The new state budget includes $1 million to fund a pilot program for AI software to record and analyze the hundreds of thousands of calls made by those incarcerated in state facilities.

This story was originally published by Signal Statewide. Statewide is a nonprofit media partner of the Toledo Free Press.

By Jake Zuckerman | Signal Statehouse

Starting next year, all phone calls involving some of the 45,000 men and women in state prisons in Ohio will be recorded and analyzed by new artificial intelligence technology. 

The recently passed state budget provided $1 million for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections to buy software that can “transcribe and analyze all inmate phone calls.” That data will be accessible to all law enforcement agencies in Ohio to support criminal investigations. The program is funded as a pilot through 2026 after the attorney general approves a location. 

State policy already allows state employees and private contractors to monitor or record calls of anyone incarcerated in state facilities, either at random or on a regular basis “for cause.” Those comments can lead to disciplinary or criminal consequences.  

However, manually combing through hours of calls is a tedious and time consuming process, naturally limited by the manpower to review it all. AI, via what vendors call “automated content analysis,” allows state officials to do the same thing, at a massive scale and a fraction of the cost. The technology is designed to flag for personnel any suspicious words and phrases it detects.

“Sometimes those reviews are getting information about crimes that are occurring in the prison, or outside the prison at the prisoners’ behest, threats against corrections workers, etc.” said House Finance Chairman Brian Stewart in an interview. “The potential to do what we’re already doing, in a more efficient way with less man hours and taxpayer expense, we thought was an intriguing idea.”

One vendor of such software, LeoTech, a Texas company, hired three lobbyists from two law firms to help make its case in the state budget, to House lawmakers especially. And Annette Chambers-Smith, director of the ODRC, met with state lawmakers and advocated for funding for the new system. ODRC spokeswoman Jenn Truxall said some Ohio prisons have already launched an “independent pilot program” using LeoTech software.

Lawmakers who support the technology, and the vendors themselves, say it’s a cost-effective way to cut down on drug flow into the prison and any ongoing crimes involving current inmates. But critics say it’s an invasion of privacy of both inmates and those in contact with them, leaving their data at risk of leaks or misuse by the vendors. 

Plus, several companies active in the industry have been accused of improperly recording phone calls between inmates and their attorneys – calls which are typically private affairs. 

Prison vendors join the AI rush

A handful of vendors nationally offer AI monitoring services for state penal systems. 

LeoTech sells its Verus product, powered by Amazon Web Services’ software. The company says Verus produces transcripts, can isolate “relevant communications” among high volumes of long phone calls, cuts through slang or coded terminology, and can “visually identify patterns and connections within your data to better understand complex communication networks.”

Aventiv, another Texas company, operates subsidiaries that offer a broader set of phone, video call, and GPS monitoring services. That includes Securus, which operates AI surveillance technology in prisons across multiple states. 

Rory McBryde, a prosecutor in Michigan, founded WireTap in 2019, a company that uses ChatGPT to transcribe jail calls and alert prison officials and prosecutors to possible criminal evidence. He described in a podcast his frustrations as a prosecutor that there was no easy way to surf through days worth of phone calls from suspects to get to the important stuff. 

“Almost every single felony domestic violence case where the guys are locked up, we know they’re calling their girlfriends, telling them not to testify or threatening them or saying, ‘Think about the kids,’” he said. “All of this stuff is illegal. That’s another felony.”

None of the vendors responded to interview requests. 

AI monitors accused of eavesdropping on attorney calls

Typically, communications between people and their attorneys are considered confidential. 

However, in some states that have deployed AI systems to monitor the calls in jails as well as prisons, the vendors have been dogged by accusations of eavesdropping on inmates’ calls with attorneys, which could give prosecutors a strategic advantage in trial or plea negotiations. 

For instance, the New York Department of Investigation issued a report determining that Securus inadvertently recorded about 324 privileged, attorney-client phone calls between late 2020 and early 2021. That’s a small subset of about 700,000 calls analyzed. 

Securus settled a class action lawsuit in 2020 for $880,000 with California prisoners who alleged their calls with public defenders had been unlawfully recorded. 

In jails in Maine, Securus’ surveillance systems recorded nearly 1,000 attorney phone calls recorded in four county jails in about a year. That affected nearly 200 defendants and 44 law firms, according to public records obtained by the Maine Monitor. The inmates and their attorneys filed a class action lawsuit against the company, later dismissed by a federal judge who found the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate the company intended to capture the attorney-client calls. 

And Securus and CoreCivic, a private prison operator, paid $5.3 million to settle two lawsuits in Kansas from 500 current and former detainees who say their calls with their attorneys were improperly recorded, according to the Kansas City Star. 

Privacy advocates weary of AI surveillance

Stephanie Krent teaches at Columbia University Law School and practices at the Knight First Amendment Institute there. She said there’s a yawning gap between old-fashioned call monitoring and omnipresent artificial intelligence creating a “permeating surveillance system.”

The recordings, she said, will sweep up not only the recordings of the inmates but law abiding people on the outside. From there, the vendors could sell or carelessly handle the data. And state prosecutors could gain a panopticon-level view of communication networks.

“I think those lawsuits are a lesson about trusting the intentions of these telecommunications companies and hoping that everything will work out as planned,” she said in an interview. 

Will Owen is a spokesman for STOP, a New York-based public interest nonprofit focused on limiting technological surveillance from law enforcement that has studied Securus’ rollout of the technology in New York facilities. 

There, he said, besides recording attorney phone calls, the technology has violated the privacy of innocent people contacting inmates, and its biased software produced disproportionate numbers of false positive flags on Black and other minority inmates. 

“This software is not just a threat to people who are incarcerated, but to their friends, family, children, their entire communities,” he said. “It deepens the reach of surveillance into already over-policed communities of color. And it’s very rife with racist biases, struggling with certain accents, tones that do not fit more Eurocentric standards. It’s just a really dystopian form of surveillance and expansion of surveillance.”

Lawmakers cite public safety interest 

The legislative text of the budget is vague in terms of how many facilities will be under the AI monitoring, but Stewart said his conversations with the ODRC suggested the agency would pilot the technology at one prison before rolling it out further. That’s Ross Correctional Institution, in Chillicothe. 

There, prosecutors say that Rashawn Cannon, a 28-year-old serving a sentence for felony assault and possessing a weapon while prohibited from doing so, murdered a 62-year-old corrections officer on Christmas Day last year. The death came amid reports from the guards’ union of understaffing, and a significant increase in use of force incidents between officers and inmates between 2013 (259) and 2023 (736). 

Stewart, an attorney, said he “assumed” the AI vendors have some means to screen out the lawyers’ calls with inmates. But he’s not worried about it, given the words would likely be found inadmissible as evidence.

Another supporter of the budget provision, Rep. Mark Johnson, a Republican whose district includes Ross Correctional, said he hadn’t heard about the attorney-client privilege problems and doesn’t think the state should be listening in on those calls. 

But he said he’s heard reports from corrections officers of drugs coming into the prison with ease, fueling a rash of overdoses from people with no ostensible contact with the outside world. The $1 million investment, he said, can help clean up the facility.

“There’s so many calls, a human being can’t do it,” he said.