Incarcerated People Lose Treasured Media When Prisons Change Tablet Contracts

Between 2016 and 2025, Michelle Shoemaker spent more than $1,000 on songs and games for her tablet — a rudimentary, prison-approved device she purchased from JPay, a subsidiary of the massive prison communications company Aventiv. Her tablet also held hundreds of emails and photographs, including treasured photos and messages from her deceased father, daughter, and mother. One email contained the final words her mother ever wrote to her.

But in March 2025, Shoemaker’s tablet was abruptly confiscated by the Tennessee Department of Correction (TDOC), which had signed a new tablet contract with ViaPath, the prison communications giant formerly known as GTL. None of Shoemaker’s music, games, emails, or photographs were transferred to her new device. The new contract added Tennessee to a growing list of states where incarcerated people have lost purchased digital content due to tablet changes beyond their control. In most cases, the companies profiting off these tablet contracts — including Aventiv and ViaPath — are the same giant corporations that have been exploiting incarcerated people and their families for decades.

In March 2026, Shoemaker and another incarcerated woman, Linda Whitaker, filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against TDOC Commissioner Frank Strada. Their allegations hinge on the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause, which bans the government from taking a person’s private property “without just compensation.”

“The government can’t take your property without compensating you for it,” Thomas Harvey, an attorney representing Shoemaker and Whitaker, told Truthout. “And in this instance, they not only took their property without compensating for it, they took it in order to enter into a contract with a different provider, so that the state can profit more.”

Under the old JPay contract, Shoemaker and others in Tennessee prisons owned their digital files, paying for a song once and retaining it on their tablets. Under the new ViaPath contract, people have to pay $0.03 to $0.05 per minute to access entertainment via a streaming service. According to the complaint, TDOC receives commissions when people place phone calls or access entertainment on the tablets, with a guaranteed minimum annual payment of approximately $2,225,000.

People incarcerated in other states have similarly lost beloved content. In Virginia, Shebri Dillon said the women in her prison had their tablets confiscated without warning in May, and were issued different tablets the following day.

“This switch over has been traumatizing,” Dillon wrote in a message to Truthout. “Some may think that is too strong a word because it’s just music, emails, and pictures. But when one is incarcerated, this is the essence of what we have. It is our coping mechanisms, our connections to family, and memories with our children or those who have passed on.”

Although Dillon said some of her photos transferred over to the new device, “more than half my pictures have not shown up. And I don’t know if they ever will. My children’s graduation pictures, pictures of them as they grow, and pictures of things they wanted to share with me along the way.” She noted that her family had to pay via digital stamps each time they sent those photos.

As of June, she said, officials continue to assure that their purchased music might eventually transfer over to the new devices. “We paid for all these things,” she wrote. “Most institutional residents make $.27 to $.45 an hour. I had over 700 songs at mostly $1.99 a piece. Gone. Still don’t have them back.”

“This is robbery. Of our money, our connections, and our family’s investment. And, most painfully, our hearts,” Dillon said.

People in California prisons are also in the midst of losing their stored photos and messages, as the prison system switches from ViaPath to Securus tablets. And last year, the same thing happened in New Jersey, when the prison system switched from JPay to ViaPath. Like in Tennessee, under New Jersey’s new ViaPath model, people are charged by the minute instead of a flat fee to purchase games, movies, and music outright.

“[My tablet] holds a decade’s worth of sentimental e-messages, pictures and video messages from my family and friends,” Shakeil Price, who is incarcerated in New Jersey, wrote in a 2025 essay in The Marshall Project. In addition to losing $6,000 in music, he wrote, “By changing vendors, I will lose access to photographs from my son’s high school graduation and videos of my grandchild saying his first word, taking his first step and riding his first bike. These items are priceless to me; a dollar amount can’t measure their worth.”

In Wisconsin, in an ongoing, proposed class-action lawsuit filed in 2025, Robert Huber is suing his prison’s warden and the secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Corrections (WIDOC). Huber lost more than $1,000 of tablet content when the department switched providers in 2023. Like the Tennessee plaintiffs, Huber alleges this switch violated the Takings Clause.

“With a simple signing of a new contract, the Wisconsin Department of Corrections … effectively has stolen millions of dollars of digital music, books and movies from the prisoners in its custody,” the complaint alleges. People in Wisconsin went from purchasing individual songs under the old contract, to having to pay an ongoing subscription to access music. According to documents on WIDOC’s website, a music subscription costs $18 a month; there is also a per-minute cost to access some services. WIDOC will make commissions on the subscriptions, a spokesperson told the Appleton Post-Crescent in 2024.

Although WIDOC offered incarcerated people the option to pay $25 to mail their devices home to family members for safekeeping, Huber argues that doing so defeats the purpose of having entertainment while stuck in a prison cell. And the plan is impractical in other ways. “Who’s going to carry around a large device to listen to music?” Nate Cade, an attorney representing Huber, pointed out to Truthout. “That’s like saying, ‘I’m going to carry a boom box’ in a day and age where everybody’s got an iPhone. That just makes no sense.”

Huber’s complaint cites multiple instances where WIDOC told incarcerated people that their digital purchases would remain theirs forever. For instance, an order form for purchasing a tablet promised: “Once music is purchased, you’ll always own it!”

In the lead-up to the tablet transfer, prison officials deflected blame for the upcoming content loss. “There are licensing and copyright issues restricting content transfer from one vendor’s device to another,” an official wrote in a 2023 memo to incarcerated people. “Please understand that is outside the control of the DOC and the tablet provider.”

Huber’s lawsuit questions whether copyright issues would really be a major issue, noting that the outgoing and incoming tablet providers belong to the same parent company, Keefe Group. However, Cade said an even simpler solution would be to offer people media credits equal to the amount they had spent on content for their old tablets.

That is the solution that was reached in a 2020 settlement between the Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC) and incarcerated people in a similar class-action lawsuit, also based on the Takings Clause. In that settlement, FDOC agreed to give millions of digital credits to about 11,000 incarcerated people who had lost their music when the department switched its media player contract from Keefe to JPay.

As in Wisconsin, FDOC had repeatedly advertised to incarcerated people that music purchases would be theirs forever. The tablet user guide explained: “After all, you have already paid for the song once; we don’t think you should ever have to pay for it again.”

“The big question was, ‘What was the thing that the prisoners owned? What was their property interest?’” Dante Trevisani, litigation director at the Florida Justice Institute and an attorney in the lawsuit, explained to Truthout. “And because they were in prison, and it was this intangible digital media thing … It was kind of a novel question. So part of our argument was to incorporate those representations, and to say, ‘When you’re looking to define the property interest, you have to look at what the expectations were when they bought it.’”

In that case, court documents revealed that when FDOC began the process of seeking a new tablet provider, the department initially intended to allow incarcerated people to retain their purchased music. In fact, the complaint alleges that the two vendors, Keefe and JPay, had been willing to work out an agreement to transfer music. But as FDOC proceeded with contract negotiations, it de-prioritized transferring the music (or fully compensating users for lost music), and instead prioritized perks like new computers and iPads for prison officials.

Ultimately, after requiring all incarcerated people to surrender their media players, the department sought to compensate them for their lost music by offering $10 credits — even though the average person owned 300 songs, at a cost of about $500. FDOC had profited significantly from those purchases: Between 2011 and 2017, incarcerated people spent around $11.3 million on media files, $1.4 million of which went to FDOC in commissions.

Although the 2020 settlement ultimately provided members of the class with digital credits equal to the amount they had paid into the old system, some problems cropped up years later. Several incarcerated people sued JPay in 2023 when the company swapped out tablets for new ones, which one again did not contain their previously purchased digital content.

Stealing From and Exploiting Incarcerated People

The loss of people’s digital media during tablet transfers is just another example of how incarcerated people are a literally captive market, especially vulnerable to predatory companies and exploitative policies that remove any competition and charge premium prices for subpar service.

Prison tablets remain largely unregulated, allowing prison communication companies like Aventiv and ViaPath to rake in profits, even as the Federal Communications Commission cracks down on prison phone costs.

Some states have distributed free tablets to their entire prison populations, but many costs are still offloaded onto the users. “While tablets have the potential to improve carceral conditions, the ‘free’ tablet model as it currently exists exploits inmates and often does not work at all,” noted a 2024 analysis from the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). The briefing continued: “In many states, the funding structure of tablet programs incentivize Departments of Corrections to keep rates high — commission or ‘kickback’ clauses offer a percentage of revenue from tablet services to the corrections facility. These clauses lead prisons to prioritize commissions when selecting among bids, rather than lowering costs to incarcerated people and their correspondents.”

Incarcerated people deal with other exploitative tablet practices. Some companies charge people to access e-books that are freely available in the public domain. Others charge incarcerated people by the minute for composing and reading e-messages. This not only means the company gets paid twice for incoming messages (once for the digital stamp purchased by the non-incarcerated sender, and again per-minute as the incarcerated recipient reads it), but it effectively charges slower readers a “literacy tax.” Tablet companies have also exposed people’s personal information, call records, and personal correspondences in data breaches. In South Carolina, people were scammed out of hundreds of dollars due to fraudulent purchases on their ViaPath-branded prison tablets in 2023 and 2024.

Incarcerated people also often experience glitchy service, slow connections, and garbled phone calls on tablets.

When outside companies provide other prison services (such as facilitating phone calls), they are typically paid directly by the department of corrections, in addition to charging incarcerated users and their families per-use. But with tablets, the companies often receive no direct payments from the department. Instead, all money is made by charging incarcerated people for e-messaging, music, and entertainment.

“It’s just so lucrative, they’re doing it without even getting paid from the department of corrections,” Trevisani explained. “So the problem, from my perspective, is that it destroys any of the department’s leverage to enforce the contract.” If the department confronts the tablet provider about glitchy service or other problems, he noted that the provider can essentially say, “‘Well, what are you going to do? You’re not paying us for this. Unless you want to fire us completely, you can’t withhold any payments, you can’t threaten any contract violations.’”

“It’s a double-edged sword,” Bianca Tylek, executive director of Worth Rises, a nonprofit that aims to expose and fight the commercialization of the criminal legal system, told Truthout. “As much as we want technology to be introduced in prisons and jails, relying on the same industry that has preyed upon people for decades is really not the way we should be introducing that technology.”

Tylek said the prison communications companies that get these contracts “are not truly interested in the well-being and advancement of people who are incarcerated. They are interested in preying on people, and so they’re going to introduce these technologies in the exact same way that they’ve done everything in the past, which is with exploitative models. And so you have, frankly, just bad technology, poor technology.”

Questions surrounding digital media ownership extend outside of prison walls. Consumers have sued companies like Amazon and Apple for removing content from their platforms after users “purchased” it.

Yet the issue is far more extreme within prisons, where people have no choice in providers and make far below minimum wage.

“It’s analogous, but this is so much more extreme,” said Harvey, the attorney in the recently filed Tennessee lawsuit. While people on the outside can choose among various entertainment providers, “there is literally no other choice but to go through the prison. They dictate the terms, they negotiate the contract. Your choice is to not have a tablet, not have any access to the outside world — or have the tablet they provide you, with the subscription they provide you. And now they’re saying, ‘Not only that, but we can take the property that was represented to you as being property, at any time we want, without any compensation.’”

While departments of corrections and tablet providers tend to blame copyright issues outside their control, when Ohio switched tablet providers in 2023, it managed to transfer over people’s photos, messages, and music. And the 2020 Florida settlement offers another solution: crediting people in the new system in the amount they paid in the old. In its guide for best practices for prison tablet contracts, the Prison Policy Initiative notes that plans for future transferability or compensation should be included in contracts.

“You live in a cage that they control,” Harvey said. “It’s a sign of a pretty evil society that we not only imprison people — we seek to profit off of them while we’re doing so. And then we think we can steal from them without compensating for the things that we forced them to buy through this provider that we chose. It’s outrageous.”