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An Open Letter to aventiv/Securus: Securus Debit Accounts

In Florida's state-run prisons, residents can deposit funds from their Inmate Trust Accounts into their Securus accounts directly from their tablets, or ask their loved ones on the outside to deposit funds into their Securus accounts. This enables easy access to media options in the Securus Media Store (music, movies, games, and television shows), the ability to purchase digital stamps for eMessages, pay for subscriptions to the Newsstand, as well as allows us to purchase earbuds or headphones directly through the Accessories app on our tablets. This adds value and utility to the hardware we are issued here in the Florida Department of Corrections.

Up here in the Panhandle at a private prison camp in Region 1 that's operated at this time by the (mis)Management and Training Corporation, however, our one and only way of putting funds onto our tablets for the abovementioned uses is through our canteen services operator, Keefe Commissary Network. We must go to the canteen window, if we are allowed to do so, to do an in-person transaction that then can take from three days to over a month for the funds to move through a limbo state: the funds leave our commissary accounts immediately, and will eventually arrive on our tablets through some roundabout process.

Imagine for a moment, however, when your canteen operator chooses to not process or sell orders of "tablet time" as it is called here.

This causes a multitude of problems.

  • We are unable to purchase digital stamps on our own if we do not already have funds on our media debit accounts. For people who communicate primarily via eMessages or use VideoGrams on the kiosk, this has potentially devastating consequences if they have run out of stamps.

  • We cannot rent movies. I can't walk into a nearby Regal Cinema; I'm nowhere near Broadway Metro. My 7" tablet screen is the biggest display I will get to watch Zootopia and Zootopia 2 on unless things change about my sentence structure. If I cannot put funds on my account, and no-one else can, then I'll have to wait to see those.

  • We cannot buy music. Granted, there's a general lack of what I would enjoy listening to (not enough ODESZA, London Elektricity, Polaris, Keeno, Ocean Shiver, or Mitch Murder, just to start), but I am just one of eighteen hundred people affected when our canteen operator chooses not to allow sales of tablet time.

  • We cannot buy games. I know I've shot up the games collection a number of times, but at the same time, the games give us something to do on the tablets when the wireless is so abysmal as to balk us at movies or TV show rentals. Buying that goes out the window when tablet time isn't available at ours.

This, unfortunately, will drive a wedge between aventiv/Securus and its captive customer base, and for once, this wedge isn't of their own making. It's caused by Keefe and its canteen manager telling the operators that they can no longer sell the body incarcerated tablet time because the manager is spitting the dummy over something.

What can be done?

Simple!

Like our fellows in state facilities, we should have an option that allows our people outside to directly place funds into our Securus accounts. This would open up easier opportunities for us inside to do something as simple as send a message to our people, "Could we come up with $20? I'd like to sub to the news this month, buy a game and a couple songs, please." and that could be made far easier to act on.
It would also add some peace of mind to some family members, who are concerned that their loved ones are addicted to bug spray and cooling crystals: funds that go into a Securus account can only be used in the Securus account; it's harder to divert elsewhere.

This is a solution that needs to be looked into sooner, not later, as we're already at a standstill on tablet time purchases. I calculate it as a potential of about $8,000 in sales lost in the last seven days alone... now multiply by 4.3 and cringe at the average monthly loss if this lack of sales keeps up.

Thank you for your consideration and time.

Carefully submitted,

Someone who uses your platform.