Paul Sancya/AP Photo
Detroit Pistons owner Tom Gores during a game against the Milwaukee Bucks in January 2019
The NBA has put itself at the vanguard of the movement for racial justice in America. The court at the Disney World bubble is emblazoned with the words “Black Lives Matter,” and players have insisted that the league live up to those words. Last week’s three-day playoff strike, after the shooting of Jacob Blake, led to an agreement on the establishment of a social-justice coalition and related advertising focused on civic engagement, advocacy for criminal justice and police reform, and ballot access. On that last point, all franchises that own their home arena vowed to “work with local elections officials to convert the facility into a voting location for the 2020 election.”
The rise of sports figures as a social and political force mirrors past eras; think John Carlos and Tommie Smith raising their fists in Mexico City in 1968, or Curt Flood’s fight for labor freedoms in baseball. The radicalization of basketball stars, using their platform to condemn injustice, is similarly inspiring.
At the same time, however, there has been an uncharacteristic silence about how one of the league’s owners is responsible for systematic abuses against people of color.
Tom Gores, the billionaire owner of the Detroit Pistons, is the founder of private equity firm Platinum Equity, with $23 billion under management and around 40 portfolio companies. The portfolio includes Aventiv, one of the largest prison telecommunications and money transfer companies in the United States. Aventiv’s business model gouges prisoners and their families, who are disproportionately Black and Latino and typically inescapably poor. Yet the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA) has never spoken out about this franchise owner and his role in capitalizing on mass incarceration.
No members of the Pistons sit on the NBPA executive committee. A request for comment from the NBPA was not returned.
The Pistons did not make the NBA playoffs, and hence, will not participate in the bubble seeding games. But next season they will face a full schedule of opponents. Teams in this consciousness-raising league will perform at Tom Gores’s arena and help fill Tom Gores’s pockets with money, though they’ve yet to express any opinion on one of the ways Tom Gores has made his fortune—through the exploitation of Black people caught up in the carceral system.
Some know about Aventiv through the name of one of its affiliates, Securus Technologies, and its duopoly in the prison phone market (Securus serves 1.2 million inmates in North America; the other giant in this space, Global Tel Link, serves 1.8 million). Prices for a Securus phone call in a local jail ranged as high as $24.82 for 15 minutes in Arkansas as recently as last February; Securus claims to have reduced that top rate to $13.65 for 15 minutes, with an average of $3.57. Keeping in touch with loved ones can set back poor people hundreds of dollars. Lack of affordability can lead to inmates being cut off from the outside world, heightening loneliness, spurring alienation, and breeding recidivism.
In May, Gores responded directly to complaints about high prison phone rates from former Federal Communications Commission members, pronouncing himself as a “change agent” dedicated to affordable communication between prisoners and their families, particularly during the coronavirus crisis. But his rundown of Aventiv’s services in his letter reveals the extent of the issue.
In addition to phone services, Securus provides video visitation. A common technique in local jails, even before the pandemic, has been to block access to in-person visitation and allow video visitation instead. Even if visitors come to the jails, they are often put into secure rooms for remote visits. Of course, off-site video visitation costs money, as much as $1 per minute for something that was previously free. Securus states that all but three counties charge less than $1 per minute for remote video sessions.
Inmates and families report that video visitation also frequently doesn’t work, with constant lags, frozen screens, and out-of-sync audio. The videophones are stationed in hallways, with loud noises in the background. One prisoner in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, complained that the camera was bolted to the wall and angled upward. Because he’s short, his family has only seen the top of his forehead for years. There’s little incentive to invest in better equipment, since companies like Securus sign exclusive contracts.
Meanwhile, prisoners and their families are the only people in America who need a stamp to send an email. Aventiv’s JPay unit requires a 35-cent stamp for each page of an e-message, and another 35 cents for each picture or video. Prices deliberately rise on dates like Mother’s Day, when a lot of messages fly back and forth. JPay sells JPay tablets where prisoners can read emails, as well as download books, music, podcasts, and games, each for a larger fee than comparable downloads on the outside.
Prices for a Securus phone call in a local jail can range as high as $24.82 for 15 minutes in Arkansas; keeping in touch with loved ones can set back poor people hundreds of dollars.
In 2018 in Florida, prison officials replaced older mp3 players, stocked with $11.3 million in music (for which the prisons took $1.4 million in commissions), with JPay tablets. They said the old files couldn’t transfer over because JPay’s system was more than just an mp3 player (meaning it could sell prisoners email, too) and therefore incompatible. Inmates had to start over, losing millions of dollars of downloads. JPay said that they provided $4 million in credits to incarcerated individuals in Florida, which still leaves a $7.3 million gap. They claim that the previous vendor wouldn't allow the files to be transferred. It was a testament to the proposition that the best way to get away with stealing is to become a subcontractor to a prison.
As with the video visitation scam, where competing in-person visits are barred to the benefit of the for-profit service, prison officials have repeatedly prohibited things like greeting cards, typewritten paper, colored envelopes, and books and magazines, so inmates can only read correspondence and written material through a JPay tablet. The outlandish claim that these were security measures (colorful paper could be laced with fentanyl, one prison alleged) masked the intent of forcing out any competition for Aventiv’s expensive products.
JPay also provides around 70 percent of U.S. inmates the equivalent of bank accounts, allowing prisoners and families to pay for these services. A $200 transfer can trigger a $13 charge. If a prisoner finishes their sentence with a balance on their account, they get a JPay release card, with charges like “account maintenance fees” of $2.50 a week, even if the card goes unused. JPay has stated that these fees are operative on about 40 percent of their release cards.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Aventiv Technolgoies said the following: “Under the organization’s new leadership, Aventiv has worked to make our services more affordable – including reducing the average cost of a call to 13 cents per minute. Since January, we have provided free communications valued at $20 million and we are in the process of reducing fees by 35 percent. And while the majority of revenue from our communications tools goes to cover the cost of technology, safety and security resources, free educational and re-entry resources and to correctional agencies in the form of commissions, we are now offering zero-commission and fully taxpayer funded options to all correctional customers to accommodate the funding model selected by state and county officials. We know we have more work to do to make our services accessible to incarcerated people and their families, and we expect to be held accountable to our commitments – but that must begin with an accurate and honest picture of our business and the services we provide.”
To be sure, in his letter to the ex–FCC commissioners, Gores cited millions of free calls, video connections, email stamps, game rentals, and movie downloads given out at more than 700 facilities since the pandemic hit. No transaction fees were added to these gifts, Gores said. But this generosity serves mostly to highlight how much Aventiv, through Securus and JPay, was charging before the pandemic.
Gores stressed in the letter that he’s been working to “transform” Aventiv into a compassionate company, but that’s incompatible with a business model of charging desperately poor inmates and their families for services that were previously provided at prison libraries for free. He touts reducing the price of Securus phone calls by 30 percent since he took over the company, as if $2.10 for a ten-minute local call, noted in the letter as a sample price in Washtenaw County, Michigan, was at all equitable. (Other correctional facilities using Securus charge up to five times as much, according to prison advocates.)
The problem, as Gores identifies it, is that prisons and jails take a substantial commission on the calls, and most other services provided by Securus and other contractors. It’s the system of privatization, in other words, that makes the business model so exploitative.
By all accounts, Gores, who is worth $5.7 billion, is a charitable man who has raised money for the underprivileged in Michigan. His team, the Pistons, has committed to various social-justice initiatives, saying in a statement: “words aren’t enough.”
But the prison service provider he owns is irredeemable, and antithetical to the NBA’s commitment to uplift Black lives. Current and former players have chosen not to speak out about one of their league’s owners controlling an exploitative prison company. That’s less tenable in the current moment of the fight for racial justice.
This story has been updated to include a statement from Aventiv Technologies, as well as their contentions on a handful of points.
