Communication Monopoly and How it Divides Us

Twelve years ago, the landscape of prison communication was a different beast entirely, one we've navigated through personal upheaval and systemic change. Through the last decade and a half we've remained steadfast in dissecting the transition from physical mail to costly digital barriers that keep loved ones at arm's length. This week on Lockdown to Legacy, we're peeling back the complex layers of this evolution, from the dawn of MP3 players to today's tablet-based systems. We don't just recount the journey; we expose the monopolization by service providers that's resulted in steep costs and untold frustration for families nationwide, and the governmental kickbacks that make it all possible.

As we navigate the murky waters of JPay, GTL, and CoreLinks, we're sharing our personal experiences with their various platforms and the struggles we've faced across state lines. It's a tale of financial exploitation and privacy challenges behind bars – illuminated through our discussion on the impact of non-compete clauses and lack of provider competition. We invite you to join us, not just as listeners, but as advocates for change in a system that too often prioritizes profit over people. Together, we dissect the intricacies of these challenging times, advocating for a fairer and more transparent communication system for those who are incarcerated and their loved ones on the outside.

The article referenced in this episode can be accessed through this link:
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/emessaging.html

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:19

Welcome to Lockdown the Legacy stories from the inside out. I'm your host, remy Jones.

Speaker 2: 0:25

And I am co-host Debbie Jones. We are a husband and wife team here to bring you the real life stories, experiences and questions around the American criminal justice system. We do advise discretion with this podcast. I think we should put that out there first and foremost. Yes, we are going to talk about experiences that happen inside the prison system, outside of prison systems. We will use language that might be offensive, but we intend to keep it real. And if that's not for you, we totally understand, but please do what's best for your listening ears.

Speaker 1: 0:56

Oh, we're about to keep it real, son. Our goal of this podcast is to share the inside realities of the American prison and criminal justice system, from pre-charges all the way to post-release, from the voices of those who've experienced it firsthand, including me.

Speaker 2: 1:12

That's right, we're going to keep it real.

Speaker 1: 1:30

What's up everybody? Welcome back to another episode of Lockdown to Legacy, of course.

Speaker 1: 1:36

I am your host Remy Jones Today. I'm a B-boy myself, but that's all right. You know, don't tell DJ, but I'm the best part of the show, right? I mean she's got all those amazing qualities but I've got the charisma, you know.

Speaker 1: 1:56

But to get onto a serious note, if any of you guys tuned into our episode last week, which was not really a full-on episode, you'll know that we did just experience loss in our family. So if you could all of our loyal listeners, please keep us in your thoughts and prayers on that aspect. It will be greatly appreciated. And thank you for all of you who have reached out and expressed your sentiment. So, other than that, I mean we have also been a sick household recently. Actually, directly prior to our loss, we were sick for about a week and that was a really hard transition from being sluggish with no energy to grieving. But everybody's on the mend now. You know, grown-ups are returning to work, kids are returning to school. So I mean it's all good, we're making it. Actually, I mean I was sick and then ended up having to go back to work just so we could, so I could experience this sub 10-degree Fahrenheit weather, which has been the worst. But you know you got to look for the good. You know you got to look for the good. I got some really good winter gear, so I've been out there looking like seven layer dip baby under layers, uniform hoodie, overalls, big winter coat, neck warmer, you know, heavy duty gloves with hand warmers like the whole night, you know, out there delivering gas and this weather. So just heck, even on that aspect, keep me in your thoughts and prayers. All right, this week, though, you know, onto the meat and potatoes.

Speaker 1: 4:01

This week, I wanted to talk about something that I honestly feel like I should have talked about a long time ago, man, because I've been dealing with it for probably 12 years now and it's never been good. But just recently, man, I had this incident, and I was so frustrated that I was like, why the freak have I not talked about this yet? And that subject is electronic communication with your loved ones in prison. You know I keep in contact with a lot of guys in prison still, and over the years, electronic communication to give you the best description of it, I mean, people call it email, but it's really far from email. We'll get to that later. You know, in that episode, most recently it's evolved into more of a tech, space type of communication where it's almost real time. So I mean it's gotten better. It's gotten better. I mean, if I had to, from my own personal experience, think back to when I first saw this electronic mail come on the scene, I would say it was probably back around 2011, 2012.

Speaker 1: 5:33

And then, prior to that, you know, we saw the digital age making its way into prison late as hell, but still making its way and probably like 2010, 2009,. You know, that's when they did away with CD players and tape players and started bringing in MP3 players and it sucked. Man, all of it sucked, especially in the beginning. I mean, everybody knows that the beginning of anything is a horrible time, but the MP3 players were bad because they were very limited in function and it was our first introduction to a kiosk system. So there's like this central computer I think when I was in Toledo, I think there was a lot of people who were in jail the kiosk was the like commissary or rack or something like that, and you could order songs, the first MP3 player. You had to order your songs like online or something. You had to have your family members go onto the website and order the songs and then, when you go, plug into the kiosk, it would download the songs for you if you purchased them. And they were expensive, they were like, I mean, they were like three, four dollars a song. And so it was crazy that you got an MP3 player that could hold like it was some small, like a thousand songs and each song was three, four dollars, like insane. And so from the very beginning he goes to show how these companies and there's only like a handful, maybe five companies that control all this stuff and their sole purpose, it seems, is to just take advantage of incarcerated people and their families.

Speaker 1: 7:26

Prior to the digital communication and the MP3 players and stuff, it was the phone systems. You know I've talked about it before where, when I first went to prison, calling my dad in Virginia from Ohio, from prison in Ohio, cost me like sixteen dollars for a fifteen minute phone call. To put that into perspective, the average inmate in Ohio gets paid a sixteen to eighteen dollars state pay every month, you know. So if I wanted to call my father, I had to spend almost my whole month's earnings to make that one phone call. Luckily I was not limited to state pay, but there are a lot of people who are, so it was very unfair. I mean, even for a local phone call, it was like I think five, six, seven dollars or something like that For the same fifteen minutes. And so I actually had people who, you know, there's always that way to like try to cheat the system and it sounds bad, but the system is corrupt itself in this case, so I didn't mind at all.

Speaker 1: 8:40

So, around this time was when Google Voice first came on scene, so I would have my family members get a Google Voice phone number in Toledo with a Toledo area code, so that it could cost the five to seven dollars to make the call instead of, you know, depending on how far it was long distance, it'd be anywhere from ten to sixteen dollars, and I was just I mean, I was messed up really. So in that case, inmates did come together to follow a lawsuit against the phone companies, mainly the biggest of them, which is GTL, global Tel Link, who was the controller of the phone systems in state prisons in Ohio, and they won. So now, as of the time I left 2018, a local phone call was like ninety five cents, which was like a huge win. You know, long distance calls were like two dollars, so that was. That was huge, that was really huge. Still still fifteen minute phone calls, but I mean, when it comes to being connected to your family, they're still connected to your family. I mean, when it comes to being connected to your family, that was a big win and I had nothing bad to say about it.

Speaker 1: 10:04

So back to the digital mail. When digital mail first came on scene, it was horrible, so horrible that I wanted nothing to do with it. When you think about, like I told you, it was, it was probably 2011,. 2012 when I first saw it and the institution's primary concern is not inmates keeping in touch with their family. They don't care, they have no care at all about that. They probably only provided because they have to. But the main concern is security. So when this email, whatever they call it when the JPEI JPEI was the provider back then Then, when they first came on scene, it was actually more of a service for the loved ones than for the inmates. The loved ones will go to the website JPEIcom or the app if they had it. I don't know if they had an app back then, but they will go on there and they will write what could closely resemble an email to an MA in a certain institution.

Speaker 1: 11:22

You could attach photos you know, for an extra fee, of course, which the fee was the same amount as the original email itself. So if it costs 50 cents to send the email, it costs an additional 50 cents for each attachment that you added, which was nonsense. So 150 cents email could turn in. You could attach up to five pictures so that one email could turn into a $3 email or message or whatever. They also have character limits. So you know, the more you think about it, the less it resembles an actual email. You can't include any type of video back then. But then once they send it, it sends on their end as if it were an email. But it goes to the same mail office at the institution that processes the paper mail. And then there was an officer in there that will review it. I don't know how well they reviewed it, if they read it word for word, if they skimmed it or if it was electronics that you know flags certain words, I'm not really sure. But once it was deemed as acceptable, I know for sure that the officer did have to look at the pictures and process those to say if they're acceptable or not. But once they said it was acceptable, they would print it out on like a regular black and white laser jet printer and fold it up and give it to you with paper mail, what at mail call. So it was kinda like pointless, right To be electronic mail that was printed out and given to you with paper mail. And then they would give you like two extra sheets that had the J-Pay letterhead on it, blank sheets with the letterhead at the top, and that was for you to write your response and then submit it with the paper mail it would go to the mail office Once again. Now you know we talk about the security aspect, as opposed to a paper mail letter which you can put in a sealed envelope. Now you're giving them your letter and they get to review it before you send it out. They would scan it into the computer and send it back to your loved ones in the form of electronic message.

Speaker 1: 14:00

And I was just stupid. I thought like why are all these people involved in me sending the letter to somebody? Like it made no sense to me so I wanted nothing to do with it. I mean even like the pictures, like if they attached photos. Even those were given to me as black and white printouts on a laser jet printer, which I mean why even bother, right, but it got better. It did get better and as it got better, man, I eventually softened up and took advantage of it, because it became like they pushed it and they focused on it so much that they really wanted it to be the primary method of communication as far as mail went. So much so that there was a big push for a while to do away with paper mail in prisons, and that's not just in Ohio, that was in many different states. I don't know what states it was successful in, I could probably double back with that fact later, but I know that luckily it did not succeed in Ohio.

Speaker 1: 15:08

But since it didn't succeed, the mail rules changed dramatically. Like it was almost like a vendetta, like they were mad that they didn't get away with this, because it got a lot stricter on what you could get in the mail. You couldn't get anything that was like a greeting card. You were no longer allowed to get greeting cards, postcards, anything that smelled. So if, like you were, you know, writing your lady and she sprayed perfume on it, hell, if you were writing your grandma and it smelled like perfume and you got the letter like you couldn't have it. And if eventually people got so tired of that and you complained so much that they would scan it and print it out and give you the scan version and not the original, because it smelled like something. There was all types of reasons. If there was anything that had like colored ink, colored pencil, crayon, anything like that, you couldn't have it, and so it was kind of like pushing you to use the electronic mail even more.

Speaker 1: 16:22

And then eventually, you know, like I said, it evolved. It evolved to the point where eventually inmates got these tablets. These tablets, they were like clear and bulky and they were very limited as far as electronic security goes. It was a closed system. You could not access the internet. You could only have like music. Eventually you could download a couple of games on it, any photos and eventually like 30 second videos that they sent. You could view them on your tablet.

Speaker 1: 16:58

But the flaw in the tablet was the kiosk. You know I mentioned that early. This kiosk, since you can't access the internet, there was like one or two computers in every cell block or every dorm block and it would be like inside a secure box on the wall with like an exposed keyboard and the only access that you could get to it was, there would be a USB port on the side. So every day, or however often you choose, you go and you plug your tablet into this USB port and it would download everything that you had as far as new mail or new music or games or anything that you purchased, and then it would also send out anything, any mail that you wrote, any letters that you wrote on your tablet. So that was how we had to do it, but it was heavily flawed. I mean, there's only one or two kiosks in every block for you know 3, 400 people, so that right there, you know, demand is crazy.

Speaker 1: 18:06

It was like a 20 minute time limit when you log in, because you could also log in and write your letter on the kiosk. But I mean, if you weren't a fast typer, it'd just boot you out right in the middle of typing. You know which was messed up? Because you could only log in At first. You could only log in twice a day. Eventually they kind of done away with that as more people got tablets. But I mean it's hard if you don't got a tablet and you know that's how you got to write. It kind of sucks because you got dudes on there just trying to like download music and games and stuff, and they'll get on there back to back. And then eventually they introduced video visitation, which is also done at the kiosk and there's also no privacy, like this kiosk is bolted to the wall and it's in the day room, so like people are walking behind you, you know, coming and going out of the block. Sometimes you know, hey, there are creeps in prison. There'd be somebody that's just sitting there at a table behind you watching you have a visit with your family, like trying to, you know, be seen or something. So I really didn't like that man. But, like I said, eventually it got better.

Speaker 1: 19:25

Right after I left prison in 2018, it evolved again. So the tablets got upgraded. You could do college on your tablet, you know. You could do like electronic correspondence classes and stuff with local colleges. They had just actually introduced that right before I left. So I actually did a couple of college courses through Ashland University. You know, shout out to them, for they do a lot of programs for inmates and it's an actual degree that you can earn through their college, which is really cool. But anyway, the tablet evolved and now it's like you can make phone calls from your tablet, which is huge. And the phone calls have been extended to 30 minutes, since you're not tied to the wall, because, you know, before it was like four phones on a wall with, like I said, 3,400 people. Long lines, you know, especially on holidays. So that's cool. It gave you a little more privacy, it gave you a little more convenience. They can also watch movies, I mean, there's more game options, there's all types of stuff, so it's actually like a full entertainment platform now and it's actually switched.

Speaker 1: 20:47

So they switched companies from J-Pay J-Pay was actually like it was a shitty company to, I mean, excuse my language. Their customer service sucked and they were really one of those companies that their main goal was to just squeeze as much money out of you as possible and really not care about what the product was that they offered. Like if there was ever a time where there was a technical glitch and you lost money on it, so what? They didn't return your money. Their customer service was hard to interact with and I mean it just was what it was really.

Speaker 1: 21:28

So now they switched to more like a text-based type thing, and it's with GlobalTelling. It's an app called GTL Getting Out, which is a stupid name, by the way Stupid name, but it's almost as if you know, I say it's kind of text-based because it's almost real-time. I mean there's still like a delay because you know they have electronic monitoring. I don't know if it's AI whatever that's the new tagline but it's like AI that looks for red flag. You know words and stuff, and so that's cool, because now, instead of sending an email, you know in air quotes and I say that as email because it's really the easiest way to describe it, but it's not email. So it went from email to more like a text, because now, instead of sending an email and it comes through, maybe in a day or two, I can now send that text and get a reply in five to ten minutes, which is cool.

Speaker 1: 22:40

But, like I said, you know, their goal is not really convenience. Their goal is to squeeze as much money out of use possible. In some aspects it improves, in some aspects it fails horribly. So with JPEG, you know, like I told you, I got on 2018, when I left every message like 50 cents plus 50 cents for each attachment. Well, now each message is 10 cents and 10 cents per attachment. So you know, huge improvement, but it's kind of still the same where, like if I, this is what really. I'm sorry, this is what really caused me.

Speaker 1: 23:30

The big issue recently is the holidays just passed. I tried to send a whole lot of pictures into prison to different people that I still, you know, keeping contact with and support, and I mean I must have sent, like at one time I sent like 20 pictures, which in a grand scheme of things, it's not a lot of money, but you know, 20 pictures at one time to different people. And I started getting these emails man, like my emails just lighten up. I'm looking and it's like, oh, your attachments were denied, your attachments were denied, your attachments were denied. And I'm thinking to myself like let me go check this out. I go on here and I look and I'm like man, I know I ain't saying nothing crazy Pictures of me and my children having a holiday, celebrating Kwanzaa, me and my wife.

Speaker 1: 24:29

Pictures of me and my wife, you know DJ at the Columbus Crew MLS Cup championship game, you know, like with the mascots and stuff. And I'm like what the fuck were they? Why is this denied? And not only is it frustrating that they got denied, but it's also frustrating because when they're denied, you don't get a refund, you still get charged for having to send those. And so I'm email, you know, I'm texting my guys like yo check what your mail office man, because you know these pictures getting denied and they're like innocent pictures, man, and being my kids, being my family, you know. So they're talking to the mailroom and the mailroom's telling them oh, we ain't gonna do with that, you all gotta talk to the GTL.

Speaker 1: 25:15

So I, you know, I, whatever man, I sent some more pictures, different pictures, thinking that it was kind of just a fluke or something sister, mare or whatever. I sent pictures of me and my kids again and they're denied, sent pictures on my family on the first day of school. They were denied. So I called GTL man and I'm livid. I know I'm yelling at the wrong people. I know it because I know that this person on the other side of the line did not make this rule. They did not deny the pictures themselves. But I'm mad because I want answers Like you're wasting my money and my time, you know. So they're like oh, we got nothing to do with that. That's the institution. I'm like nah, bullshit.

Speaker 1: 26:07

The institution told me that's your, that's what a guy was like. Ah well, you know, kind of like he got caught red-handed. You know he's like well, every institution sets their own rules. This was news. This is something that I've never heard before. Also, in all of my, let's say, 13 years of dealing with this I Like dealing with the electronic messaging I've never actually seen the rules.

Speaker 1: 26:40

Nobody gives the inmates of rules on what is and what is not acceptable. Nobody gives Us on the outside the information, the rules of what's acceptable or not. So I was just kind of going off common sense. Like you know, ain't no nudity, ain't no gangs, ain't no drugs, you know, because that's the only rules. As far as the institutional rules, you know they'll tell you that. Like you can't send anything, Regardless if it's electronic or not, you can't say anything with. You know gang signs or anything like that. So the guys telling me is all, every institution says their own rules, and I'm like it didn't register yet. So I'm like dude, I just sent some shit of my kids on their first day of school, like celebrating holidays. I was getting the night. Like y'all guys explain it, like I want my money. And so the guy finally relents and he reads me the rules. It was the first time I've ever heard these rules and as he's reading them to me, I Just want to punch him. The beyond is mad. I just wanted to punch. I'm like the fuck? Kind of rules is this man Like?

Speaker 1: 27:51

If these were the rules that I made up, I wouldn't want to tell anybody the rules either, you know, and it made me really not want to use their, their Platform anymore, but it's a monopoly. If I don't use their platform, then I'm back to writing snail mail and you know there's no other. Like I said, there's a handful of these companies. So there's like J pay, secure is GTL, core links. There's you know four or five companies that run it all for the whole country, but Usually it's when they contract with the state there's a no compete clause so they can be the only provider for the state For all the prisons in the state. So it's not like I could, like I ain't using it on them or I'm gonna go over here mess of Coralings, so I'm a going mess with, you know, secures. Like I have to use GTL or I don't. You know I don't talk to my people. So, anyway, to get on these rules, what the rules were, and let you guys know that I'm not overreacting, it kind of shed a lot of light on, like every time.

Speaker 1: 29:09

He mentioned another rules. Like another picture that I had sent came to my and I understood why they were denied. I just didn't understand why that rule was a rule. So one of them is you cannot be making any keyword, any Hand gestures in your pictures, not limited to gang signs. We're talking about peace signs, thumbs up, hang loose rock or whatever it is. You know, anything that is looked at as a hand gesture will get the picture denied.

Speaker 1: 29:45

So when I'm thinking about me and DJ at the soccer game you know at the soccer match and we're with the, the mascots, and you know we're all throwing up the peace sign I'm thinking like why the fuck would they deny that? Like we're Standing here with a stuffed cat like you know, I do a cat costume and we're all just kind of like hands up, you know, throwing up peace signs and stuff. Well, that's because we were doing hand gestures, pictures with me and my kids and stuff. And you know, when I'm throws up a thumbs up or something, anything like I was like that's stupid. Like use some common sense if it's me and my, you know, 3 year old, 5 year old, 7 year old, 10 year old, and we're throwing up peace signs and thumbs up, dude.

Speaker 1: 30:33

If you think that that's a fucking gang sign and you're just fucking stupid, so then I you know he's going on, he's telling me about other rules and it's like if you send a picture of a child, anybody under 18 or that looks to be under 18, and they do not have an adult in the picture with them, they will deny it. So all these holiday pictures, first day of school pictures, everything like that, that were denied it's because there wasn't no adult in the picture with them. And I'm like dog, you know whatever, keep going. So he's like any collage you make, any Like you know you do the collage, or it's multiple pictures and one it'll get denied every time. It's not allowed because they want their money. They want you to send those pictures separately.

Speaker 1: 31:31

What else was? It was just a bunch of stupid stuff. Man, I was just like dude, even if there's somebody in the background. That's what he had. That's the one thing that he said. Now, it kind of just made me want to yell at him even more, because he's like, even if me and my kids are the focal point of the picture, if there's somebody in the background throwing up a peace sign. You know like it's denied.

Speaker 1: 31:58

And, like I said, when they deny all these pictures, man, they're not giving me a refund and they're also not telling me why they're denied, which is horrible because it leaves you guessing. You send more pictures and you know they're not telling me why they're denied pictures. And you know they get denied everything. And the really bad part of that is the service is automated. There is no real service being provided as far as people goes. There's no labor cost or anything. So when I send a picture and it gets denied because AI flags it and you still profit off of it and I lose on it. Like where is the justice in that? Like that's shady. You know that's super shady.

Speaker 1: 32:48

And so the fact that every institution has their own, these were just the rules for this one institution where you know it's one particular person I was talking about, with him Resided. So if every institution has their own Set of rules, me, as a patron of this Platform, it's literally impossible, because they don't even provide the rules for one, but for two. If I did know them, I would have to know them for every institution which houses an inmate that I correspond with. So I actually currently, right now, and I talked to inmates and four different prisons, five different prisons I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to answer that five different prisons, so I would have to know those, the rules for each of those five prisons and they're, you know, they could all be like wildly different, which, like man, that's stupid man, that's really harsh and there's no oversight, there's really nobody complained to, because why me, when I call this customer service number, I had to call Maybe ten times, do a lot of Google searches and everything, because it's all automated and there was no option to talk to somebody. And it was like I really don't even remember how I ended up getting to talk to somebody. It was some obscure combination of button-pushing and they ended up. I think I ended up having to like leave a message or something and they called me back. And so that made me even more mad, because when dude called me back, I was just like, who is this? Oh, like, soon as you say who he was, was like, oh yeah, I got something for your ass. Yeah, I've been waiting for this. You know, yes, it's really bad. You know, like I said, the Platform, the features and stuff. The features got a whole lot better. I can't argue with that.

Speaker 1: 34:48

But the lack of oversight, the lack of uniformity, you know the lack of, I mean even like Regulation, government regulation, whatever it is like, it's stupid. I and the difference between states, like I correspond with inmates in Ohio. I got people in Virginia. I used to have a friend that was a locked up in Virginia. She's since been released, but if I wanted to talk to her I would have had to download a different app and put money on that account, not be able to use the same account pool of funds. My brother was in the Feds. The Feds don't use JPA or GTL, they use CoreLinks. So there's another app. I would have had to download Load Funds, you know it's like so. And then also with that there's a whole another set of rules. You know, with each different company, with each different app, with each different institution, it's like super confusing and I just I really wish it would get better, man, I really wish it would get better.

Speaker 1: 36:08

The cost got better. Yeah, you know the features got better, but I mean, if I can't even send, you know, a picture, not, let alone the fact that the picture itself, the attachment, costs the same cost. It costs the same amount as the original letter, like that's come on. That's the reason why I say, that's one of the reasons why I say at least that it's not email. I mean there's word count, I mean character counts limits. So you know, in some places and it really depends on state, not even just company, so like in Ohio with GTL, I think, there's like a 2000 character limit, you know.

Speaker 1: 36:53

But in some of the research I did, like in some states, mostly Southern states, which is weird the character count goes as high as 20,000, which is like a huge difference and there's no need for it. There's no need for a character count limit because I mean, if it's like email, like I never wrote an email on Yahoo or on Gmail or Outlook or anything, and they're like all right, man, you're hitting your character count limit, you know you better end this and write another one, pick it where you left off, you know. Or you know trying to send attachments, whatever. And you know, like I said, I'm not trying to 100% shit on these companies because, like I said, they offer the product is getting better, but when it comes to the security and when it comes to the customer service it's lacking, you know, it's too much security, it's not enough customer service, it's not enough oversight and regulation, and basically, you just get to do what they want.

Speaker 1: 38:14

Like I said, their number one goal, it seems to me in dealing with this program I mean the platform is their goal is to make money off of incarcerated people and their families, which is loathsome to say the least. Man and I mean when I took economics in college, man, you know the first thing, the first rule of economics is competition breeds quality and innovation. There's no competition. There's five companies that serve as a whole country and they have non-compete clauses in their contracts with these government organizations, and those contracts give the government organizations kickbacks. How is that fair? How is that fair at all? So I'm not gonna keep harping along, but there is an article that I read concerning this and I thought it was a pretty good article. It was very informative. It even had charts showing which states utilize which companies, talks about the feds and all that stuff. It was really enlightening, even for me as a person who dealt with this on the inside and now am dealing with it on the outside. It still shed a lot of information, a lot of light on stuff that I didn't know. So I'm gonna include this article, the link to it, in the show notes and I encourage you guys to check it out because I mean, really it's us out here who have all the power to make change. And I'm gonna tell you right now, it ain't with the company, it's with the government, the state organizations, the Department of Rehabilitation Correction wherever you're at, whatever your corrections organization is and your state leaders. That's where the change has to be made. The complaints have to be sent, because I recall times being in prison where I felt I was being treated so bad by these companies that I contacted the Better Business Bureau and had them mediating the circumstances on my behalf. There was actually even one time that it was a few inmates, probably like I don't know less than 10, more than five somewhere in there.

Speaker 1: 41:00

But we all got together and we wrote the Attorney General to complain about J-Pay and how they were treating us, how you would order something and it would never be delivered. I ordered a tablet and it never came. And when I contacted them like yo, where's my stuff? They told me it had already been delivered. And I was like, nah, even the mail room employees were like, nah, this never came. Nobody ever signed for it. Like how are you saying it was delivered? And they were basically like, fuck off, it's not our problem. So I mean like, who's gonna make them do it? And I'm telling you, once we did that the attorney we wrote the Better Business Bureau, you know, and they were basically like you know, fuck off, you ain't gonna do nothing either.

Speaker 1: 41:54

And when we wrote the Attorney General, I actually got three tablets in the mail. I actually got three tablets in the mail and the average shipping time on one tablet is like a month, you know, and I got three of them in like a week and a half. You're not even allowed to have three because they're secure and they got all your information and stuff like that. That password protected all that stuff. So basically, I had to send two of them back to the manufacturer or back home, which you know I'm not paying for that shit. Y'all can't have it, you know, because I got it, it has to be sent at my expense. So I'm like, fuck it, leave it down here in the mail room, destroy it. But I mean, even when I got the tablet, like I had to go back and forth to the mail room because when I got, when I plugged it into the kiosk, it was like this is not your tablet record show, you already have a tablet. And I'm like, ah, fuck. So I had to like go back down there because they don't have a kiosk in the mail room. I had to go back down there and exchange it out, one after another to find out which worked, which, you know, cool, they finally made it right. But I had to get the damn Attorney General involved for them to make it right. So I mean that's what I'm saying, like, if we want oversight, if we want uniformity, if we want consistency, if we want clarity, you know, you know we have to talk to the people, not the people at the company, but the people who make the laws, the people who go into contracts with these companies. You know we have to make it public, make it. You know, when you humiliate a company publicly and they get bad press, then is when they start moving to cover their own asses. So I mean, check out this article. If you guys do have people on the inside.

Speaker 1: 43:51

You know I'm not saying don't use these platforms, man, these apps like GTL getting out. I gotta say it's a whole lot better than JPEG, which I don't even know if JPEG is thrown around anymore. I hope they went belly up because they suck, but I mean it's cool for just correspondence. As far as pictures and stuff go, it's slim, man, it sucks, you know. So just keep that in mind. I mean, I still encourage you to use them because it's much better than Stale Mail.

Speaker 1: 44:26

If you're going to send some photos, you might want to do that the whole fashion way. You know, go down to that three hour photo development. You know one hour photo development, print the babies out and send them in that way it probably means a whole lot more anyway, you know, when you're inmate on that side and you get to actually hang up your pictures or, you know, have a photo album or whatever. So I don't know, man, if you guys got any feedback. Man, let me know. If you got any experiences, you know, let me know. Hit me up on Facebook.

Speaker 1: 44:58

You know the Lockdown to Legacy podcast, ig email stories at lockdowntolegacycom. You know, I'd love to hear from you guys. And also, if you don't have any experience with these apps and you need to get in contact with your people and you want some help getting in contact with these people with through these apps, you know, reach out there too, man, I am not opposed because really I'm an advocate for the people on the inside, man. So if I got to help you set up an account on one of these so you could keep in contact with some people you reach out, I'll do that. Man, I don't even care if I don't know you and I don't know them, I do it. All right With that. I'm going to close this out. Yeah, host, remy the.

Speaker 2: 45:56

Lockdown to Legacy podcast is proud to be a part of the Bus Sprout podcast community network. Lockdown to Legacy is recorded at Kohatch in their lovely audiophile room. Thanks for your scholarship. Audio engineering is done by our very own Remy Jones. You can reach us with any feedback, questions, comments or share the love by emailing stories at lockdown, the number two legacycom. Stories at lockdown to legacycom. You can reach out there too for a free sticker, and you can find us on Instagram and Twitter with the handle at lockdown to legacy and on Facebook at the lockdown to legacy podcast. Thanks for listening.