$16.00+Tax to Print A Letter In Prison.
I am not prone to hyperbole, my readers. That subject is how we say Hi, Reader! in Securus-ese.
Some months ago, we inmates received this emessage via our tablets and the kiosk:
Hello.
In partnership with the Florida Department of Corrections, starting on July 27, 2023, except for attachments, which will only be produced in color, you will be able to request printed black and white and color copies of your eMessages from a Unity tablet.The eMessaging printing fees are:
- $0.25 + tax per page for a black and white print of any text letter(s) per page
- The option to print black and white attachments (like photos) will no longer be available.
- $1.00 + tax per attachment for a color print of any attachment(s) per page
- Digitally scanned mail will be printed at the attachment price per page.
I'm going to interrupt the letter to point at that last sentence, and the price immediately above it. That number is relevant to our interests, folks. I promise. Make a note of it!
Also, to wit: if someone mailed me a physical letter, and it ISN'T legal mail or religious correspondence, it must go to a central PO Box in Tampa, to a company that scans the original letter, sends me a digital copy, and destroys the letter. You know... the one someone slapped a 66¢ stamp on and put in the mailbox.
Okay, back to their message.
Heres how you can submit a print request directly from your tablet:
- Select the message that you want to print from your inbox.
- Press the printer icon in the upper right corner of the message.
- You will be notified of the price (before taxes) and asked to confirm. Select "Print" to confirm.
- You will see a confirmation message showing your total cost (including taxes) that will be deducted from your Securus Debit account.
- Your request will be sent to your facility mailroom for processing and delivered in accordance with facility timeframes.
?
Kind Regards,
Your JPay and Securus Team
These instructions explicitly exclude an option to select which page or pages you want printed. That is an important option in my books, when I can't choose to have a letter printed in black and white.
$16, though?
There's a reason for that number.
I recently sent off to the Blackstone Career Institute to ask about their paralegal course that is available to inmates, seeking info on costs, materials needed, etc.
They replied back to the PO Box I mentioned, with the info I asked for. Since I have a tablet, I have enough time to manage to read my messages. But what about people here who do not have tablets?
Kiosk or Bust
That's right: a person without a tablet only gets 15-minute glances at their messages, AND they aren't even given the option to print. This includes mailed letters outside of legal mail and religious correspondence.
Inmates frequently wait 6-10 months for a tablet, which can then be stolen on a whim by some drug-addicted idiot, restarting the cycle of waiting for hardware.
So if someone's spouse, partner, bestie, or circle of care writes a letter, for someone that's tablet-less, it's read the letter on the kiosk quickly; the clock is burning, 15 minutes... out of time. They are, I repeat, not even afforded the option to print from the kiosk.
So you want to print...
For those of us with tablets, let us go back to my interruption point above, shall we? It reads:
$1.00 + tax per attachment for a color print of any attachment(s) per page
Digitally scanned mail will be printed at the attachment price per page.
When they digitally scan our mail, EVERYTHING is scanned. Front of envelope, back of envelope, front and back of every sheet of paper enclosed. So, for a letter with six sheets of paper, you have 14 surfaces scanned: (6*2)+2 = 14.
Seven sheets is 16 surfaces, eight sheets is 18, and so on.
The important part here is, when we send the message for printing, we can't select which pages we wish to print. That means we must print the envelope scans and the empty pages along with the letter.
Using my letter from Blackstone as an example, here's what I would pay to print:
$16.00 + 7.5% Sales Tax = $17.20 for 16 pages
2 pages, Envelope
6 pgs, Blank sheet
2 pgs, Marketing dross
2 pgs, Financing terms
1 pg, Reminder, Prior education credentials are needed
3 pgs, Relevant application content
All that for the low, low price of $17.20!
Since I can't choose what I want to print, that means I spend $8.60 alone on the envelope and blank pages! 🎊
I just want to print the application, three pages, but $17.20 is a steep price for my loved ones to pay, when they're already paying $2.80 for one sleeve of stale sardines for me.
That's $5.73/page for what I need.
A Round of Chee "Applause"
This overpricing feels like another way to milk more money from the free world. I surmise that aventiv (d/b/a Securus and JPay) is a little jealous of HIG Capital (d/b/a Keefe Commissary Network, AccessCorrections, others) and their hamfisted approach to Florida prisons, so they had to find a way to screw inmates a little more for a few extra dollars.
Florida DOC isn't innocent in this, either:
In the false name of "security", inmates cannot receive physical letters from anyone other than legal entities and religious entities that are sending specific correspondence.
That's to keep folks from getting a letter with a daub of perfume that their spouse might wear -- a keepsake that might make a man's time a little easier and motivate him to earn his way out of prison.
I'm sure their reasoning is "To mitigate the ingress of synthetic marijuana onto our compounds" or some such dreck, but it also trades one issue for another.
The pricing for printing letters cuts into a person's commissary funds. Choosing between buying batteries, saltines, and Magic Shave or printing a letter from a school is an easy choice: People here need to eat and maintain hygiene. People want or desire education.
What a shame.
It's shameful, the difficulty one faces to have a tangible letter.
Were I paranoid, I'd scream this whole debacle is all in the name of feeding a heretofore undisclosed AI model, to further surveil inmates and their loved ones. After all, if it's cheaper for loved ones to digitally send me messages of love and support, wouldn't most of us switch to the online portal?
They'd hope so!
Instead, I say this:
I can get wanting to mitigate the ingress of K2-saturated letters and hopefully curtail the high-getting nature of a people warehoused like cords of meat. After all, it takes two ingredients and a sheet of paper to produce a product used by the prison populace.
But to punish people who already can't afford your food with unaffordable, low quality printing?
A sampling I received
I have had a couple of small print jobs done through this system to get an idea of what we receive. I wasn't particularly thrilled.
The text is rather small, perhaps 8 point Calibri, Trebuchet MS, or other sans-serif font. That makes it inaccessible for anyone with a visual impairment. If your print takes two pages, you are going to lose a paragraph of text, replaced with the JPay banner indicating it's the "fastest way to get mail".
(It's the ONLY way to get my mail, you know...)
I spent $1.34 for a mixed message to be printed: one page text, and one image. The image is printed on a sheet of paper oriented for a portrait, even if the image would best fit on paper rotated to landscape.
The image... I am thankful and grateful to my friend who drew the image. I hate the over compressed artifacts I can see in the print of the image.
Pictures are resized here to what appears to be 800×600 pixels when we receive them.
Improvements required!
It would be grand to receive the original letters, but I don't see them going back to that any time soon.
In its absence, 25¢ a page for black and white is reasonable, but fix your margins and your font sizes.
Let me choose what pages are being printed when there are attachments, like a scanned physical letter.
Let me choose black and white prints when it's just me wanting to print a letter I received.
And right now, most important, assure me and mine that our messages sent through your portal or app aren't being farmed for info by a large language model you've hired on to potentially further harm incarcerated people and their loved ones by chilling their speech.
Something to fret over, I'm sure.
Take care, readers, and do spread the word, won't you?