Over the past decade, dozens of states and the Federal Bureau of Prisons have contracted with private companies to provide their incarcerated populations with electronic tablets. These secure devices enable people in jails and prisons to exchange email-like messages with their loved ones, receive money, and download entertainment and educational materials. Some allow video visits.
While tablets can keep imprisoned people more connected to the outside, they come at a cost. Prices and services vary according to the deals made by each corrections system, but users tend to pay a fee for every message, download and deposit. With the average prison wage maxing out at 52 cents per hour, families often absorb the cost of staying in touch.
The two companies that dominate the prison telephone business also command the tablet market — ViaPath Technologies, rebranded from GTL, and Securus, which acquired JPay in 2015. Years of activism by incarcerated people, their families and advocates resulted in the Federal Communications Commission capping the cost of prison phone and video calls last year. But tablet-based products remain largely unregulated.
Because prison telecom vendors tend to bundle their services, corrections systems often contract with a single provider, regardless of quality. And dozens of states make “commissions” from user fees. Within this context, incarcerated people become the unwilling consumers of a billion-dollar industry. Shakeil Price, one such user at New Jersey State Prison, explores another aspect of package deals: What happens when a state switches providers?
Imagine if you were forced to change your cell phone provider, and the new company said you wouldn’t be able to keep the content you’ve gathered over the last 10 years. How would you feel? As someone facing a similar scenario, I would say: distraught.
This situation began last March when the New Jersey Department of Corrections announced that, after a decade, it was changing its “inmate communications provider” from JPay to ViaPath. The electronic memo they sent was vague and failed to mention exactly how the transition would take place.
We could safely assume that ViaPath would replace our tablets. We also figured the company would remove our current kiosks, the shared computers we sync up with our tablets to send messages and download movies, music and games.
What we didn’t know was how much ViaPath would charge us or what would happen to everything on our JPay tablets, which essentially function as hard drives. The lack of details heightened anxiety among the population at New Jersey State Prison because we were unsure of how the future would unfold.
Our wing representatives gathered our questions and concerns and took them to the administration. What they brought back was mostly, “They’re gonna get back to us on that.”
Eventually we learned that the ViaPath tablets will be facility-owned “loaners” that we’ll receive free of charge. But that “free” hardware can’t possibly cover the personal and financial losses we’ll sustain when we either send our JPay tablets home or give them to the prison system for disposal.
My little 7-inch JP6 tablet with its meager 32-gigabytes of memory may not mean much to the state, but it holds a decade’s worth of sentimental e-messages, pictures and video messages from my family and friends. By changing vendors, I will lose access to photographs from my son’s high school graduation and videos of my grandchild saying his first word, taking his first step and riding his first bike. These items are priceless to me; a dollar amount can’t measure their worth.
I can calculate how much I’ve spent on JPay products. Let’s start with the cost of exchanging e-messages. Like other prison tech companies, JPay sells digital “stamps.” In New Jersey, they cost 35 cents apiece and only come in packages of five, 10 or 20.
Each e-stamp covers a message with 20,000 characters or less. Anything over that limit will cost you or your loved one another stamp. If you attach a digital image or greeting card to your message, that will take additional stamps. Clearly this adds up.
Snail mail was once a viable alternative, but now it takes about three weeks to reach us. In the name of security, our loved ones must mail their correspondence — letters, photos, drawings, postcards and greeting cards — to a processing center in Las Vegas run by a private company called Pigeonly Corrections. Pigeonly scans the mail for illegal substances and red-flag words and sends copies of mail marked safe to each prison for distribution by staff. This inconvenience all but guarantees that our loved ones will use digital messages.
Next, consider how much I’ve spent on hardware. Since 2015, my tablets have broken or malfunctioned on three separate occasions. These devices cost $75 apiece, so I’ve spent a total of $225 on tablets that will soon be obsolete.
Then there’s the small fortune I’ve spent on downloads. Over the decade that I’ve had a JPay tablet, I have downloaded over 3,000 songs at $1.99 apiece. I’ve spent an estimated value of $6,000 on music because it’s my lifeline. I am a hip-hop enthusiast with a background as a rap artist, and I listen to everything from Rakim to Wu-Tang Clan to Jay Electronica.
I am a gamer, too. I’ve downloaded 25 games at $3.99 to $8.99, plus tax. I play my Chess, Sudoku and NBA Jams for hours at a time, often while I’m listening to my music.
JPay sells its downloads for a one-time fee. Once you buy the license to a song or game, you can use it whenever you want to. Your purchases are stored on the cloud, and you can even remove items from your tablet to make space, then download them again at no additional cost.
ViaPath, on the other hand, operates a streaming service that charges fees for usage on top of downloads. At the time of this writing, even after more than a year, I still don’t know the cost of streaming or how often I will have to pay for it.
Even scarier is the prospect of paying per minute to send e-messages and use media you’ve already purchased. That’s what they do in Tennessee, according to a March 2025 article in Prison Legal News. In that state, prisoners must pay 3 to 5 cents a minute to watch their movies, play their games — and type their messages.
This vendor change could put a strain on my already depleted finances. I only get paid $1 per hour as a teacher’s assistant, and my workdays are five hours. Truth be told, this $5 job is considered one of the best in the prison.
Not everyone is phased by the switch. Clarence Artis, a man who stays in a cell a few feet away from me, said he’s looking forward to using the video visit option on his ViaPath tablet. (On JPay, we have to use a public kiosk for video visits.) “Sometimes you have to give up something to get something,” he told me. “If I gotta give up these throwback tablets with everything on em,’ oh well. I wanna see my girl’s face when I talk to her.”
I totally understand that not everybody in prison is faced with the same circumstances. If I’d only purchased one tablet and 100 songs, it wouldn’t be that big of an issue for me to change vendors. Also, if I was going to be released from prison in a few months or years, my position would be different. I wouldn’t be bothered by the vendor change because I’d be home, in the physical presence of my loved ones, enjoying their smiles and laughter up close.
Unfortunately, that’s not the case for me. I am serving a life sentence, and I’m not eligible for parole until 2077. Most of the brothers here at New Jersey State Prison are long haulers. They don’t tend to send people here with less than a 30-year sentence. To depart from such personal belongings is like losing a part of your existence.
For a solution, I’ve suggested that we keep the old tablets that we bought in our possession. That’s what Idaho is planning to do when it switches from JPay to ViaPath this month. According to a February update on the state’s corrections department website, “residents” will be able to hold on to their hardware and use what they downloaded “until the tablet stops working.” Prisoners will also have the option of mailing the tablet back to JPay so that the company can put their downloads on a USB, unlock the tablet and send both to a home address. Their families and friends will be able to use the unlocked tablet.
I believe it’s also technologically possible to transfer material to a new vendor’s tablet. When Ohio switched from JPay to ViaPath tablets in 2023, it reportedly allowed prisoners to transfer all content except for games. That June, the corrections department’s website proudly pronounced it “the first time in history that a correctional agency has switched communication vendors without the incarcerated population experiencing a loss of meaningful media files, such as messages, music, and photos.” I’m not sure how well the implementation actually went, but I hope my state at least tries to negotiate this kind of deal.
New Jersey started using ViaPath’s slightly cheaper financial services in late March, and I’ve seen workers installing new routers in my facility. But the gradual rollout and unanswered questions have made this vendor switch frustrating and stressful.
Many of us come from poor communities. We have invested so much — emotionally and financially — into these companies, and when we take losses, it hits differently. These communication vendors exploit the fact that, as prisoners, we are desperate for entertainment and ways to stay united with our families through these isolated times. With this desperation ever-present amongst a captive market, companies like JPay and ViaPath have forged a monopoly at our expense.
Shakeil Price is a poet and a published author. His book, “P.E.A.C.E. in Prison,” is available on Amazon. Shakeil has also published articles as a freelance journalist for Prison Writers and as a contributing writer for the Prison Journalism Project. As of today, Shakeil remains incarcerated at New Jersey State Prison as he fights to overturn his murder conviction.
The New Jersey Department of Corrections (NJDOC) director of public information Christopher Greeder stated that “the [d]epartment is currently reviewing additional services to be provided by ViaPath and will communicate any updates or enhancements to the incarcerated population when they become available.”
He added that “kiosks will be eliminated and replaced with tablets. If an incarcerated person refuses a tablet, they will be offered paper forms to complete any tasks needed.”
Regarding Pigeonly’s mail delivery times, they stated that it takes “typically less than two weeks,” but varies depending on the speed of the United States Postal Service.
