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FEATURE
San Francisco Public Library and hoopla Bring Free E-Resources to County Jails
by Rachel Kinnon
| This is a groundbreaking project, and we want it to be the first of many examples of free library resources being made available to incarcerated patrons. |
In the past decade, tablets have become increasingly common inside carceral facilities. They can be used for communication with families, ordering commissary, documenting a grievance, playing games, reading ebooks, and a variety of other activities that are generally welcomed by incarcerated people. However, technology always brings new challenges to bear as well. With the use of electronic devices comes the opportunity for the facility to conduct additional surveillance on incarcerated people and their communications, their reading, and any other tasks they undertake on the tablet. Another concern with the integration of tablets is that they can be seen by facility administration as a replacement for snail mail, print books, or in-person visits. Complaints about the tablets’ poor functionality are common, as are stories of poor customer service to deal with those complaints.
Another major issue with the use of tablets inside is that they are a money-making venture for carceral facilities and for the companies that provide the tablets. The graphic in Figure 1, from the Prison Policy Initiative, gives a sense of how expensive basic features can be; keep in mind, incarcerated people who have jobs typically make only a few cents for each hour they work. Emails that cost 35 cents for an e-stamp quickly become either unaffordable or a massive strain on the incarcerated person or on their loved ones on the outside who may be paying the bill. Even simply adding money to a person’s commissary account—so that they can purchase toiletries or food items, listen to music, or send emails—often carries a fee of several dollars. In some carceral systems, the tablet content is free, but the tablet itself has a price. In those cases, people “buy” their tablet at a considerable price and then find that the bare-bones, stripped-down tablet is not particularly useful if that person is later released. When ebooks are available on prison tablets, they are often expensive. Free books available on these tablets may be books in the public domain, which usually means their author died prior to 1954. Issues with tablets inside can be well summed up by an incarcerated person quoted in the Slate article “The Robber Barons of Prison Tech” (
slate.com/technology/2023/12/prison-telecom-gtl-viapath-jpay-securus-private-equity.html): “There is nothing good about this tablet other than the fact that we actually have one.”
The Corporate Landscape
One reason that costs have run rampant over the years is that there has not been competition among different tablet vendor companies. That is, there once were a number of companies in the carceral technology field, but as shown in Figure 2, they have almost all been purchased and merged into the two big powerhouses: Aventiv and ViaPath. ViaPath is the newest name for GTL, one of the two major companies in the industry. Securus, the other dominant company, is now referred to as Aventiv (the name of its parent company), in what critics claim is a way to disassociate from Securus’ negative public image.
Looking over at the right-hand side of the chart in Figure 2, you can see that these companies each are worth $1–$1.5 billion. They are lucrative, and they are making money from the fees incarcerated people and their loved ones pay to use tablets inside jails and prisons. The tablet vendors often are contracted to provide multiple services: phone calls, video visits, ebooks, games, commissary ordering, etc. If a carceral facility wants to do something creative—such as provide access to library materials for free—the tablet company can make that difficult. It is its tablet and its software, and it controls what’s on the device. A facility may be unable to open a new contract with a tablet vendor because it is contractually obligated to its original vendor for all of these other vital services, such as phone calls. This packaging of multiple services through one vendor is challenging for those of us who want to expand the offerings on tablets, but it is not insurmountable.
San Francisco contracts with a company called Nucleos, and the tablets in San Francisco are free to users, as is all the content on the tablets. We are aware of another vendor, Orijin (previously named American Prison Data Systems; APDS), which is currently working with a local public library to make hoopla available on its tablets inside. Now, we don’t want you to think that if your local facility has a contract with Securus or GTL that you’re doomed and you won’t ever launch library resources on the tablets. We do know of one instance—in Dauphin County, Pa.—in which GTL/ViaPath has supported access to OverDrive. Precedent has been set with ViaPath, although it’s a different model than what the San Francisco Public Library has developed with hoopla. As of this writing, we don’t know of any cases in which Securus has done so, but we hope that will change soon.
How Do Carceral Tablets Work?
Tablets in jails/prisons do not access the general internet, and there are a few ways that content is filtered. In our case, approved websites are whitelisted by Nucleos, and any URL that is not whitelisted is blocked. Figure 3 provides a look at hoopla usage on jail tablets. (The outer circle in the graph refers to the top three items listed in the key on the right, and the inner circle breaks them down into specific formats as items four through nine. The general term “video” includes both TV and movies.) As you can see, music, at 45%, is the most popular format incarcerated patrons are borrowing. They’re also watching TV shows and movies, and on a smaller scale, reading ebooks and listening to audiobooks. The San Francisco Public Library (SFPL) provides robust library service inside the jails, so patrons have better than average access to physical books. It’s likely that in other facilities that don’t have well-funded physical book collections, ebooks and audiobooks would be more widely borrowed. We realized early on that in order to adhere to the jails’ content restrictions—which are typical of jails and prisons—we could not make all of hoopla available inside the jails. We worked with hoopla to set up systems by which my team of librarians select books and audiobooks for the jails’ smaller hoopla collection. We used ratings restrictions to automatically block movies and TV shows that might conflict with the jails’ rules. SFPL pays for its hoopla usage, just as it does for all patrons’ usage. Currently, each patron can borrow 20 items per month.
One of our early conundrums was figuring out the best way to authenticate our incarcerated patrons. Physical library cards would not be permitted inside the jails and would be hard to keep on hand. Working with hoopla and Nucleos, we successfully implemented IP authentication. Using the jails’ IP addresses to validate that patrons should be granted access to the smaller, curated hoopla account ensures that our patrons have access to this particular hoopla collection and that they are not required to memorize yet another ID number and password in order to use hoopla.
What else is on these Nucleos tablets inside the San Francisco jails? The content is similar to what is on the tablets provided inside by any of the companies we know of. In San Francisco, the entire project was spearheaded by a city program called the Financial Justice Project; content was chosen and continues to be added based on recommendations by the sheriff’s office, the Financial Justice Project, a network of local grassroots groups called the Jail Justice Coalition, and the public library. The tablets offer jail services such as commissary ordering and filing grievances, as well as
LexisNexis, online courses that can help earn some time off of one’s sentence, and Pluto TV. We have visions of various other library resources being on the tablets too, including prerecorded library programs, other apps that provide
ebooks and digital media, and perhaps digital literacy classes. Again, the tablets are free to users, and almost everybody who is incarcerated in the San Francisco jails can use them. The city of San Francisco purchased them and funded the rewiring of the jails so that the necessary infrastructure was in place. The library covers the costs of hoopla borrows.
Expanding Access
This is a groundbreaking project, and we want it to be the first of many examples of free library resources being made available to incarcerated patrons. As the Slate quote on page 25 so eloquently explains, advocacy from people inside as well as on the outside is an effective way to create change in carceral conditions. In various places and with varying success, advocacy and activism have been used to challenge censorship inside, to decrease uses of solitary confinement, and to bring down the exploitative, high pricing of services such as phone calls.
My hope is that Securus will follow the lead of Nucleos, Orijin, and even ViaPath to partner with libraries so that library e-resources are available to incarcerated people for free. Persistence is the only thing that will allow us to make our amazing resources available to incarcerated people, who truly need them. The advocacy that has been so successful on specific topics (such as bringing down high prices) has also forced these companies to soften their image and adapt some language of rehabilitation and even, sometimes, restorative justice. With the recent reinstatement of Federal Pell Grants to incarcerated students, educational programs are increasingly accessible on tablets, and library resources can be appealing to administrators and politicians in much the same way.
We recognize that providing library resources on tablets is not the next, first, or best step for all libraries working with jails and prisons. But libraries can be a presence inside carceral facilities in many ways other than tablets, and library staff already work every day to support people who have returned to the community after incarceration. Carceral facilities are in every community, and incarcerated people are cut off from information even in facilities with libraries, even in facilities where there are educational programs, even when family and friends visit regularly—and those circumstances are not true for most incarcerated people. My department at SFPL has received generous funding from the Mellon Foundation to increase information access for people inside. Part of our work is to develop stronger networks of librarians doing this work or who are interested in providing services to incarcerated people. We have created virtual drop-in meetings that take place every other month, a series of online trainings that each cover a particular aspect of providing services to incarcerated people, and a regular newsletter of our grant activities and related news. We would love to share our resources and connections with any of you who are interested and to support you in developing programs like these or any other programs for people inside or who are in re-entry.
For additional information, visit PEN America’s webpage for 2024 Prison Banned Books Week (Sept. 15–21), which focused on tablets in prisons and called on tablet companies to make public library resources available, for free, on prison tablets (prisonbannedbooksweek.org).
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