This story was originally published by Verite News.
The Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office is planning to upgrade jail communication by providing tablet devices to detainees in the Orleans Justice Center, possibly in the coming year.
During a November hearing on her 2024 budget, Sheriff Susan Hutson told New Orleans City Council members that her office has already received bids on a proposed tablet contract and is planning on moving forward. The office did not provide additional information to Verite News on the contractor or estimated costs.
A spokesperson from OPSO said the agency aims to begin handing out tablets at some point next year, but that it is meeting with community partners — particularly organizations that work to support incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people — to make sure the devices are introduced in the best way.
The tablets “will allow [residents] to have medical visits, some mental health, but mostly medical, talk to their lawyers, talk to family and most importantly have reentry programs and educational programs,” Hutson told the council last month.
Ultimately, under Hutson’s long-term plan, anyone incarcerated in the jail would be able to use a tablet to make free calls to their doctors, attorneys and loved ones on the outside.
Similar programs have been tried elsewhere, including Connecticut, where officials say the introduction of free tablet-based calls has led to improved quality of life and reduced tension among incarcerated residents.
“All the sheriffs I talked to — even in prisons, they talked about that — it still helps to reduce the violence,” Hutson told council members.
In an interview last week, Hutson said she hopes that access to the technology will improve morale at the Orleans Justice Center, and possibly even help to curb violence, which Hutson says has grown in recent months along with the jail’s population.
She said barriers to communicating with loved ones are a major source of frustration for people in the jail. Residents often have to wait in long lines to use the jail’s phones and video monitors, some of which are periodically broken. And calls are expensive. Currently, jail detainees use their commissary accounts to pay about 20 cents per minute for phone calls — around $3.00 for a 15 minute call, the maximum time allowed. (In her 2021 campaign, Hutson promised to work to make jail calls free.)
Hutson said she recently saw a young resident burst into tears after being unable to contact family.
“He was upset. He had been in a fight,” she said. “And what was really making him upset was he had missed his daughter’s first day of school. So he didn’t get to talk with her and see her. … When they’re not able to stay in touch with their family, it really causes disruptions for them.”
In last month’s budget hearing, Bruce Reilly, deputy director of Voice of the Experienced (VOTE), a prisoner advocacy nonprofit, echoed Hutson’s sentiments.
“The number one cause of violence in jails and prisons is the phones,” Reilly told council members. “Free phones is the number one thing that will reduce violence in there. You don’t fight over stuff that’s free.”
Even if the new tablets arrive next year, using them to make calls will still cost money.
Currently, 86% of what residents spend on phone calls goes to the sheriff’s office, with the rest of the money going to phone contractor Securus Technologies. The agency estimates phone revenue will come to nearly $1 million this year. In order to implement her free calls plan, Hutson said she would need the city, which provides most of the jail’s operating budget, to make up that money, something that won’t happen for at least another year.
Reilly proposed that the council increase Hutson’s budget by the amount of revenue the jail receives from phone use to cover the cost of calls. Several council members, including Freddie King and Oliver Thomas, seemed to show interest, particularly in the potential effect that free calls on tablets could have on violence. King and Thomas did not respond to requests for comment.
For now, Hutson still plans to secure the tablets. She said that once a contract is finalized, the devices themselves would be provided to detainees for free. But residents would pay for some services — including phone service, but also movie and music downloads and other services — using apps installed on the devices.
Such extra charges have come under criticism as more states and localities have adopted tablets in prisons and jails. A 2019 analysis of “free” tablet contracts around the country by the research and advocacy nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative identified dozens of extra costs for tablet services — including some that charged by the minute to access e-books and send messages.
Hutson said her office is currently looking into what contracts it can get to keep costs low for residents.
She said she anticipates asking for funding to make phone calls free for the 2025 budget year.
‘You instantly got to see the tension and violence evaporate’
While there are no formal studies linking violence reduction to tablet use, multiple studies show that contact with family through visitation, phone calls and mail, reduce recidivism.
In Missouri, after just over a year of providing tablets — with calls at 5 cents per minute — to its residents, the St. Louis County Jail saw staff use-of-force incidents go down by 40% and residents assaults on guards plummet by 60%, according to a report from St. Louis Public Radio.
Steven Parkhurst served 30 years in prison in Rhode Island and Connecticut. For the majority of that time, the use of communal pay phones was a source of tension for himself and his fellow inmates.
When he was locked up in Connecticut, he said there were five or six phones per cell block, each holding about 100 people. He remembers dozens of people lining up to use them to contact friends and family on the outside. Some of the phones, he said, were controlled by prison gangs, which meant they were off limits for unaffiliated people.
“At the end of the day, 30 years in prison was 30 years of either violence or perceived violence or the threat of violence at every single turn, and the majority of that came from the telephones,” Parkhurst said.
Roughly five months before his release, Parkhurst received a tablet. It allowed him to download movies, take advantage of educational courses, listen to music and hear podcasts from hosts who were formerly incarcerated themselves. And he could make unlimited phone calls for free — Connecticut began providing tax-payer funded phone calls to prison and jail residents in October 2021 — without looking over his shoulder while waiting in line.
“You instantly got to see the tension and violence evaporate,” Parkhurst said.
He remembers seeing anxious dorm residents grow more relaxed as they talked to loved ones on the phone.
“Now you’re getting this circle of music which is people’s conversations to their loved ones on the phone,” Parkhurst said. “To me it is a crazy beautiful thing.”
Andrius Banevicius, a spokesperson for the Connecticut Department of Corrections, said the state has not directly studied phone use and violence. But anecdotes from prison staff suggest the tablet program has reduced tension in the prisons and jails.
‘Behind the curve’
When it comes to technology, the Orleans Justice Center is “behind the curve,” Hutson said. At the moment, each jail pod — a secured unit with a common area with tables with attached seating secured to the floor surrounded by two stories of cells with a plexiglass window on each cell door — has the capacity to house 60 people. There are generally four phones attached to a column in each pod’s common area for residents to use and four monitors against a wall for video visitations.
When Hutson inherited the jail, many of the phones and video conference monitors were broken, she said.
Verite News visited a pod in the jail on Wednesday. Residents there said all four phones were working, but the buttons on one were sticking.
Debra Hammons, who oversees operations at the jail, said she’s excited for the tablets to come to the jail.
But some advocates who monitor prison and jail communications are wary of the costs of services offered on the tablets.
Wanda Bertram with the Prison Policy Initiative said over the last decade, as prison and jail telecommunications companies have faced increased regulation of costs for phone calls, they have pivoted to marketing tablets, which have services like e-messaging with rates that are not regulated by the Federal Communications Commission.
These companies can charge a premium for services, leaving the people behind bars and their loved ones to bear the cost.
“The prices that are charged for services on tablets largely escaped regulation,” Bertram said. “So unless the sheriff is planning to introduce tablets and make the services on them free, which I think would be a very good thing to do, I think that’s a concern to watch out for.”
In most Louisiana prisons, tablets cost $79.99. The Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women is currently participating in a pilot program in which all residents of the prison are issued a device for free. Phone calls on the tablets are 14 cents per-minute and messages are $0.30-per-message, a spokesperson for Aventiv Technologies said in an emailed statement.
“You can make some services on it free, but the companies are always looking for, you know, where’s our revenue going to come from,” Bertram said. “How are we going to keep this from being, overall, exploitative of incarcerated people?”
