Firm to feature large presence the 141^st Congress of Correction in Kissimmee, FL

From August 5^th to August 10^th, 2011, JPay will be attending the 141^st Congress of Correction in Kissimmee, FL, hosted by the American Correctional Association.  The semi-annual ACA conference is one of the largest and most influential gatherings in the corrections industry.  This summer’s event is taking place at the Gaylord Palms Resort and Convention Center.

The conference features several workshops as well as an industry-wide exhibition and distinguished keynote speakers.  Attendees include officials from Departments of Correction from states across the nation, as well as service providers and producers that cater to the corrections industry.

JPay will be featuring its new consumer-facing website, JPay.com, in addition to several of its most popular inmate products and services, including the JP3 music player and JPay’s money transfer service.

JPay provides corrections services to many of the agencies that will be in attendance next week.  Moreover, JPay’s progressive approach to inmate and offender services will be well-represented at a conference that features such workshops as:  “Invest Now or Pay Later, Partnerships to Make Reentry Efforts Work,” and “Alternatives to Re-incarceration for Technical Parole Violators.”

The American Correctional Association is the oldest and largest international correctional association in the world, serving all disciplines within the corrections profession.  The association offers professional development and certification services, as well as standards, accreditation, networking and consulting opportunities, research and publications, conferences, exhibitions, and technology and testing for corrections agencies.  The ACA, which calls itself the “world-wide authority” in corrections, is widely considered the primary professional association in the corrections industry.

JPay, of course, is the national leader in inmate and offender services, delivering innovative and technologically advanced products and services to agencies in more than 30 states and serving more than 1.3 million inmates and offenders.

To learn more about the ACA, visit https://www.aca.org/.  To learn more about JPay, visit http://www.jpay.com/ .

Corrections officers aren’t the swearing, callous, violent thugs that television and movies make them out to be. The vast majority of prison guards and correctional officers would never dream of abusing an inmate, and those who do are themselves criminal. There is no excuse for abuse of power or authority in any situation, but especially in the penitentiary system, and those who do commit such crimes are held accountable for their actions.
Guards are trained to treat inmates with respect, even in the face of obscenity, threats, or actual violence. The danger they face every day at work is very real, and they certainly rise to the occasion without losing their essential humanity. Most prison guards are empathetic, and regard the prisoners as people, not just chattel, or a part of the job. The goal is for corrections officers to treat the inmates how they would wish to be treated should they be incarcerated, and to entirely believe in the rehabilitation system.
Many corrections officers are also trained in how to deal with inmates with mental illnesses, who are caught up in the system but unable to wholly function within it.  They treat such prisoners with the dignity that should be afforded to any human being, regardless of any other factors, instead of judging them and meting out any sort of punishment.
Corrections officers are constantly instructed to perform their duties in at the highest level of professionalism. If they are unable to conduct themselves thusly, they are asked to find employment elsewhere. Unfortunately, the position sometimes tends to self-select towards employees who enjoy exercising power, and it is a huge part of the penitentiary system to train the officers to wield their authority appropriately. On the whole, these efforts are successful, and it is only the stories of a few bad apples that represent corrections officer’s current reputation in the media.

Which is why Senator Webb’s efforts on this issue are so unique.  And now, his “pet issue” (albeit likely an issue of personal principle) is picking up steam in the Senate, as his Republican colleague, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania has now joined Webb in so-sponsoring a law that would create a blue-ribbon panel that would undertake an year and a half analysis and subsequently make reform recommendations.

Webb has referred to parts of our criminal justice system as a “national disgrace” and has noted that the U.S has 5% of the global population but 25% of its prisoners.  He has also noted the rapidly rising number of drug offenders that are serving time, and he charged that four times as many mentally ill people are in prison than are in mental health institutions.

The eleven person commission whose chairperson would be appointed by the president, would try to improve American responses to gang violence, improve treatment for mental illnesses, change the standards for drug criminalization, improve prison administrative processes and create a system to reintegrate inmates back into society.  The panel would compose of experts from the criminal justice field, public health, law enforcement, prison management, social services, national security, inmate reentry into mainstream society and victims’ rights.

Currently there are approximately 5 million people on parole or probation. Senator Webb, is convinced that the U.S. has far too many inmates who ought not be incarcerated.

The data that back his assertion are as follows…

Greater than 1% of American adults are incarcerated, including about one out of nine African American men, according to the non-partisan Pew Research Center. In contrast, China, who has a population of over one billion, was second in the world with one and a half million prisoners, and Russia was third with 890,000 incarcerated. The U.S. incarceration rate is even greater than Iran’s.

On the other end of the spectrum, only 93 out of 100,000 people in Germany are incarcerated, which is approximately eight time fewer than the American rate of 750 out of 100,000 people. And as far as minorities go, one in 106 white males are in prison, one in 36 Latinos and one in 15 African-Americans men are serving time, according to Justice Department data.  Perhaps the most disturbing stat has to do with black men between twenty and thirty-four, of whom one in nine are incarcerated.

It will at the very least be very interesting to see what the panel comes up with.

Technology Overview

The term technology today is so widely accepted that we actually have divisions intended to separate one form from another. We have high tech, low tech, green technology, brown technology, space technology, hypertechnology, nanotechnology and finally, we even have the term “tech factor” to describe the level of technology. In the tech factor scale you would probably find email at the lowest level.

Let’s be real here, even our parents have been emailing family and friends for years. However, the very minute you start to talk about email for inmates the faces in the room turn sour and the mood turns to panic. Just for clarification sake, I don’t like the term email in every application of electronic mail in regards to inmates. The only true email application here is using kiosks for the delivery of this technology to inmates. The most widely used application today is the print and scan method; the planned application for both the North Dakota State Penitentiary and the James River Correctional Center. This application does not allow an inmate access to a key board, computer screen or send or receive anything electronically. In this process the inmate receives the mail on printed paper and sends a response in handwritten form on paper provided by the vendor and scanned by staff. We do plan to use kiosks at the Missouri River Correctional Center as our pilot project to learn more about kiosks and their place in our corrections environment.

Background and Security

How I got to the point of being an advocate of electronic mail for inmates has everything to do with my history and experience with mail in the maximum-security setting. For the past seven years as Deputy Warden of Operations there was very little left to the imagination in regards to my experience screening mail. My office shares a wall with the facilities mail room and all the screening takes place adjacent to me in the next office shared by two administrative services staff. Even though my duties as administrative oversight of this process pales in comparison to the volume of mail screened by these two administrative services staff, it would still take me hours to list all the examples I could recall of how contaminated the mail is entering correctional facilities today. The list would include narcotic infused pages and cards, pages stained with body fluids and perfumes, powders, herbs, minerals, oils and other items poured into envelopes and many other items; half of which I could not remember if I tried. It would be virtually impossible to begin to identify the vast majority of unknown substances sent through the mail so looking for a totally sanitary and safe alternative is exactly what brought us to this technology. This was by no means an accident.

There is an old saying in this business; “always resolve all issues in your favor.” I am very fortunate to serve on one National Institute of Justice (NIJ) sponsored advisory board (RULETC) and one NIJ sponsored Technology Working Group and I have a vast network of the best technological minds in the corrections profession today just an email away. The general consensus with most of these technology specialists in regards to solving most of the mail issues in corrections today is the electronic mail systems for inmates if applied properly. It is in our best interest to explore our options to clean up the mail screening process and provide safer and more secure methods for both staff and inmates. There are a handful of states currently using an inmate electronic mail service provider and equally as many other states in the implementation process at this time. One of the largest correctional systems in the US, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, is currently piloting the electronic mail delivery technology in 20 of their facilities. They are interested in this technology for all the same reasons and the goals are to cut down on the amount of paper mail and the associated contraband that flows through their prisons (LRP Publications 2008). It is obvious this is a shared problem in the state prison systems, as well as the federal system.

Cost and How it Works

I have addressed some of what we have to gain with this new technology in our prisons but is there a gain for the inmates and their families? The fact is the inmates and their families and friends have the most to gain. Inmate families and friends often bear most of the cost and burden of communication with the offenders in the prison system. In many cases family and friends send money to offenders for phone calls, they always drive or travel to the facilities for visits (many times hundreds of miles) and they pay a minimum of 42 cents to send in a letter through the mail. With the new electronic mail service families and friends can purchase 10 stamps for $3.50 (.35 per stamp), 20 stamps for $6.00 (.30 cents per stamp) or 40 stamps for $10.00 (.25 cents per stamp). The family or friend will also have a much greater chance the offender will respond back in a two-way transaction because the return sheet is pre programmed to go back to the person sending the mail. They don’t have this level of confidence if they send the offender money with hope that the offender purchases US Postage and eventually writes a letter. That money often is spent on other items in the commissary. As you can see, in a two-way transaction using stamps purchased for the $10 amount through electronic mail the family can save 34 cents. When you look at the volume of mail some family members send these offenders there would be a huge savings over a year.

Creating an Account and Features The process for family and friends to sign up for this service is simple. However, a home or work computer would provide the most convenience but a public access computer such as a public library computer would work as well. They simply go to www.jpay.com and follow the instructions for email for offenders. A family member or friend must set up an account in any event and, in the application of kiosk delivery, an inmate is still restricted because the kiosk will not give them access to the Internet. Once an account is set up the inmate is simply in a reactive role allowing them to respond either by handwritten and scanning method or responding to an email after receiving a letter on the kiosk. An offender using a kiosk can initiate a letter to a family or friend if the account they use has ample funds and the only person they can write to is the person holding the account with the service provider. This prevents inmates from using the electronic mail service with anyone other than the person holding the account. The same control exists with electronic letters delivered through the print and scan method, as the offender receives a blank page along with their printed hardcopy letter with a barcode at the top of the page. The barcode routes the handwritten response upon scanning back to the person holding the account through the service provider. Pictures can be sent for the cost of a stamp per each picture. This is where the home or work computer works best because the family or friend can send pictures from their personal files.

Conclusion

The electronic mail system for offenders is a secure system with clear benefits for both the offender and the correctional agency. There are numerous security tools built into the program for the correctional staff. The goal with this technology is to increase the communication and frequency of contacts between the offender, family and friends by reducing the cost of mail, while providing increased security and safety to the facility staff. This is clearly a win-win solution to an age-old problem that has frustrated correctional mail room staff for years. My prediction is electronic mail will have the same impact on corrections as it has on society in general and stamps will eventually become a thing of the past. Go to www.jpay.com and follow the instructions for email for offenders.