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First I'd like to thank you for the comment. You made me realize a mistake I made in mentioning JPay and Securus when I meant to say Global Tel Link and Securus

First I'd like to thank you for the comment. You made me realize a mistake I made in mentioning JPay and Securus when I meant to say Global Tel Link and Securus. As far as pushback from other companies, we haven't received any so far. There's nothing they can really do besides make their services more appealing. Currently, with Letters (our first app), it allows users to sign up, add their contacts (inmates), and then type out a letter and also are given the option to attach an image. Then we use a third party service, Lob, to print off the letter and send it. Given that we're just working with physical mail, there's absolutely nothing they can do to stop us. One type of pushback we can receive is from facilities themselves. One facility returned one of our letters and said that you can't have anything in the letter that could be some form of encrypted message or symbol. In our case, that happened to be the bar code used by the third party service to manage their letters. In the future, we'd like to also offer services like free video chat/messaging. In my opinion, we're not far from being able to offer those kinds of services. I can definitely imagine some sort of pushback happening in that space, but what kind specifically is TBD. I'm excited though, because if we can get to that point, we'll be literally transforming the system.

grahamburger 6y ago
Honest question, because I have no idea how this all works: if people can just send letters for the cost of a stamp then why do they use Global Tel Link or Securus? Really great thing you're doing here, I hope it all works out.
- jessehorne 6y ago
  The benefits of using those services are that communication is much faster when you can just write up a message on your phone or computer and click "send". If you can afford it, it's the preferred way to go. It's better than having to wait for days upon days, and even weeks for your letter to arrive. Even though from what I've heard, a letter is much more personal and very much appreciated.
- tyingq 6y ago
  They use jPay and similar because it's faster. Typically in the incarcerated person's hand in a day or two. USPS takes longer, then the prison contraband checking process, etc.
  - bdcravens 6y ago
    I believe jPay letters are printed out at the facilities and then distributed
    - tyingq 6y ago
      Yes, that's correct.
- gavinray 6y ago
  If you think the letter prices are bad, try: - $3.15/15 mins for a domestic phone call - $15/20 mins video call/teleconference if your jail/prison has them and you/someone else are willing to fork out that much (You may be there a while and so have to stretch whatever money you have left as far as possible) - I don't even want to know how much for an international call - $1 for a single pack of ramen - $5 for a 5oz bag of freeze-dried coffee And even if you have the money, you'd better hope someone picks up when you get your phonecall and/or that you know people's addresses or phone-numbers offhand. US Justice system is a nightmare. Gotta love JPay, Bob Barker, and Aramark.
  - syshum 6y ago
    >US Justice system is a nightmare. I would stop calling it a justice system, we have a legal system for which any "justice" is by pure coincidence
- garrettgrimsley 6y ago
  Not OP, but I spent 11 months technically in US Federal custody, but in practice I was incarcerated in various county jails [0] that they contract with. I have experience with PayTel and Securus. At the facilities I housed in the digital > printed letter systems were not offered [1], everything was through USPS or your standard parcel carriers for packages. Books from outside were allowed. Global Tel Link, Securus, and PayTel have a very literal captive customer base when it comes to phone communications. While almost everyone wrote letters, a phone call is a much different form of communication. You can actually have a live conversation with a loved one! You can hear their voice, and respond in real time. For this reason, we paid the price demanded by the companies. In my state of North Carolina, the maximum price of a local call through PayTel was $.40/minute. The long-distance rates were cheaper, and so people would get Google voice numbers to get the cheaper rate. [0] Wake County Detention Center, Edgecombe County Jail, and Albemarle District Jail. [1] I could absolutely see these systems being utilized. They could take the roundtrip latency of text-based communication down to a day if the facility had a kiosk from which we could send replies. I was told by people on the yard that this is how CorrLinks works.
hackermailman 6y ago
You have to give wardens/politicians money to put any kind of technology in their prisons, so free video chat/messaging isn't going to happen unless some benevolent billionaire prince is funding you. However you could do some kind of distance education via letters, remember math can be learned with just pen and paper and not the kind of shit we learn in highschool but the Terrence Tao Analysis from scratch kind. There's an old book called the Schemer's Guide by Iain Ferguson (spelling?) which is programming with pen and paper. Many opportunities here besides just communications, just an idea, I have no clue how it would work in practice. Another idea is create social media or pen pal profiles for prisoners where they fill out a template and you just launch it for them, so they can find other people to talk to, many people inside have nobody on the outside, this is why facebook groups like Jail Mail exists and the like. Of course legal problems here, if some maniac uses your service who should be in jail. Wikipedia search is also something I've always thought should exist via snail mail. 'What is <subject>' should return the entire wikipedia page or other encyclopedia page for convicts. A marketplace for anonymous convicts would also be interesting that nobody has done, many of these guys/girls are experts in fitness since there's nothing else to do inside, they should be able to make some kind of money (again, depending on societal heinousness of crime) by being a motivational coach or something. I have plenty of other ideas, many of them require money/political connections which I don't have but just things I observed while in lockup wondering why are these petty criminals just rotting away in here when there's so much opportunity not just for them, but people they can personally effect to make amends for whatever they have done. I even met a few hundred song writers inside that wanted to be 'producers' and sell their rhythms or lyrics with no way to do this. Anyway good luck
- HideousKojima 6y ago
  >You have to give wardens/politicians money to put any kind of technology in their prisons, so free video chat/messaging isn't going to happen unless some benevolent billionaire prince is funding you. Having done a decent amount of IT work at prisons, this isn't really the case. What I did often see, however, is that various vendors would give a very long free trial and free hardware to the prisons I worked with, with the basic idea being to lock them in when the obscenely high normal rates kick in after the free year or however long the trial was
FpUser 6y ago
"One type of pushback we can receive is from facilities themselves. One facility returned one of our letters and said that you can't have anything in the letter that could be some form of encrypted message or symbol. In our case, that happened to be the bar code used by the third party service to manage their letters." Here is example of bad scenario which I sincerely hope will never happen. Anything containing image (letter itself included) can be considered as encrypted due to a tech like steganography. They can get really creative there.
- zrm 6y ago
  You can do the same thing with text as well, or any message that contains any entropy whatsoever. There isn't one type of message where this is possible and another where it isn't. If you allow two parties to communicate at all, they could really be communicating about anything.
- syshum 6y ago
  The steganography your talking about really only works in digital formats, not printed in this case "code messages" can be just as easily hidden in the text of the letter (in fact probably easier) then in the printed out image
  - FpUser 6y ago
    You are wrong. There is a printable steganography along with the pure digital.

grahamburger 6y ago

Honest question, because I have no idea how this all works: if people can just send letters for the cost of a stamp then why do they use Global Tel Link or Securus? Really great thing you're doing here, I hope it all works out.

jessehorne 6y ago
The benefits of using those services are that communication is much faster when you can just write up a message on your phone or computer and click "send". If you can afford it, it's the preferred way to go. It's better than having to wait for days upon days, and even weeks for your letter to arrive. Even though from what I've heard, a letter is much more personal and very much appreciated.
tyingq 6y ago
They use jPay and similar because it's faster. Typically in the incarcerated person's hand in a day or two. USPS takes longer, then the prison contraband checking process, etc.
- bdcravens 6y ago
  I believe jPay letters are printed out at the facilities and then distributed
  - tyingq 6y ago
    Yes, that's correct.
gavinray 6y ago
If you think the letter prices are bad, try: - $3.15/15 mins for a domestic phone call - $15/20 mins video call/teleconference if your jail/prison has them and you/someone else are willing to fork out that much (You may be there a while and so have to stretch whatever money you have left as far as possible) - I don't even want to know how much for an international call - $1 for a single pack of ramen - $5 for a 5oz bag of freeze-dried coffee And even if you have the money, you'd better hope someone picks up when you get your phonecall and/or that you know people's addresses or phone-numbers offhand. US Justice system is a nightmare. Gotta love JPay, Bob Barker, and Aramark.
- syshum 6y ago
  >US Justice system is a nightmare. I would stop calling it a justice system, we have a legal system for which any "justice" is by pure coincidence
garrettgrimsley 6y ago
Not OP, but I spent 11 months technically in US Federal custody, but in practice I was incarcerated in various county jails [0] that they contract with. I have experience with PayTel and Securus. At the facilities I housed in the digital > printed letter systems were not offered [1], everything was through USPS or your standard parcel carriers for packages. Books from outside were allowed. Global Tel Link, Securus, and PayTel have a very literal captive customer base when it comes to phone communications. While almost everyone wrote letters, a phone call is a much different form of communication. You can actually have a live conversation with a loved one! You can hear their voice, and respond in real time. For this reason, we paid the price demanded by the companies. In my state of North Carolina, the maximum price of a local call through PayTel was $.40/minute. The long-distance rates were cheaper, and so people would get Google voice numbers to get the cheaper rate. [0] Wake County Detention Center, Edgecombe County Jail, and Albemarle District Jail. [1] I could absolutely see these systems being utilized. They could take the roundtrip latency of text-based communication down to a day if the facility had a kiosk from which we could send replies. I was told by people on the yard that this is how CorrLinks works.

hackermailman 6y ago

You have to give wardens/politicians money to put any kind of technology in their prisons, so free video chat/messaging isn't going to happen unless some benevolent billionaire prince is funding you. However you could do some kind of distance education via letters, remember math can be learned with just pen and paper and not the kind of shit we learn in highschool but the Terrence Tao Analysis from scratch kind. There's an old book called the Schemer's Guide by Iain Ferguson (spelling?) which is programming with pen and paper. Many opportunities here besides just communications, just an idea, I have no clue how it would work in practice. Another idea is create social media or pen pal profiles for prisoners where they fill out a template and you just launch it for them, so they can find other people to talk to, many people inside have nobody on the outside, this is why facebook groups like Jail Mail exists and the like. Of course legal problems here, if some maniac uses your service who should be in jail. Wikipedia search is also something I've always thought should exist via snail mail. 'What is <subject>' should return the entire wikipedia page or other encyclopedia page for convicts. A marketplace for anonymous convicts would also be interesting that nobody has done, many of these guys/girls are experts in fitness since there's nothing else to do inside, they should be able to make some kind of money (again, depending on societal heinousness of crime) by being a motivational coach or something. I have plenty of other ideas, many of them require money/political connections which I don't have but just things I observed while in lockup wondering why are these petty criminals just rotting away in here when there's so much opportunity not just for them, but people they can personally effect to make amends for whatever they have done. I even met a few hundred song writers inside that wanted to be 'producers' and sell their rhythms or lyrics with no way to do this. Anyway good luck

HideousKojima 6y ago
>You have to give wardens/politicians money to put any kind of technology in their prisons, so free video chat/messaging isn't going to happen unless some benevolent billionaire prince is funding you. Having done a decent amount of IT work at prisons, this isn't really the case. What I did often see, however, is that various vendors would give a very long free trial and free hardware to the prisons I worked with, with the basic idea being to lock them in when the obscenely high normal rates kick in after the free year or however long the trial was

FpUser 6y ago

"One type of pushback we can receive is from facilities themselves. One facility returned one of our letters and said that you can't have anything in the letter that could be some form of encrypted message or symbol. In our case, that happened to be the bar code used by the third party service to manage their letters." Here is example of bad scenario which I sincerely hope will never happen. Anything containing image (letter itself included) can be considered as encrypted due to a tech like steganography. They can get really creative there.

zrm 6y ago
You can do the same thing with text as well, or any message that contains any entropy whatsoever. There isn't one type of message where this is possible and another where it isn't. If you allow two parties to communicate at all, they could really be communicating about anything.
syshum 6y ago
The steganography your talking about really only works in digital formats, not printed in this case "code messages" can be just as easily hidden in the text of the letter (in fact probably easier) then in the printed out image
- FpUser 6y ago
  You are wrong. There is a printable steganography along with the pure digital.