Inside the virtual tollbooth at many U.S. prisons
Sending money to someone behind bars used to go something like this: you'd go the post office, buy a money order for about $1.25 and then mail that to the prison or jail. All told, it would cost you no more than $2 — that was before JPay came on the scene.
Over the past 12 years, JPay has taken advantage of the Internet to revolutionize money transfers in the prison system. Seventy percent of all prisons in the U.S. offer JPay services, and for 450,000 inmates, JPay is the only way a loved one can send money. That kind of market share came, at least in part, from a profit-sharing arrangement JPay struck with prison systems. But the result for the families trying to send money is a complex, and expensive, layering of fees.
We had a few questions for Dan Wagner and Eleanor Bell about their six-month investigation into JPay and the other companies making a buck off prisoners' families.
How did you first hear about this story?
Related: Prison bankers cash in on captive customers
Dan Wagner: In 2012, when I was a reporter for The AP, I was looking into different ways that governments use prepaid debit cards to deliver benefits and other funds, and how this practice can result in shifting costs onto poor people. I came across a website for a now-defunct company that was using debit cards in local jails and decided to start digging. A month later, I had learned that JPay was far and away the biggest player in this field. I got Ryan Shapiro on the phone.
The first thing he asked me was, “How did you get my number?”
I replied, “I’m a reporter. It’s my job.”
He kept talking to me over the past two years, more than a dozen conversations. In that time, I began talking to family members of inmates and learning about the incredible array of costs they face — and how the money they receive in prisons is a necessity, not a luxury.
Related: Time is money: who's making a buck off prisoners' families?
These items you talk about inmates needing, toiletries, winter clothes, have these always been things prisoners need to purchase at commissary?
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Copyright 2014 The Center for Public Integrity. This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.
