(Photo by iStock/MivPiv)
Telecommunications companies have long profited from incarcerated people and their loved ones trying to remain in touch with each other through pay phones and collect calls. But as the dollars have flowed in, few tech innovators have pursued the question of whether it’s possible to make these services free.
Enter Ameelio, a nonprofit start-up featuring an app that allows people outside of prisons to send their incarcerated friends and relatives postcards, letters, and photos—for free.
“It’s immoral for incarcerated people, their families, and the most vulnerable people in our communities to be excessively charged for the same thing that [people who aren’t incarcerated] have access to for free,” says Uzoma Orchingwa, cofounder of Ameelio. “It didn’t make sense to us to place a regressive tax on this community.”
In 2019, Orchingwa met fellow Ameelio cofounder Gabe Saruhashi while they both were studying at Yale University. Having had several friends become incarcerated, Orchingwa, then a Yale law student, read articles about people’s difficulties staying connected to loved ones while behind bars. After he read about Saruhashi’s work in communications technology, they bonded over coffee and a shared passion for social justice.
They launched the app just as the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States in early 2020, and they initially had trouble fundraising because some potential donors and investors didn’t understand their vision for a nonprofit tech company that adopted some of the same structures of a venture but without a profit motive. Ameelio’s major funders include several foundations, such as the Robin Hood Foundation and Start Small, the philanthropy backed by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, as well as a number of small donors. The app’s founders have already raised $1.5 million—enough to remain operational through 2021. The cofounders feel optimistic about fundraising because Ameelio recently received Fast Company’s 2021 World Changing Ideas Award in the social justice category.
Two companies hold a virtual monopoly over the $1.2 billion industry in inmate communications. Securus Technologies, which Detroit Pistons owner Tom Gores’ firm, Platinum Equity, purchased three years ago for $1.5 billion, has faced heavy criticism for charging high fees and preying upon the incarcerated. The same judgment could apply to Global Tel Link, or GTL (formerly owned by Gores’ brother, Alec Gores), which at one point netted upwards of $17 for each 15-minute call. Such charges compound the financial injustice faced by the incarcerated and their families.
“Data shows that the more contact one has with their loved ones while incarcerated, the much better they do post-release,” Orchingwa explains. “So there’s a moral imperative, as well as a practical and pragmatic one, and that’s why we wanted to divorce from profit. It’s almost impossible to be fully committed to the idea of [disrupting the current system] and being a for-profit company.”
Ameelio’s platform also includes a correspondence feature, which allows organizations to send materials to people who are incarcerated. Journalism nonprofit The Marshall Project uses this feature to offer free copies of their print publication News Inside, which is distributed in prisons and jails nationwide, through the app.
The literature and human rights nonprofit PEN America also uses Ameelio to reach incarcerated writers working with its Prison and Justice Writing Team. PEN America chose Ameelio to remain engaged with participants after pandemic lockdowns began and snail mail became unfeasible. They needed a way to send large mailings to a list of recipients and to track and log correspondence required by mentorship volunteers.
Ameelio has access to prisons through agreements with states, but it is not yet nationwide. So, Orchingwa and Saruhashi continue to work on acquiring state contracts while also further developing their app so that incarcerated people can begin charting their path toward successful reentry into society as soon as they enter the prison system. To this end, Ameelio launched a free videoconferencing platform at the Iowa Correctional Institution for Women in June to expand ways for the incarcerated to stay connected to their families and to facilitate their access to remote learning and mental health services. Ameelio plans to scale this video platform to all nine of Iowa’s prisons by the end of August, and it has tentative agreements with Iowa, Massachusetts, and Colorado to run pilots of the video platform this year.
The goal, Orchingwa says, is “to create an ecosystem through which we can have sustained decarceration.”
Read more stories by Derrick Clifton.