This publication has been updated to provide additional context regarding patents and patent applications, which are indications of an entity’s interest in a particular product, but do not prove that the product is currently in development or available for use. You can read more about the role of patents in this series in our post, “The Prison Watch Catalogue: Patents Are Not Products (Yet)”

No matter how many rights are taken away from people in prison, no matter how brutally they are treated, the prison industrial complex has not stopped inventing new ways to extract money from prisoners and their families. sure, in one of his most recent patentsGranted in February 2021, it has envisioned a new tool to do just that: use a tablet issued to individual inmates to allow them to make video calls, access information about their case, and give them the opportunity to pay money for temporary video access. games.

Just because you’re in prison doesn’t mean you get a pardon from the microtransactions and insatiable maw of capitalism.

It is important to note that patents often precede the actual development or deployment of a technology. Although applications may demonstrate an interest in advancing a particular technology, these intentions do not always go beyond the proposal, and many inventions described in patent applications do not end up being built. What we can infer from a patent application is that the company is thinking about the technology and that it could be on its way.

In this case, the dream tablet would be useful for more than just extracting money from prisoners. Securus proposes that it can also be used as a biometric surveillance device. According to the patent:

“The monitoring system can be configured to collect sensor information from the resident communications device to detect unsafe conditions during a gaming session. For example, the monitoring system may collect sensor information from the resident’s communications device indicating a resident’s level of stress or agitation during play. One or more gyroscope sensors included within the resident communications device may be used to detect unsafe handling of the resident communications device. Heart rate and blood pressure information detected by sensors worn by the resident can be transmitted via RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) to the resident’s communications device.”

If the sensors and biometrics in such a wearable device could be used as an indicator of a prisoner’s mood, it’s possible those observations could be used for other prisoner assessments. We could imagine a scenario where the system incorrectly uses an inmate’s emotion or anger while playing a game to determine that the inmate is uncooperative or at risk of reoffending. Perhaps prisons can even use this data at parole hearings or when deciding to give inmates punishments/rewards. If Securus, or any company, were to develop a gaming device with such mood control, their “gamer moment” in the digital world could be used as yet another cause for further punishment in the real world.

Following the publication of this post, Aventiv, the parent company of Securus, provided a statement to EFF saying that it is “committed to protecting the civil liberties of all those who use our products” and that the company is “reviewing all open patents to certify that they align with our transformation efforts.”

Global Tel Link

The gaming world is also potentially lucrative terrain for another prison telecommunications company, Global Tel-Link, which has filed a patent for a virtual reality (VR) service for prisoners. According to his own description, it would allow the prisoner, “for a brief time, to imagine himself outside or away from the controlled environment.”

According to the patent, Global Tel-Link envisions this prison virtual reality system to complement, or completely replace, in-person visits so that inmates can interact with friends and family in a controlled and monitored virtual environment. We imagine that Global Tel-Link would presumably charge for this service the same way it charges for all of its other prison communications products.

But inmates are not the only ones subject to Global Tel-Link’s surveillance and technological “assistance”. The company has also filed a patent for Augmented Reality to help and keep an eye on the prison guards – essentially “Google Glass: Prison Edition”.

An image of the patent, Global Tel-Link’s AR device patent

According to the patent, the Global Tel-Link AR device worn by the guards would have myriad functions. It would be able to perform facial recognition on inmates and display vital details such as their name and history. It is also intended to show the location of any unauthorized radio frequency signals that could indicate contraband cell phones. Additionally, he reportedly has object detection powers and can highlight any dangerous or contraband objects, such as weapons or open doors that need to be closed.

The patent is particularly worrying because AR already has many potential privacy issues created by your always-on cameras and other monitoring devices. The civil liberties problems of AR systems would be exacerbated if they were used in prisons, since incarcerated people already have much less privacy and autonomy than people in public.

The patent also describes how AR devices could be used to track prison guards. Global Tel-Link states: “In some situations, guard activities are unsupervised, giving some staff/guards the opportunity to become involved in the importation of contraband goods into the controlled environment.”

Who watches the watchers? Apparently Global Tel-Link does. The company declined to comment for this post.

GTL’s proposed system described in the patent could also monitor whether prison guards are doing their job. According to the patent, the AR system “stores…a set of criteria that define whether a monitored activity is determined to be ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’. For example, the set of criteria includes the range of time to complete a task, the route designed for a task, the time spent in a place, the range of heart rate, the places of regular presence of inmates, etc.

We are skeptical about Global Tel-Link’s ability to pack so many advanced technologies into a handheld device, especially at a price that is comfortable for private and public prison owners. However, if the company is able to build its patent, the result would be that prison guards would join incarcerated people under the ever-present eye of the panopticon.