my name is callil cumberbatch and i'm the associate vice president of policy at the david rothenberg center for public policy at the fortune society and welcome to both sides of the bars a discussion driven show that examines the criminal justice system from various perspectives including those most impacted by the criminal justice system we discussed critical questions about how the current system works its intersections with social justice and highlight the efforts that are being made to improve the lives of everyone that is affected by it we ask you the viewers to spread the word about both sides of the bars and share your comments with us on twitter at the fortune as  today show is titled correctional profiteering the money trail of mass incarceration over the last few years there has been an increased attention paid to private industries role in profiting from the criminal legal system and immigration detention companies such as global tolling core civic formally known as corrections corporation of america and g director of corrections accountability project bianca combines her expertise in both criminal justice and financial services to combat the commercial exploitation of the criminal legal system dedicated to eliminating the influence of commercial interests on the criminal legal system and ending the exploitation of justice and so does that mean that means that we challenge any way in which the criminal legal system has been used as a vehicle to extract resources whether they be wealth labor social capital out of communities of color communities of poverty through the criminal legal system right we have been laundering taxpayer money through this system into private corporations we have been extracting all of these very valuable resources out of our communities and often marginalized vulnerable communities and so you know our main work is strives to really challenge that on its face and make sure that every commercial actor that embeds themselves into the criminal legal system has a force to be reckoned with and we do that sort of in two main ways exposing the commercialization of justice and sort of public education of shifting and then also in our advocacy in organizing and empowering people to challenge the industry and how are you defining commercial interests it's a great question so we very intentionally use the term commercialization as opposed to privatization and the reason for that is that private actors are not the only commercial actors there's actually quite a number of commercial actors in this space it might be private sector and obviously very often w we talk about private sector private sectors a big role they play a lot through law mean campaign financing and all of that and like and having that interest in manipulating the system but they're also hidden him with the government the government can at times be commercial actors if they're taking let's say a commission communities up north or to rural areas to employ people right for jobs that notion that that's somebody who's now dependent on the system for their own operation their own livelihood their own wealth and then of times you know in a really unfortunate situation we even have nonprofit organizations are commercial actors you know down in florida for example their entire prison labor of the state of florida department of corrections is run by an organization a nonprofit called pride right  and you have c e o s of this organization taking home multi six figure salaries and by most a i mean you know four hundred five hundred thousand dollars well people are earning a leavened cents an hour and they're managing these vocational programs and so there are there are quite a number of layers of who these commercial actors are which is deeper and broader than just private and how would you define the criminal legal system as it relates to your work so our viewers have some full context because yes there are undoubtedly be folks who are familiar with mass incarceration criminalization and the criminal justice system in general but how do you define the criminal legal system as a relief to your work s so we define it from a legal system a sort of the spectrum from like contact with policing through sort of reentry and people being able to make it home so that means that means policing that means surveillance that means they'll that means probation court systems right into correctional environments immigration detention and then back out as you see parole again other forms of community corrections and supervision monitoring things like that all the way through even re entry programming on the outside and things like that so i would love for our viewers to hear like how why like why did you start corrections accountability project like what led you to that point where you said something needs to be done with that in this specific needs definitely launched the organization i appreciated that there was a gap in the advocacy community that was specifically targeting the industry and economy that built around human caging and control i think quite maybe appreciate just h so it's really huge an entirely separate it's an eighty billion dollar industry so billion with a b eighty billion dollar industry and that's that's still conservative right in the sense that still doesn't include what families are spending to call their loved ones inside eighty billion dollars is only what the government can account for the government has paid for it right but we know that families are paying for phone calls that support networks are playing for commissary right that there's all these other things that have latched on electronic monitoring fees right parole and probation supervision fees all of that stuff that's coming out of the community that's not even included in the eighty billion dollars so it's important to understand that but for me so for me this work is personal i you know i came ground i was you thousand volved in the system had a number of sort of close friends and like sort of grown up with that had been through the system and so i always knew that i wanted to at some point work on criminal justice issues i didn't really know exactly where my role would be right like would i be working without risk youth would i be working with you know people coming out to be working in the system outside the system like where is your role right and so i took a few years to specifically figure that out and i was sitting on the boards of foster care agencies i was working with a lot of youth of incarcerated parents and ran actually a program at rikers that i founded back in two thousand and twelve with a number of colleagues that was doing educational programming right that's actually where we originally met you years years ago and so you know doing all of that sort of figuring out my role and at the time i was in this really shines please called walsh and i was literally working as an investment banker for a number of years and i had developed all these skill you call them right in finance specifically and so when i finally left finance and i felt like i had started to figure out like ok it's my time like i want to go into criminal justice full time as a career  i went to law school and i started again it was like kind of popular around different places they were to these you worked multiple advocacy organizations actually i actually also worked at a number of dio seas which was interesting and different type of experience deals these being deported apartments of her action correct and then i came out and the thing that was interesting to me or that i wanted to spend some time focused on was how  departments of correction option outsource their services and how this was over the last thirty forty years had become a more regular thing and and that that market that industry continued to expand and to me that seemed there seemed to be a lot of power there and not a lot not a lot of stem of work being done to challenge it and i sort of felt like well here we are as advocates reformers organizers activists challenging a syst running into a wall consistently because we're talking to legislators right and all these other people who are just behind the scenes being paid right by like the industry and so as we keep running into a wall and just keep moderating our message and keep compromising our stuff can get through and so i realized at that time that it felt like there may be a gap sort of in the criminal justice advocacy space of people who have like financial system cation and lot of directly impact people not a whole lot of former bankers are like that's not where you see a whole lot of people in our field but i all the sudden realized that the skills that i had developed to build companies i can now use to dissolve and that was where the concept sort of came out and what we seek to do so talk a little bit about recently within the last five or six months or so new york  city decided that they would no longer char each for phone calls for people who are in city jewels so can you talk to our viewers a little bit explain that a little bit better than i did what that actually means  what that means for the profiteering apparatus that was connected to that and ultimately how this is a trend that we're seeing the we're hoping to see more of all across the country  so yes so this was a really really exciting big win for us we lead a coalition back through the spring and early summer that offered up this legislation that worked with city coun to get this legislation passed and in july we were able to get a bill passed that as you said makes new york now the only jurisdiction in the country were calls out of its city jails will be for it i say will be because it's two hundred seventy days from the enactment and it was signed into law by the mayor in august and so we're roughly looking at may twenty nineteen one when cars will finally be free and what is that like what's the impact of that on a conservative estimate we estimate it's roughly ten million dollars a year for the directly impacted communities here in new york and obviously it means so much more for those who could never have college in the first place because they didn't have the the financial support in order to do that and so that was a really remarkable i think piece of legislation but also there's so much layered into that raid so one thing that like people  necessarily know is that new york actually was collecting an eighty one percent commission on the cost of calls prior to this so this bill also includes language that while sort of irrelevant at this point was necessary to address which is that the city of new york wason never take a commission on something on telephone calls or something like this and thinking about new york as a really liberal and progressive city especially the liberal progressive begin of new york state it was interesting that new york state had a law that prevented it from collecting commission and yet new york city was still doing it right so it was time when we caught up with like the rest of the state system and then did something better right and realize that like opening up those lines was so super important and that's what we're obviously trying to relay to so many more people so that's like that's a big part of it i think the other thing that was an import and sort of factoid as we were talking about this bill was that back in nineteen the early one nine hundred ninety s one thousand nine hundred one i think was one riker's population was at its peak it was roughly two two and a half times what it is almost three times even what it is today and yet for free at that point so i don't like saying that new york is the first city to make it very because it used to be free everywhere prior to late the one nine hundred eighty s and ninety's right even two thousand when these companies started coming in and convincing departments of correction that you need surveillance on these calls and so if you you need surveillance you need a new phone system a new system that you can charge really exurban and rates on because you're paying for our technology pattinson all these other ridiculous things and i'm convincing you are necessary but that never existed before right and so that's how they need their entire market it's how they continue make the market it's one of the reasons i wanted things we want to push next is ending the surveillance of calls phone call that they surveilled as opposed to just turning over all of these records to district attorneys who can now prosecute people especially when we're talking about a jail environment were largely there with pretrial people so undermining the or their ability to like sell that notion of surveillance could essentially dissolve that industry as being necessary because once you do that you can bring in verizon or eighteen to outfit the facility and calls the like negligible in rate and so in this particular case the city took on the cost it was roughly eight million dollars to the city the city obviously doesn't pay tax on it to itself didn't have to pay deposit fees right that families had to put on  and you are still innocent right of crimes like they were a second ago you know in theory until you did that but more like even the comparison was like relevant right eight million dollars compared to a one point four billion eight million right and we're worried about that right and it's like this was actually described by a staffer within the city council is equivalent to a rounding error and also why are we fighting for this if it means that our vulnerable communities can get something back because i promise you for them what translated to about ten million dollars is not a rounding error right that is people being able to feed their children who are being able to like pay their rent right there their bills  all of this stuff so so that was sort of a lot of the conversation around that and and fighting for that and we were really really obviously thrilled that it passed and it passed i mean really almost across the board  with three of the forty two to three i think the final vote was so so yes i think the the future of what is that look like we are talking now to other cities across the country and cities and states  thinking about what does this mean for us and what might that look like obviously you know for us it was it was easier for us to get this done in new york because of all the incredible advocacy energy right that is happening in new york like clothes riker tunisia like all these different initiatives without those entry level conversations that makes a win like this really like powell will end and seemingly easier like it's harder so talking to other cities that may or may not have that right energy going on in their city and what that might look like but definitely exploring opening that up as well as addressing all of the other types of ways that the city as well as private companies are allowed to make revenue so about like what does it mean for us to have a zero revenue system and there's been a similar national wave of folks trying to think more creatively about how to implement technology for people while while being detained or incarcerated some of the most common things are like kiosks that will be placed in the housing units there are folks who are being detained who are being imprisoned who actually think that that's actually a more efficient way same similar with with tablets like there are folks who've been incarcerated you know multiple decades and having access to a piece of technology prior to being released would help them acclimate their folks who are incarcerated that actually look at that as a benefit what would you say to their to them their families about what that actually means when they present a piece of technology  what are the tethers that actually come with that so this is i think one of the more complicated questions and like fresh rating question because there's there's no doubt that the tablets in many ways introducing this solved the issue of solitary confinement because most folks in solitary are not there for violent acts they're there for violating some miscellaneous rule in the facility sometimes struggling from addiction right one hundred percent and sometimes people are in solitary for year old pregnant girls in solitary confinement because there's simply no other juvenile girl in the jail and that is effectively solitary confinement even if it's not directly a position that right so in any case like using these tablets as a way to necessarily solve the problem and care for those issues is like super problematic but even when you think about the the general population yes there are some utility to it there is the ability to in theory be able to submit a priya complaint or a elimination act so anything you know with regard to those type of things without a or a grievance without the like threat of you know as they say retribution or something so there may be some of those positive aspects i do think the technology thing and the idea as you were just mentioning somebody has been serving twenty years thirty years and they get a tablet now i just want to be very clear these tablets are the most rudimentary version of like something you could potentially call technology is not an i pad it is not an i pad it is nowhere near like the same type of technology that we're interacting with this is like the type of technology that like you would let your two year old play with because they like have big buttons and i don't understand why it's quite going on so and just like poor devices like the device themselves are like just really antiquated like if you ever put that into like the free world like had to compete with the rest of technology like all of these companies w major attack company there's a few of them but began introducing tablets and they were they gave away for free however you want to say fifty two thousand tablets in new york i new york state and they're like oh they're free don't worry the taxpayers are going to be paying for them all of this in a day like with that contract it wasn't worth eight point eight million dollars to the company and that's because on this tablet now you can buy albums for forty six dollars a music album i'm just like not sure what you're purchasing for that you can now they're going to start doing video calling ray another thing that's like super problematic because while they claim to be introducing you know more access what they're really doing is also shouting out in person visits right and so nine dollars for a thirty minute video conference right they have the opportunity now to do a money transfer as you are saying these kiosks ray and all this stuff a money transfer now in new york state under jay pay ten dollars cost three dollars and fifteen cents if you do it online and four dollars and fifteen cents if you do it over the phone right so like there's no company you know for a private company in anywhere that is just going to be giving away its main product unless it's looking to get something back and these things are just introducing that so very briefly with the limited amount of time that we have left i would love to talk a little bit about immigration detention and how are is a tremendous amount of profiteering being made from that what is one is what is one unknown what is like the biggest unknown factor of how profiteering is deeply entrenched in immigration detention yes so i think quickly i'm just going to spew out a few facts and i feel like those kind of nail it so seventy two percent of immigration detention beds are privatized seventy lot of those beds and often charges as much as a few hundred dollars a month for someone to be on an ankle bracelet in the i c system actually far more then after we have in the criminal legal system that person has to bear the cost to correct that personal defeat and then those companies will threaten to say if you don't pay this you're going to be deported or you're right you'll be back in this in this system so this threat of like deportation rate of change in some ways entire like life and just ousting them from everything they know so i think and for example the company that has the contract for the telephones in and i talk and there's again one you know a lot of provider for all immigration detention after doing quite a bit of research we found that tall in about three or four layers  t providers of private prisons and a space that's highly manipulated by corporate interests so what do you want viewers to know in the last minute or so that we have about corrections accountability is work how can they get in all speaking on this issue of commercializing justice right now we paid all the artists which is a really exciting thing that we're able to do so i really encourage people to go to our website our website is w w w dot corrections accountability dot org and you bianca thank you we could continue this conversation for another hour or thank you for joining us and thank you to the viewer to the viewers for tuning in as well if you're interested in finding out more about the fortune society please check us out on the web at