years at Snake River. He saw his wife and three children three to four times a year because they faced a 10-hour drive from their home in northern Nevada. Two years ago, he was transferred to the Lakeview prison, still a three-hour drive one way.

The new video visiting “is going to benefit us a lot,” Yancy said. “When the weather’s bad, you worry about your family traveling through the mountains. And the economy isn’t too good.”

Yancy said he’s especially eager to see his children, even online, on a monthly basis. “The kids can see me more often, and it will be like having both their parents around.”

He said he expects the video visits to improve connections with his wife. “You can talk on the phone, but it’s hard to have a relationship when you can’t see that person,” Yancy said.

The Oregon Corrections Department transformation is Telmate’s largest. The company has converted county jails across the country, and two years ago rewired the state prisons in Montana.

Dale Tunnell, investigations chief at the Montana Corrections Department, said inmates made dramatically more calls. “They think it’s great,” he said.

The system also gives prison officials a new investigative tool. All calls, chats and messages are recorded, and state investigators can analyze patterns. “We’ve made some really good cases involving contraband,” Tunnell said.

Oregon officials expect the same bonus. Call information “is very valuable for looking for patterns of extortion, theft, that kind of thing,” Morton said. Inmates also will be limited to “corrections-friendly” music downloads.

Peters, the Corrections Department director, said the new technology should especially help the 59 percent of Oregon inmates who get no visitors. Inmates with outside contact behave better in prison and perform better when released, she said.

A landmark study of Minnesota inmates found that “any visit reduced the risk of recidivism by 13 percent for felony reconvictions and 25 percent for technical violation revocations.”

Prisoners also will have better social media skills when they leave, Morton said. “When inmates get out, they often face a radically different world,” Morton said. “If we can give them an opportunity to practice, this might help them be better prepared for doing online banking, and that that’s how people communicate now — little bits of information.”

How much to stay in touch?

Inmate costs*
MP3 player: 4G, $120; 8G, $140. Inmates can get a $25 rebate if they turn in a CD player, which can be converted into an illicit tattoo gun.
Domestic calls: 16 cents a minute, with 30-minute maximum ($4.80)
International calls: 50 cents a minute, with 30-minute maximum ($15)
Music download: $1.75 a song

Cost to others
Video visit: 66 cents a minute, with 30-minute maximum ($19.80)
Text message to inmate MP3: 44 cents; discounts for multiple messages
Photo to inmate MP3: 60 cents
Details: telmate.com
* Others can deposit money to cover these.

Source

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Another article that reinforces the value, to both detainees and their families, of frequent contact and interaction.

meshDETECT enables more frequent and higher quality conversations between prisoners and their loved ones through the deployment of its secure prison cell phone solution.

Marshae Hunter remembers the close bond she had with her mother when she was a child. But that relationship changed drastically when her mom went to prison.

The times when they baked cookies together, did homework or played with dolls abruptly came to an end. Hunter, who was just 13, was cared for by her grandmother.

But a video visitation program through the Cleveland Eastside Ex-Offender Coalition allowed the family to reopen lines of communication. The program allowed for face-to-face meetings, via video conferencing.

That video program, which helped nearly 200 Northeast Ohio families keep in touch with incarcerated relatives, is gone now.

It ended last fall because of financial troubles.

Experts say its loss created a void that remains unfilled. Children who have a parent or parents behind bars are at greater risk of trouble themselves. Visitation can ease that. And, they say, social visits for inmates while they’re in prison can help lower recidivism rates once they get out.

A state grant that largely funded the coalition’s program, Project IMPACT (Incarcerated Mothers, Parents And Children’s Televisitation) ended last year. The grant was no longer available. The coalition tried to keep the program going, but it accrued a $12,000 deficit, said Caroljean Gates, the coalition’s executive director.

The program, which began in 2004, allowed kids and their relatives to visit through video conferencing with their incarcerated relatives for one hour a week at three Ohio prisons: the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville, Trumbull Correctional Facility in Leavittsburg and the Allen Correctional Facility in Lima. The visits were free to participants.

All the electronic equipment for the prisons and the office was paid for by the coalition.

Gates said she kept the program going as her staff looked for additional funding, but the $1,800 a month it took to pay for a high-speed Internet connection became too expensive. Now the agency is paying back its debt and is at work developing a strategy to restart the program and sustain it.

“We still kept the program going for our clients as we looked for other sources of revenue, but we became overwhelmed,” Gates said. “Our phones have constantly been ringing every week because people want to talk with their loved ones.”

Gates said most of the families who used the video program didn’t have the means to travel long distances to see incarcerated relatives. They also found videoconferencing more convenient than waiting to get on a visitor list at a state prison.

For children, those meetings were important, she said, because children who have incarcerated parents have a higher risk of becoming teenage parents, dropping out of school, abusing drugs and committing a felony.

Not much information exists that shows the number of offenders in state prisons who are parents. A 2010 report by the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction showed that in a sample of 3,396 people, 38 percent of female inmates and 21 percent of males had dependent children living with them at their time of arrest. In a 2004 study about incarcerated fathers, 52 percent of 965 men sampled said they had a minor child.

For Marshae Hunter, now 20, the visits helped her re-establish a connection with her mother, Thomia Hunter, and helped her avoid the same path. When her mother was sentenced to prison in 2006 for murder, Marshae didn’t understand how to process her pain and began to rebel, relatives said. She got into fights at school and struggled academically.

Her grandmother, Vanessa Hunter, said she feared Marshae could someday end up in prison, just like her mother.

“They were very, very close when Thomia went away,” Hunter said. “She was hurt and too young to understand.”

But the ability to talk to her mother made a big difference.

“Being able to see her mom and talk to her eased some of her strain,” Vanessa Hunter said. “We would sit in that room and her mother would tell her the same things I did. We tag- teamed her.”

Marshae Hunter graduated from Shaw High School and now attends Lakeland Community College. She studies early childhood education and works part time for the Downtown Cleveland Alliance as a safety officer.

Since the visitation program was suspended, Hunter still tries to talk with her mother by phone once a week and writes her letters. She said her mother has always encouraged her to follow a positive path.

“I felt like I needed to finish school because if I did well, then she wouldn’t be in there getting down on herself for how I turned out.”

Other participants in the Eastside Ex-Offender Coalition program said it is sorely missed.

Andrea Mudd, 41, of Cleveland, has a 12-year-old daughter with Charles Bibb, who is serving a 15-year sentence at the Allen Correctional Facility in Lima for drug possession and involuntary manslaughter.

Her daughter, Kaylin, an honor-roll student, began to ask about who her father was a few years ago, Mudd said. She last saw him in person when she was 3 years old. Through the video program, she was able to visit a few times a month.

During their visits, Kaylin and her father would play educational games that Kaylin had learned at school, Mudd said. Bibb also talked to Kaylin about his mistakes, and encouraged her to do well in her studies.

“I think the visits were very helpful because now she knows where she came from,” said Mudd, who added that her daughter and the child’s father now write each other.

The visits also help inmates, and Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction officials said they are looking to expand video visitation services at state facilities.

Research shows that offenders who get the social interaction from visits while incarcerated have a lower recidivism rate once they are released from prison, said JoEllen Smith, a spokeswoman for the corrections department.

Smith said the video visitation cuts down on costs for visitors to travel to facilities and for prisons. She said the department would welcome back the Cleveland groups’ program and said the department is looking at how to expand video visitation options at its prisons. Already, the corrections department offers a pay remote visitation service at four prisons.

Gates, a former probation officer, said she believes criminals have to pay their debts to society, but that, for children, the former program helped to establish a much-needed connection with parents. She said she wants to get it back in operation soon.

“When a parent goes to prison it is the child who suffers the most,” Gates said. “No matter who you are or where you come from, as long as a child wasn’t abused, all children deserve to have a relationship with their parents.”

Source

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An interesting article about the use of video visitation in prison. We recently discussed the search for new sources of revenue by prison administrators and the positive impact of visitation on prisoner recidivism. This article highlights the use of technology to accomplish both goals.

As stated in the article, “The company’s revenue-sharing model provides some incentives to corrections agencies. But the real savings are in staffing. Everyone has had to rein in costs. It’s cheaper to put in an Internet system to cut down on inmate movement than to have people come on-site.” Allowing prisoners to make calls, whether voice or video, from their cells will raise revenue, increase safety and reduce cost.

Lydia Curtis walked into the visiting room with a handful of other women Wednesday at the Cape May County Jail, where a sheriff’s officer ran a metal-detecting wand over them.

Curtis, 37, of Lower Township, was there to visit her husband, Ben Curtis, who is awaiting extradition to Pennsylvania on a warrant for failing to complete community service in Bucks County, she said.

“We just talk about normal, daily stuff. He wants to know about the kids. They play sports,” she said of the couple’s four children.

These in-person visits have become less common since Cape May County introduced Internet visitation last April.

The system works like Skype. Inmates or their families pay a fee to chat over the Internet through a video screen. Families can access the system over the web.

County officials are convinced this kind of service could raise millions of dollars in new revenue for the state Department of Corrections.

More jails in New Jersey are considering adopting this kind of service. And one provider, iWebVisit.com of Reno, Nev., recently met with New Jersey officials about using the system at the state’s prisons.

Cape May County freeholders in January 2011 paid iWebVisit.com $67,145 to install 27 video-chat terminals at the jail off Crest Haven Boulevard in Middle Township. Inmate processing fees paid for $17,000 of those costs.

The county receives 46 percent of revenue from the video chats between inmates and their friends, family or even lawyers. The company charges $10 for a 20-minute video chat; $15 for a chat with a lawyer.

While the system has not replaced in-person visits, it has become a popular alternative for inmates and their families, Sheriff Gary Schaffer said.

“Over the summer, about two-thirds of our visits were over the Internet,” he said. “The results are better than I expected and they’ll only get better. We’ve had a couple law firms sign up already. Attorneys are starting to use it more.”

Cape May County collected about $8,000 in revenue since the system went live in May. These earnings are expected to increase to $20,000 in 2012, Administrator Stephen O’Connor said.

The company recently met with the state Department of Corrections about adopting the system at New Jersey’s nine state prisons.

“A presentation has been made, but they haven’t decided which way they can go,” Corrections spokesman Matt Schuman said. Corrections Commissioner Gary Lanigan would make the final decision, Schuman said.

New Jersey houses about 24,200 inmates, according to the department. That’s about 100 times the average occupancy of the Cape May County jail.

Under the terms of the county’s deal, the state might expect to raise at least $2 million in new revenue per year — more, if the participation rate were higher.

“If the state does go with this kind of thing, they can make millions of dollars per year,” Schaffer said. “Take the number of inmates in the system. Some of our inmates have three visits per day, while before they were lucky to get one visit per week.”

Salem County signed a similar agreement in November. Because Cape May County was the first in New Jersey to try the system, the company offered Cape May County a more favorable revenue-sharing deal.

“They came in by offering us 15 percent,” Salem County Jail Warden Raymond C. Skradzinski said. “We coaxed them up to 25 percent.”

Salem County, which, unlike Cape May County, houses federal inmates awaiting trial from Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, expects to see $10,000 to $20,000 in its first full year, Skradzinski said.

The Nevada company was one of four that bid on the Cape May County proposal. The company provides Internet visitation at jails in six states, spokesman Robert Avery said.

“We’re talking to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security right now. They run all the ICE jails,” he said of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“ICE inmates are typically housed extremely far from their families,” he said. “I’ve been told the ICE inmates are practically wearing out our system. It’s very popular with them.”

Avery said the company’s revenue-sharing model provides some incentives to corrections agencies. But the real savings are in staffing, he said.

“Everyone has had to rein in costs. It’s cheaper to put in an Internet system to cut down on inmate movement than to have people come on-site,” he said.

Schaffer agreed he expects to be able to cut down on overtime for scheduled visitation as more inmates start using the Internet version.

Lower Township’s Curtis says she has tried the Internet visitation from her home, but prefers to save money by coming to the jail when she can.

“It’s a little impersonal,” she said. “State prisons allow contact visits. Prisoners are not going to want to give that up.”

Reached for comment, the New Jersey branch of the American Civil Liberties Union declined to comment when told the Internet visits were optional.

Salem County’s Skradzinski said prison inmates likely would use the Internet visitation system much more than typical jail inmates. Prisoners serve longer sentences than most jail inmates, which are typically limited to 1 year. And state prisons often impose greater geographic distances between inmates and their families.

Skradzinski recommends the state consider this kind of visitation system.

“It would be the smart thing to do. I definitely see it being the wave of the future,” he said.

Source

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An interesting article about the use of video visitation in jail as a replacement for face-to-face visits. As in prisoner phone calls, the video visitation interaction is recorded. One of the benefits highlighted in the article is that it gives family members more time to visit. Visiting is now offered at the jail five days a week, not just the weekend. We believe giving prisoners secure cell phones will also expand the availability of family contact by providing more flexibility in when prison phone calls can take place.

For family and friends with a loved one behind bars that weekly jail house visit carries a lot of weight. But as cities and counties build new jails, video visits are replacing that face-to-face contact. They say it cuts down on labor and is safer. But inmates and their visitors often say something is missing with the new technology.

Modesta Lopez is dressed in silver high heels, a neat white blouse and black skirt to visit a video screen. The image of her boyfriend will be beamed from his cell block several hundred feet away. Lopez dressed up especially for him. She plans to do a turn for him before the video camera, but the full effect will surely be lost.

He’s been in jail for a few months. Until the new Cabarrus County jail was opened, Lopez was visiting her boyfriend at the old facility where visitation was face-to-face. It was a lot like in the movies. A plate of glass separated inmate and visitor with a phone to speak through.

“I was liking it because I was seeing his face more real. It’s not like watching him on a TV,” says Lopez.

But these video visits ease the burden on Sheriff’s offices. Hundreds of jails across the country have started using them, including ones in Iredell, Catawba and York counties. Mecklenburg County is not among them, at least yet. Video visitation is where the industry is headed because officials say it saves money on labor and logistics.

The system at Cabarrus County’s new jail cost about $500,000 dollars to install. So the Sheriff’s Office says financially it’s a wash. Chief Deputy Paul Hunt says it really comes down to security. Face-to-face visits often mean bringing inmates from one side of a jail to another.

“Whenever you move an inmate, that’s when you can have problems with somebody getting hurt, [if they] don’t want to go there. And you end up having a scuffle with somebody,” says Hunt.

Hunt also says video visits mean there’s less of a chance a family or friend will pass an inmate some kind of contraband.

Some visitors see advantages too. Barry Cook regularly checks in on his son. He prefers the new system because it gives him more time to visit.

“Before they had to process you and take a lot of information. It took you 45 minutes to get up there and see him for 15 minutes,” says Cook.

Cook always felt rushed visiting. Now since there’s no processing time he and his son have a lot more time to chat. Plus, visiting is now offered at the Cabarrus County jail five days a week, not just the weekend.

That brings up another advantage. Under the old face-to-face system, visitors would come to the jail all at once. It was noisy and sometimes inmates were double-booked, which could lead to some uncomfortable situations like girlfriends meeting their competition.

“It made me mad and I sat there through the visit and I left. And then when he called me I was like, “Yo, what was that?” recounts Gina Lattimore.

Her boyfriend’s in jail. At least under the old face-to-face system, she knew when other women would show up to see him. With video visits he could be two-timing her and she wouldn’t know since visitors have to sign up online. And that’s another thing that bothers her since she doesn’t have access to a computer.

Visitors to the jail sit at a table with short partitions for privacy. One man holds up a cell phone to the video screen to show some family pictures. A woman primps a bit, sitting on two chairs so the camera captures her whole face, not just the top half.

“No cursing. If you see that someone is talking loud, let us know,” a sheriff’s deputy instructs the group.

The deputy also monitors and records the video visits. Jails often record phone calls inmates make, but not visits made in person. Offering visits only by video makes it easier to record those too, which also increases the likelihood they’ll end up as evidence in a trial as they did with Casey Anthony in Florida.

Chief Deputy Paul Hunt says so far in Cabarrus County no recordings have been turned over to lawyers. He says they’re used mainly to alert police of something suspicious.

Still, the thought of her visits being recorded makes Modesta Lopez with the silver high heels uneasy.

“You cannot say stuff you’d like to tell him sometimes. But I do what I have to do,” says Lopez.

She holds back a bit and keeps to subjects like church and work. And even though, she gets more time this way, she still prefers talking to him face-to-face.

Source

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