Florida inmates bought MP3s. The prison system made them useless. It’s payback time
The Florida prison system has agreed to settle a years-long legal battle stemming from its confiscation of about $11.3 million worth of digital media players and downloaded MP3s purchased by current and former inmates.
The agreement came as part of a class action settlement preliminarily approved by a federal judge on Tuesday.
The winnings were modest, but significant for those incarcerated in the nation’s third-largest prison system: 3.9 million credits (translating to $1 per credit, according to the plaintiffs) that can be used to send emails and download music and videos on the prison’s JPay tablet program, which replaced the old MP3 players. The Florida Department of Corrections also agreed to pay an estimated $150,000 in legal fees.
The music downloads through the prison’s old contract were especially popular with those serving long sentences, but the prison system abruptly switched vendors to a more profitable agreement, and left the inmates on the hook for the cost of their downloads, which were rendered worthless.
The settlement, announced by the Florida Justice Institute legal firm and the Social Justice Law Collective, is a rare victory for prisoners who have long been nickel-and-dimed by the increasingly privatized Florida prison system. Since the mid-2000s, the Florida Department of Corrections has ushered in private vendors to take over everything from its phones to its commissaries and vending machines.
In the case of the now-ubiquitous JPay media tablets, the department collects commissions off bank transfers used to download music or send emails. Those commissions were far heftier on the new tablet system than the MP3 players they replaced, but prisoners were forced to turn in their old MP3 players and re-download all their music on new tablets when the FDC inked its contract with JPay, a South Florida-based company, as was first reported by the Florida Times-Union in August 2018.
At that point, the prison system had sold more than 30,000 digital media players and 6.7 million songs through a contract with a different company: Access Corrections. The class action, filed in February 2019, argued that the confiscation without reimbursement or ability to transfer downloads violated the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution.
The Florida Justice Institute said in a news release that the settlement will allow inmates to re-download the songs they once owned, and more.
“We are pleased that this resolution restores the class members’ ability to use what they purchased: the right to listen to their chosen music while in prison,” said the institute’s executive director, Dante Trevisani. “We hope this case sends a message that the property of incarcerated people cannot be indiscriminately taken.”
The Department of Corrections did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The coverage by the Times-Union featured the written grievances of several inmates, including William Demler, who ended up being the lead plaintiff in the class action.
While incarcerated at South Florida Reception Center, Demler wrote that the FDC “promoted the MP3 Program and encouraged participation to ensure a larger share in the profits made by Access Corrections.”
“Discontinuing the program and forcing inmates to give up their players without compensation amounts to an act of fraud,” Demler wrote in the grievance, which was uncovered in a public records request by the newspaper.
Even before its contract for JPay tablets, which are now widely used and sometimes derided for not functioning properly, the Florida prison system was generating significant revenue.
Over the seven-year life of the MP3 program, the department collected $1.4 million in commissions.
Between April 2017 and March 2018 alone, JPay brought in $3.9 million for the department.
Inmates, who were caught off guard by the switch in 2017, wrote reams of formal grievances that often accused prison officials of profiteering. The department responded to several of their grievances with boilerplate language leaving their concerns unaddressed.
In investigating its lawsuit, the nonprofit legal firm Florida Justice Institute, which has sued the department numerous times, found evidence that prison officials made false promises of inmates owning their music forever. The settlement applies to 11,000 class members and includes several people who purchased hundreds of dollars of music off the old MP3 player program.
“They, along with other class members, were promised by the program’s advertisements that they would always own the music they purchased — a promise that turned out to be empty,” the Florida Justice Institute wrote. “Now, as a result of their efforts, and this lawsuit, their property will be restored.”
This article has been corrected to say that it was the program’s advertisements, not the FDC, that promised prisoners they would always own the music they bought.
This story was originally published May 26, 2020 at 6:14 PM.
