Hi I'm Kentrell Owens, a first year computer science PhD student at the University of
Washington advised by Franzi Roesner and Yoshi Kohno. I worked on this project with Camille Cobb
and Lorrie Cranor when i was getting my master's degree at Carnegie Mellon University. Today I'll
be talking about our work on surveillance of communication with incarcerated people.
The United States is the world leader in incarceration, both in terms of incarceration rate
and the total number of people incarcerated. Incarcerated people experience surveillance
especially when communicating with families and friends. And prisons and jails are increasingly
using surveillance technology to monitor this communication. Although the described purpose
of this surveillance is safety, as is the given justification for most forms of surveillance,
we also need to consider its potential harms. For example,
incarcerated people might be reluctant to report abuse for fear of retaliation.
Racism within the U.S. carceral system means there are disparities in terms of who is surveilled
in the first place. And families have to undergo surveillance to communicate with them,
so there's no real notion of consent. So, to this last point, we interviewed
family members of incarcerated people to understand how surveillance impacted them.
For some background, in both public and private carceral facilities, e.g., prisons or jails,
prison communication services are largely provided by private vendors. This market is dominated by
two companies: GTL Technologies and Securus Technologies. There are five primary methods
for communicating with someone incarcerated: phone calls, physical mail, electronic messaging
(also known as also known as email but very different from email), video visitation, and
in-person visitation. The communication methods available at a specific facility vary widely.
Some notable surveillance mechanisms involved in these communication methods include: geo-location
of call recipient cell phones for an hour after they answer the call. So for example, if I receive
a phone call from someone incarcerated, and I press 'accept,' my location is tracked for an
hour after i answer the call, regardless of the duration of the call itself. This location data
collected by these companies have been used by police in the past to bypass the warrant process.
Voice prints have been used as a biometric to track and identify people who talk to
incarcerated people. And an increasing number of facilities have banned physical
mail altogether and used private companies to scan and index mail.
So to understand how and if these surveillance mechanisms affected their communication,
we interviewed 16 family members of people incarcerated in Pennsylvania.
The interviews lasted for a max of one hour, and compensation was thirty dollars.
We interviewed people on our campus or public libraries around Allegheny County near them
at flexible times to accommodate their work schedules. We chose to interview family members
of incarcerated people rather than incarcerated people themselves for a few reasons. One is that
our communication would be surveilled which could bias results or introduce risks to participants.
Another, of course, is that recruitment would have been difficult. And finally there are some
ethical challenges around consent and compensation when conducting research with incarcerated people.
So we asked participants questions about how their perceptions of how prison companies manage data
collection, retention, and use, and other general surveillance and privacy related questions.
So in terms of our findings, participants believed that there were legal, practical,
and technical barriers that limited the amount of surveillance they could experience (although
as we show in our work, these barriers are either non-existent or have little impact). Participants
thought it was unfair that they were surveilled because they're not themselves incarcerated.
Some participants were concerned that their words collected during
surveillance could be manipulated against them or their incarcerated relative.
Participants brought up their privacy preserving strategies,
including using the most private communication method, in their mind, or self-censorship.
And although this paper is focused on surveillance and privacy, participants
mention numerous other problems and challenges of attempting to stay in touch with their relatives,
including cost, convenience, accessibility, and prior trauma in prisons.
So to conclude, in our discussion section we raise the implications of this surveillance and
its impact on incarceration. We discuss better ways of communicating surveillance practices,
risks, and legal rights to people, and we made an example flyer that we shared with community
organizations that helped us with the study. And important future work in this area could explore
the plethora of non-surveillance related concerns that people have about prison communication. We
hope that you'll read the full paper for more details. Thank you for your time.