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Surveillance of Communication with Incarcerated People

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Surveillance of Communication with Incarcerated People “You Gota Watch What You Say”: Surveillance of Communication with Incarcerated People Kentrell Owens∗ Camille Cobb Lorrie Faith Cranor [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA, U.S.A. Pittsburgh, PA, U.S.A. Pittsburgh, PA, U.S.A. ABSTRACT 1 INTRODUCTION Surveillance of communication between incarcerated and non- The United States (U.S.) has the highest incarceration rate and incarcerated people has steadily increased, enabled partly by techno- the largest population of incarcerated people1 in the world [107]. logical advancements. Third-party vendors control communication Nearly half (45 percent) of adults in the U.S. (113 million people tools for most U.S. prisons and jails and ofer surveillance capabili- nationwide) have an immediate family member who has spent at ties beyond what individual facilities could realistically implement. least one night in jail or prison [28]. About 1 in 7 adults has a close Frequent communication with family improves mental health and family member — defned as a parent, child, sibling, partner or a post-carceral outcomes for incarcerated people, but does discom- spouse — who was imprisoned for at least one year [28]. fort about surveillance afect how their relatives communicate with Incarcerated people in the United States are under near-constant them? To explore this and the understanding, attitudes, and reac- surveillance, particularly when communicating with people who tions to surveillance, we conducted 16 semi-structured interviews are not incarcerated. Attorney-client communication is privileged with participants who have incarcerated relatives. Among other and has some legal protections from surveillance [2], but other fndings, we learn that participants communicate despite privacy communication does not. Communication to and from incarcerated concerns that they felt helpless to address. We also observe inac- people is scanned, indexed, and screened by prison ofcials or third- curacies in participants’ beliefs about surveillance practices. We party contractors (prison communication companies) who provide discuss implications of inaccurate understandings of surveillance, communication services [19, 42, 90]. Although individual facilities misaligned incentives between end-users and vendors, how our may not be equipped to leverage cutting-edge advancements in fndings enhance ongoing conversations about carceral justice, and computing, the increasing prevalence of prison communication recommendations for more privacy-sensitive communication tools. companies has created an economy of scale for surveillance [7]. Re- cently, prison communication companies have integrated artifcial CCS CONCEPTS intelligence into their systems to automate analysis of commu- nication data, creating a detailed level of surveillance that was • Security and privacy ! Usability in security and privacy; previously impractical [14, 30]. Social aspects of security and privacy. Advocates of prison communication monitoring argue that these forms of surveillance are necessary to combat future criminal ac- KEYWORDS tivity and keep incarcerated people safe [30, 87, 89]; however, this surveillance, privacy, prison, communication, ICT surveillance has been shown to limit incarcerated people’s will- ingness to report misconduct by prison staf [78]. For example, in ACM Reference Format: January 2020 an incarcerated man was placed in solitary confne- Kentrell Owens, Camille Cobb, and Lorrie Faith Cranor. 2021. “You Gotta ment for two weeks after he wrote a letter to the state governor Watch What You Say”: Surveillance of Communication with Incarcerated through the prison’s email system complaining about conditions People. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems(CHI in the prison [27]. Furthermore, since 74% of people held by jails ’21), May 8–13, 2021, Yokohama,Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 18 pages. have not been convicted of a crime and may be incarcerated only https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445055 because they cannot aford bail [83], some legal scholars argue that they should not be subjected to the same level of surveillance as convicted individuals [87]. ∗Currently at the University of Washington. This research was conducted while the Because of inequities in the U.S. criminal legal system, prison frst author was a student at Carnegie Mellon University. communication surveillance disproportionately impacts people of color and their family members who communicate with them [83]. For example, Pennsylvania (PA) has a higher incarceration rate than Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or the national average, and Black Americans comprise 46% of the classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed incarcerated population but only 11% of the state population [40]. for proft or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the frst page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). CHI ’21, May 8–13, 2021, Yokohama, Japan © 2021 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-8096-6/21/05. 1The U.S. incarcerates 698 people per 100,000 and has approximately 2.3 million https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445055 incarcerated people. The next highest country is China, with approximately 1.6 million. CHI ’21, May 8–13, 2021, Yokohama, Japan Owens et al. Family members of incarcerated people (FMIP) face surveillance but surveillance of incarcerated people extends to many other as- mechanisms similar to their incarcerated relatives when commu- pects of incarcerated peoples’ experiences. This section presents nicating with them. FMIP have to make a decision: consent to background information about surveillance practices for common surveillance and stay in touch with loved-ones, or do not commu- prison communication methods and discusses relevant prior work. nicate with them at all. This choice is not only unfair and poten- tially harmful to non-incarcerated individuals (e.g., due to chilling 2.1 Prison communication landscape efects [51, 69]), but it may also have negative societal impacts. Re- Non-incarcerated people can keep in touch with incarcerated in- search has shown that recidivism is reduced when people in prison dividuals via phone calls, electronic messaging, video visitation, communicate frequently with their relatives [ 67]; thus, policies that in-person visitation, or physical letters. Not all facilities ofer all fve encourage rather than discourage communication with incarcerated choices, and the fnancial cost of each option may limit a person’s people have the potential to help reduce recidivism. ability to choose their preferred communication method. Although In this paper, we present the results of semi-structured interviews there are also well-documented instances of private communica- with adults in the Pittsburgh area (N = 16) with relatives currently tion devices such as mobile phones being used by incarcerated incarcerated in county and state prisons/jails in PA. Our study was people [38, 77], these are outside of the scope of our study. designed to answer the following research questions: The prison communication market in the US is loosely regulated • In what ways do FMIP’s mental models (or expectations) of and has seen signifcant consolidation in the past 30 years [106]. surveillance align (or not) with actual surveillance practices Together, two private companies — Global Tel Link Technologies of prisons or prison communication companies? (GTL) and Securus Technologies (Securus) — control about 83% • What privacy concerns and preferences do FMIP have when of the prison phone market [10]. These companies are largely re- they use prison communication services? sponsible for the introduction of new forms of communication and • How do FMIP cope with having limited privacy? What con- have also leveraged advancements in computation to implement cessions do they make? What mitigation strategies do they more sophisticated surveillance capabilities, such as automated use to protect their personal information? analysis of communication data. For example, electronic forms of We report participants’ awareness of diferent surveillance mecha- communication (i.e., electronic messaging and video visitation) nisms, their attitudes about surveillance, and their privacy-preserving were introduced to many facilities in the 2010s with the promise strategies. We also present recommendations that we solicited from of more convenient communication for FMIP [73]. The scope and participants and add our own recommendations to policy makers scale of these contracts increase prisons’ dependence on the service and prison communication companies to improve the privacy of provider and enable consolidation of data from diferent communi- FMIP’s communication with their incarcerated relatives. cation methods. GTL touts a tool it ofers that “enables investigators Participants anticipated that surveillance would occur when they to consolidate data from multiple sources, including inmate tele- communicated with their incarcerated relatives, but their under- phone calls, jail management system data, fnancial transactions standing of more technologically-advanced surveillance mecha- and payment deposits, and video visitation sessions” [95]. nisms was limited. They believed that there were legal, practical, GTL and Securus
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