States that allow tablets in their facilities also benefit from significant kickbacks from these telecommunications companies in the form of revenue and profit sharing and incentives. For example, the Colorado Department of Corrections, which sells its tablets through GTL and provides them free to incarcerated people, receives a flat annual payment of $800,000. Other states, such as Missouri, receive a portion (in Missouri’s case, 20 percent) of revenue from purchases of entertainment downloads such as music, movies and games.
High fees for downloading content combined with waiting time often result in inmates incurring a large bill at the end of the month. And since prison workers are paid an average minimum wage of 86 cents per day to work inside the prison, the burden of footing the bill for these downloads often falls on outside families.
Still, a tablet can be a real — if expensive — lifeline for the families of people incarcerated in federal prisons and would be well worth the costs involved. Bowman told us: “It would mean everything if they could communicate through the tablets. That way, if we didn’t hear from them over the phone, we would at least get an email letting us know they were OK and not to worry.”
So when federal inmates and their families saw state prisons handing out tablets, they hoped the same technology would soon reach them, too. And it did – with one caveat.
A Bureau of Prisons spokesperson reportedly issued a statement in October 2022 confirming that the company was “in the process of introducing the Keefe Score 7c tablet into federal institutions and selling it through the commissioners at a price of $118 to offer for sale”. Originally, the office said, the tablets could only be used to download music and rent movies under a pay-per-download model. However, Keefe said on his website that buyers can use the tablet to communicate “with loved ones via paid text, photo and video gram messages.”
Still, we contacted nearly 30 federal prisons in our reporting and found not a single facility that enabled messaging or phone calls on the Keefe Score 7c tablets. We also spoke to more than a hundred incarcerated people and their families and were unable to find a single incarcerated person who was able to use the phone calling, video chat, or messaging features on their Keefe SCORE 7c tablets.
Several detainees told WIRED they would not have purchased the Keefe SCORE 7c tablet if they had known the messaging features would be disabled. “They don’t do anything they say on the tablets,” said Fro Jizzle, who was released from a federal facility in January. “I would never have bought one if they said I couldn’t send messages or video chat. All we could do was buy music and games and rent movies.”
It’s understandable that these captive consumers would be confused, especially considering that Keefe states in its own advertising on its website that the tablets offer text, photo and videogram capabilities. In his marketing pitch to corrections departments on his website, Keefe writes, “Your facility will benefit from a calmer, better-behaved offender population and a safer correctional environment.”