Securus and ViaPath hold 80% of U.S. prison phone contracts. Families pay up to $14 a call. Here is why.

When a person incarcerated in a Pennsylvania state prison wants to call their mother, the call routes through Securus Technologies, the contracted phone provider for the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections [3]. The mother pays. The prison system does not pay. The state does not pay the bill, and in many states the state actually collects a commission on every minute her son spends on the line with her [3]. Before the Federal Communications Commission capped per-minute rates in 2024, a 15-minute call from a county jail could cost up to $14, and a single connection fee could add another $5 on top [1][3]. The companies that built that pricing model are still on the contracts.

Two firms dominate the industry. Securus Technologies, owned by private-equity firm Platinum Equity through the parent company Aventiv Technologies, and ViaPath Technologies, formerly known as Global Tel Link or GTL, together hold roughly 80 percent of inmate-communications contracts in the United States [2][4]. The remaining 20 percent is split among smaller regional operators [2]. The two large firms compete for contracts but rarely on price, because the entity awarding the contract is the prison or jail system, and the entity paying the bill is the incarcerated person’s family on the outside [3].

The Official Story

The industry’s stated rationale is that inmate communications require specialized security infrastructure, including call monitoring, voice recognition, fraud prevention, and integration with prison-management systems. Building and maintaining that infrastructure, the argument goes, justifies the per-minute rates. Vendors describe themselves as providing a public-safety service that ordinary telecommunications carriers will not provide.

The regulatory record assembled across more than a decade of FCC proceedings tells a different story [1]. The technology costs of providing inmate calling are not substantially higher than ordinary commercial telecommunications. The cost driver is not the infrastructure. It is the contractual structure that pays the prison or jail system a commission, often 40 to 60 percent of revenue, on every call placed [3]. The high per-minute rates exist to generate the commissions, not to recover technology costs.

Follow the Money

The financial mechanics work in three layers.

The prison or jail issues a request for proposals for inmate communications. The bid is evaluated on a primary criterion that has been documented across the public-bidding literature: the percentage commission the vendor will return to the facility on every call placed [3]. A vendor offering a 30 percent commission loses to a vendor offering 50 percent, even if the vendor offering 30 percent charges lower per-minute rates to the families [3].

The winning vendor signs a multi-year exclusive contract. Securus and ViaPath both bid on commission percentage. Once the contract is signed, the vendor sets per-minute pricing within the regulatory cap and collects from the families. The facility receives its commission as monthly revenue, which most state correctional systems treat as general-fund or facility-improvement money [3][5].

The family of the incarcerated person pays. They pay the per-minute rate, the connection fee, the deposit fees on funding the prepaid account that holds the calling balance, and the dormancy fees when the account sits unused [3]. The American Civil Liberties Union and Color of Change documented per-family annual spending on inmate communications ranging from several hundred to several thousand dollars depending on call frequency and the state of incarceration [5]. The Prison Policy Initiative documented that one in three families with an incarcerated member goes into debt because of communication costs [2].

The structural product is access to a family member. The customer the system was built to extract revenue from is not the inmate, who has no money. It is the family on the outside, who will pay almost anything to maintain contact.

The Network

The two dominant firms have been through multiple ownership reshuffles in the past decade. Securus Technologies is owned by Aventiv Technologies, which is itself owned by Platinum Equity, a Beverly Hills-based private-equity firm [6]. Aventiv acquired Securus in a 2017 debt-financed buyout and has since been the subject of multiple investor write-downs as regulatory pressure has increased [6]. ViaPath Technologies, owned by American Securities and Tower Three Partners, was previously named GTL and earlier Global Tel Link [4]. Both firms have operated under the names of their predecessor companies in different contracts and disclosures, complicating the documentation trail [4].

Worth Rises, a nonprofit that maps the prison-industry corporate landscape, has documented that the same private-equity ownership structure visible at Securus and ViaPath operates at adjacent firms in commissary, money transfer, electronic monitoring, and prison healthcare [4]. The financial sponsor turns over every few years; the contracts roll forward. The same families pay the bills.

What Was Buried

The Federal Communications Commission spent more than a decade attempting to cap inmate calling rates. Each rule was litigated by the industry. Each cap that survived was set higher than the agency’s economists believed actual costs justified [1]. The 2024 final rule, implementing the bipartisan Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act passed by Congress in early 2023, eliminated facility commissions on intrastate calls and set rate caps of 6 to 12 cents per minute depending on facility size [1]. The rule went into effect in stages through 2025.

The cap reduced average call costs substantially but did not change the contract structure. The commission-driven bidding system on remaining services, video calls, electronic messaging, tablet purchases, and commissary money transfer, has continued to produce the same vendor concentration and the same family-pays revenue model on the categories the FCC rule did not directly address [2][3]. The Prison Policy Initiative’s 2024 follow-up report documented that several states began shifting cost recovery to video calls and tablet rentals within months of the calling rate cap taking effect [2].

The Stakes Now

The FCC rule represents the most significant federal intervention in the inmate communications market since the system was effectively privatized in the 1990s. Implementation has been uneven across states. Some jurisdictions, including Connecticut, New York City, Colorado, and Minnesota, have separately moved to make inmate phone calls free, recognizing that family contact correlates with reduced recidivism and that the commission revenue is a small fraction of state correctional budgets [2].

The structural condition the contracts produced is durable across the rate cap. The same private-equity ownership remains in place. The same vendor concentration remains in place. The same financial incentive for facilities to maximize chargeable activity remains in place on every service the FCC rule did not cap. The cost shifted to the families who could not afford it shifted, modestly, on phone calls. It did not disappear.

The One Thing That Matters

The inmate communications industry exists because the United States, alone among advanced democracies, treats access to incarcerated family members as a billable commercial service rather than a baseline operational function of the correctional system. Once that decision was made, an industry grew up to extract value from it. The same families described in the bail-bond industry analysis, families paying the ten-percent fee to the bondsman so their relative does not sit in jail awaiting trial, are the families paying Securus to maintain contact once the trial concludes and the sentence begins.

If correctional systems funded inmate communications as an operational cost the way they fund the lights and the water, the industry’s revenue base would collapse. The families would still be families. The calls would still happen. The companies that built the extraction model would have to find a different market.