Behind the Call: Inside Securus Technologies’ Grip on Prison Communication

By Clover A. Perez, PhD

For millions of incarcerated people and their families, communication comes at a cost. This investigation examines the corporate structure, practices, controversies, and evolving technologies behind one of the most influential companies in the U.S. correctional communications industry.

For more than a million incarcerated people across the United States, communication with the outside world operates within an economic structure fundamentally different from the conventional telecommunications marketplace. Securus Technologies, a Texas-based corrections-technology company, has emerged as a dominant corporate actor in that system, providing telephone, video, messaging, tablet, and other digital services across a substantial portion of the nation’s correctional institutions. Its influence, however, cannot be measured solely by the number of facilities where its technology operates. The more consequential distinction lies in the market’s structure: incarcerated people and their families generally do not choose the company through which they communicate. Correctional institutions make that determination through contractual arrangements, leaving the individuals who ultimately use—and frequently finance—the service with little meaningful consumer choice.

Over the past two decades, that unusual market structure has coincided with an equally consequential transformation within Securus itself. What was once primarily a correctional telecommunications enterprise has evolved through acquisition, private-equity investment, and technological expansion into a multifaceted corrections-technology corporation spanning digital communications, financial transactions, electronic monitoring, investigative intelligence, voice biometrics, and other data-driven technologies. That expansion has embedded Securus across multiple dimensions of institutional life while simultaneously placing the company at the center of persistent controversies over the cost of communication, the confidentiality of privileged conversations, the collection and analysis of biometric information, and the extent to which technologies developed within correctional environments can reach beyond prison walls.

The corporate lineage behind Securus predates the company itself. T-Netix, one of its principal predecessors, evolved from Tele-Matic Corporation and, by the early 1990s, had shifted its business toward specialized telecommunications services for correctional institutions. The company took its current form in 2004 by consolidating two established correctional communications companies. Securus acquired T-Netix in March for approximately $69 million and Evercom in September for approximately $87 million, while assuming and repaying substantial debt associated with both companies. Those transactions were more than routine corporate acquisitions; they laid the foundation for Securus to pursue an extensive strategy of consolidation and technological diversification.

That strategy accelerated over the next decade. ABRY Partners acquired a controlling interest in Securus in 2013 for approximately $640 million. Two years later, Securus acquired JPay, extending its commercial reach into electronic payments, messaging, tablets, entertainment, and other digital services used by incarcerated people. JPay operated across 33 state prison systems and reported serving more than 1.6 million incarcerated individuals at the time of the acquisition. Its purchase therefore represented not simply the addition of another subsidiary but an expansion of Securus’s position within the increasingly digitized infrastructure of the U.S. corrections.

JPay was only one component of a much broader acquisition strategy. Securus acquired businesses specializing in electronic monitoring, GPS technology, video communications, voice biometrics, investigative intelligence, and managed-access systems that detect or restrict unauthorized cellular devices in correctional institutions. By October 2015, the company described its acquisition of Guarded Exchange as its seventeenth technology-related acquisition in thirty-two months. The velocity and speed of that consolidation signaled a fundamental reorientation of the enterprise. Securus was no longer positioning itself primarily as a company that connected incarcerated people to telephone calls; it was building an increasingly integrated technological presence within the U.S. correctional ecosystem.

The scale of Securus’s corporate expansion, however, tells only part of the story. While successive owners measured growth through acquisitions, valuations, market penetration, and technological diversification, incarcerated people and their families encountered the correctional communications industry from an altogether different vantage point. For them, the consequences of this expanding corporate infrastructure often showed up in something far more ordinary: the price of a phone call with a spouse, parent, child, relative, or other loved one.

For decades, the cost of incarcerated communication has remained one of the most persistent and contentious issues facing Securus and the correctional telecommunications industry. The economics of this system are particularly consequential because incarcerated people and their families do not participate in anything resembling a conventional consumer marketplace. They neither select the telecommunications provider nor negotiate the terms under which services are furnished, and they cannot switch to a competitor when confronted with rates they consider excessive, inadequate service, or repeated disruption. The correctional institution selects the provider through a contractual arrangement; the incarcerated population and those they communicate with are subsequently bound by that institutional decision.

The Cost of a Phone Call

The scale of Securus’s corporate expansion, however, tells only part of the story. While successive owners measured growth through acquisitions, valuations, market penetration, and technological diversification, incarcerated people and their families experienced the correctional communications industry from an altogether different vantage point. For them, the consequences of this expanding corporate infrastructure often appeared in something far more ordinary: the price of speaking by telephone with a spouse, parent, child, relative, or other loved one.

That absence of meaningful consumer choice eventually drew sustained scrutiny from lawmakers, regulators, advocates, and families who had spent years challenging the financial burden of incarcerated communications. Congress responded by enacting the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, signed into law on January 5, 2023, which substantially expanded the Federal Communications Commission’s authority to regulate rates for incarcerated people’s audio and video communications. The legislation directed the Commission to set “just and reasonable” rates while preserving the statutory requirement that communications providers receive fair compensation.

As the FCC considered how to exercise its expanded authority, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division examined the correctional communications industry's competitive structure. In an April 2024 submission to the Commission, the Department characterized the market as highly concentrated and concluded that incarcerated people and their loved ones face an “effective monopoly” once a correctional institution selects its communications provider. The Justice Department further observed that Securus and its principal competitor, Global Tel*Link—now ViaPath Technologies—had collectively controlled well over half of the market for more than a decade, while smaller providers had struggled to gain enough market share to exert meaningful competitive pressure.

The significance of that characterization extends beyond conventional questions of market share. Competition may occur among telecommunications companies seeking correctional contracts, but for the individuals who ultimately use those services, meaningful competition largely disappears once a contract is awarded. Neither the incarcerated person nor the family member financing the communication selects the successful bidder. Nor can either turn to another provider because rates are considered excessive, calls repeatedly disconnect, customer service is inadequate, or the quality of service fails to meet expectations. The companies compete for the contract, and the incarcerated population and their families inherit the consequences of that decision.

In July 2024, the FCC responded with one of the most consequential regulatory interventions in the history of incarcerated communications. Exercising authority under the Martha Wright-Reed Act, the Commission adopted substantially lower rate caps for telephone calls and established interim limits on video communications. The agency estimated that its reforms could reduce the cost of a 15-minute telephone call in some large jails from as much as $11.35 to about 90 cents, while also restricting ancillary fees that had historically increased the overall cost of maintaining telephone contact.

Securus challenged the new regulatory framework. In September 2024, the company sought to halt implementation of the FCC’s order while pursuing judicial review, contending that the new caps failed to adequately account for the costs of operating communications systems in correctional institutions, including security-related expenditures and other operational requirements. Pay Tel Communications advanced a similar challenge, arguing that the Commission’s methodology failed to satisfy Congress’s requirement that providers receive fair compensation. Their attempts to suspend implementation while the litigation proceeded were unsuccessful: after the FCC denied Securus’s administrative request for a stay, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit denied stay requests from both companies in November 2024. Subsequent efforts to transfer the litigation to the Fifth Circuit were unsuccessful, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene in that venue dispute in February 2025.

The regulatory framework nevertheless continued to evolve. In October 2025, the FCC revisited its earlier methodology and adopted higher interim caps after determining that additional expenses for safety, security, and correctional-facility operations required greater recognition in the rate structure. Under the 2026 framework, base audio rates are capped at 9 cents per minute in prisons and between 8 and 17 cents per minute in jails, depending on facility size, with an additional facility-cost allowance of up to 2 cents per minute permitted. The revised rates took effect on April 6, 2026.

The regulatory intervention unquestionably altered the economics of incarcerated calling, but it did not alter the fundamental relationship between provider and consumer. Correctional agencies continue to determine which company will furnish communications services within their institutions, while incarcerated people and their families remain the population required to operate within that selection. Federal regulation may now constrain how much can be charged for a telephone call; it does not give the person making or receiving that call the ability to choose who provides it.

When a Private Call Isn’t Private

The financial cost of communication was not the only consequence of a system in which telephone contact necessarily passes through correctional infrastructure. For incarcerated people communicating with legal counsel, another question carried implications that extended well beyond price: whether conversations intended to remain confidential and protected by one of the most fundamental privileges in the U.S. legal system were actually beyond routine recording.

That question entered national scrutiny in 2015, when an anonymous source provided The Intercept with an extraordinary cache of more than 70 million Securus call records spanning approximately two and a half years, from December 2011 through the spring of 2014. The records came from correctional facilities in at least 37 states and included links to the recordings. The data included thousands of records associated with telephone numbers belonging to attorneys. Reporters initially identified more than 14,000 calls to numbers clearly connected to lawyers; a subsequent review uncovered at least 43,000 additional attorney-related call records, bringing the total to more than 57,000.

The magnitude of the disclosure, however, did not establish that every attorney-related call in the data was a privileged communication or had been unlawfully recorded. Securus vigorously disputed that implication. In November 2015, the company maintained that its investigation uncovered no evidence that attorney-client privileged communications had been improperly recorded and emphasized that its systems included mechanisms to exclude attorney telephone numbers or specifically arranged calls from routine recording. Securus also disputed reports suggesting that the information had been extracted directly from its central network, later stating that its investigation indicated the records originated from a single customer’s files and were likely accessed through a third-party file-sharing arrangement.

The distinction became considerably more consequential when journalists contacted attorneys whose calls appeared in the compromised data. Several Missouri lawyers confirmed that calls they had specifically arranged with the Missouri Department of Corrections as confidential attorney communications still appeared in the Securus records. Under the department’s procedures, attorneys were required to arrange privileged calls in advance so those communications could be designated as private. At least five attorneys confirmed that calls arranged through that process still appeared in the compromised material.

What initially appeared to be an extraordinary disclosure involving a single collection of records later became part of a broader, more persistent controversy. Questions about the recording of attorney-client communications through Securus systems surfaced in multiple jurisdictions in the years that followed. The circumstances were not identical, and the legal findings should not be conflated: some matters led to litigation, others to administrative investigations, and still others to contested allegations. The recurrence of the underlying problem nevertheless exposed an important vulnerability in communications systems designed to record incarcerated telephone traffic on a vast scale; confidentiality could depend on whether an attorney’s number was correctly identified, entered, maintained, and technologically excluded from a system whose ordinary function was recording.

In California, federal litigation established that calls to attorney numbers registered as private were still recorded through the Securus system. In Kansas, a federal special master reviewing Securus records identified attorney calls among communications obtained through the system, including calls associated with numbers designated “Private.” Years later, similar failures emerged in New York City. A 2023 investigation by the city’s Department of Investigation concluded that breakdowns in the process for designating attorney numbers as “Do Not Record” led to privileged calls being recorded. Investigators characterized the failures as serious but found the recordings did not appear intentional. The investigation also documented subsequent reforms intended to strengthen the procedures governing confidential attorney communications.

Beyond the Call: Surveillance, Location, and the Human Voice

The controversy over privileged communications was only one dimension of a much larger technological question. As correctional communications became increasingly digitized, the infrastructure supporting telephone and video conversations also gained the ability to generate, organize, analyze, and correlate substantial amounts of information about the people participating in those communications. Securus’s investigative portfolio reflects that evolution. The company markets technologies that automatically transcribe audio and video communications, search those transcripts for designated terms, generate investigative alerts, and use voice biometrics to identify individuals speaking during calls. Its THREADS platform also lets it correlate communications information with financial activity, voice-biometric data, and other investigative records, turning individual communications into components of a broader intelligence system.

That infrastructure's reach drew national scrutiny in 2018, when U.S. Senator Ron Wyden disclosed that Securus gave government customers access to real-time cellphone location information. According to Wyden’s investigation, Securus obtained the location information through an intermediary that ultimately received data from LocationSmart, a company whose location services drew on information from major wireless carriers. Of particular concern was the mechanism governing government access: Securus acknowledged that it did not independently verify whether users requesting location information possessed valid court orders before allowing them to obtain the data. The implications therefore extended well beyond correctional institutions. A technological system associated primarily with incarcerated communications had become part of a data chain capable of identifying the real-time location of cellphones belonging to people outside the system.

Securus’s surveillance capabilities also extended to the biometric characteristics of the human voice. Through voice-recognition technology, the company developed the ability to create and use biometric voiceprints, digital representations derived from distinctive characteristics of an individual’s speech, to identify speakers across recorded communications. Privacy advocates raised concerns that the technology implicated not only incarcerated people whose calls were routinely monitored but also potentially family members, attorneys, counselors, and others speaking with them from outside correctional institutions. The concern was not merely that conversations could be heard or recorded; it was that the voice itself could become an identifying biometric marker recognizable across subsequent communications.

That distinction is important! A recording preserves what an individual said during a particular conversation. Voice-biometric technology adds an analytical capability: identifying who is speaking, including in circumstances where a person may be participating in a call associated with someone else. Securus continues to market Investigator Pro as a voice-biometric investigative system that can identify incarcerated individuals by name throughout telephone calls, detect potential misuse of personal identification numbers, and search voice information across a database of recorded communications. In that environment, the telephone call is no longer merely a conversation subject to monitoring; it can also become a source of biometric identification and relational intelligence.

Taken together, the attorney-call controversies, the cellphone-location episode, and the development of voice-biometric investigative technologies reveal how far the contemporary correctional communications system has moved beyond the conventional boundaries of telecommunications. What began as infrastructure designed to connect an incarcerated person with someone outside the institution has evolved into a technological architecture capable of recording speech, identifying voices, detecting specific language, correlating information, and, under certain circumstances, helping identify or locate individuals outside prison walls. The central question therefore extends beyond the cost of a telephone call. It encompasses what information the call produces, how long that information persists, who can analyze it, and what additional purposes it may ultimately serve.

Securus Today

The Securus that emerges from this history is not the same corporate enterprise that entered the correctional telecommunications market more than two decades ago. Its technological portfolio has expanded, its ownership structure has changed repeatedly, federal regulation has altered the economics of its traditional calling business, and the company now presents itself as a comprehensive technology provider operating at the intersection of corrections, public safety, institutional security, digital connectivity, and reentry. Securus remains part of Aventiv Technologies, alongside Securus Monitoring and JPay, and continues to hold a substantial position in the correctional technology industry. Its current consumer materials state that Securus serves more than 3,400 public-safety, law-enforcement, and correctional agencies and more than 1.2 million incarcerated individuals across North America, while Aventiv describes its broader family of companies as serving more than 1,800 agencies nationwide. The differing figures reflect each company's description of its operations, but both underscore the enterprise’s continued scale.

The corporate structure surrounding Securus underwent another significant transformation in 2026. On July 2, Aventiv announced that it had completed a recapitalization through a debt-for-equity exchange, significantly reducing the company’s indebtedness and shifting it to a new ownership structure backed by institutional investors and lenders. The transaction marked a major departure from the private-equity ownership that had defined much of Securus’s modern corporate history. One month later, Aventiv appointed Brian Evans as chief executive officer and Kevin Elder as president, placing the company under new executive leadership as it entered what it characterized as its next phase of growth.

The company’s contemporary description of itself is also markedly broader than the telephone-service business from which modern Securus developed. Securus now promotes an integrated technological infrastructure encompassing communications, investigative intelligence, electronic monitoring, education, entertainment, digital payments, and institutional operations. Its public materials emphasize facility safety, operational efficiency, education, reentry, and maintaining relationships between incarcerated people and their families. The company says its mission is to “serve and connect” while improving public safety, and it describes its technology as capable of producing better outcomes for correctional agencies, incarcerated individuals, their loved ones, and surrounding communities.

That contemporary presentation deserves inclusion in any comprehensive examination of the company. Securus is entitled to articulate the purposes it believes its technologies serve, just as the regulatory reforms and operational changes undertaken in recent years are material to understanding the company as it exists today. At the same time, corporate transformation does not erase the historical record that preceded it. Lower federally regulated calling rates do not erase decades of sustained controversy over costs in incarcerated communications. Procedural safeguards governing attorney communications do not render inconsequential the privileged calls that were previously recorded. And technologies that can facilitate institutional security and criminal investigations can still raise legitimate questions about privacy, biometric identification, data retention, and the boundaries of surveillance.

The history of Securus Technologies is ultimately larger than the history of a single corporation. It reflects the transformation of incarcerated communication from a relatively narrow telecommunications service into an expansive technological ecosystem through which private companies increasingly mediate communication, financial transactions, digital access, institutional monitoring, and investigative intelligence. That transformation has produced capabilities that would have been difficult to imagine when correctional telecommunications consisted primarily of a telephone mounted to a wall. It has also concentrated extraordinary technological capacity within systems used by a population with comparatively little authority over the conditions under which those technologies are imposed.

For incarcerated people and their families, that imbalance remains central to understanding the industry. They do not negotiate the contracts that determine which company will provide their communications infrastructure. They do not participate in establishing the technological architecture through which their conversations travel, nor do they ordinarily determine what information those systems collect, retain, or analyze. Regulatory agencies can set rate ceilings, courts can adjudicate disputes, correctional administrators can negotiate contractual protections, and corporations can revise their policies and technologies. The people most intimately affected by those decisions, however, remain largely outside the rooms where they are made.

Securus enters this latest chapter under new ownership, new executive leadership, a substantially restructured balance sheet, and a business model extending considerably beyond the telephone call. Whether those changes ultimately produce a correctional communications system that is more affordable, more transparent, and more protective of privacy will be measured not principally by corporate declarations, but by the experiences of the incarcerated people and families who must depend on it.

For more than two decades, the central tension surrounding Securus has remained remarkably consistent even as the technology itself has evolved: the company provides services that sustain relationships across prison walls while operating in a marketplace where the people using those services have little control over who provides them. The telephone call may now pass through a far more sophisticated technological infrastructure than it once did, but the question behind the call remains fundamentally the same—who controls the connection, who bears its cost, and who is accountable for what happens to the information it leaves behind?

Sources: This investigation synthesizes information from court filings and regulatory dockets; reporting by outlets including The Intercept, VICE/Motherboard, Prison Legal News, Broadband Breakfast, and the NYC Department of Investigation; and advocacy research from the Prison Policy Initiative, Worth Rises, and EPIC.