Years of Incarcerated Journalist’s Reporting Deleted by Notorious Prison Telecom ‘Inadvertently’

Securus Technologies, a prison telecommunications company previously reported on for its predatory business practices, deleted incarcerated users’ draft emails in a system reboot on Monday. One incarcerated journalist says they use the draft box to do critical reporting and lost years of work as a result of the wipe, and that the company silenced important reporting. The company says it was an accident.

Christopher Blackwell, an incarcerated journalist at the Washington Corrections Center in Washington State, posted on X (formerly Twitter) on Monday that Securus had wiped his draft email box. Blackwell has written for numerous outlets about the conditions he faces while incarcerated—he’s active on X by dictating posts over the phone.

“I’m an incarcerated journalist,” Blackwell wrote in the post. “Today Securus, a predatory prison communication co, silenced journalists. With no warning they deleted all drafts of writing. Years of work. Manuscripts. Articles. Everything gone. We’re no longer able to save drafts. Now near impossible to write.”

Securus provides inmates with tablets that allow them to access their emails, as well as direct messaging and video-chats on the platform. Blackwell told Motherboard in a phone call that Securus charges inmates 24 cents per email, either coming in or going out. He said it was a “common occurrence” for Securus to reboot its system, and that this was the fourth time it had happened this year. This time, however, Securus also changed its settings so that no draft email could be saved for longer than 24 hours, which he said had never been the case.

“For anybody who’s an inside journalist, this is a really big deal,” Blackwell said. “I do a lot of investigative pieces—5,000 or 6,000 words. If I can’t save anything, how can I do anything? It’s basically a full-out attack for them to block us from doing these kinds of pieces, and it’s an under-handed way of doing it. This is just one of the many things that they do.”

Both the Washington Department of Corrections and Securus told Motherboard in statements that the draft box deletion and saving settings change had been a mistake. As compensation, the company gave inmates two “stamps” each—an internal system currency for making communications.

“Securus was reconfiguring the WA DOC account,” a DOC spokesperson wrote in an email to Motherboard. “Inadvertently, during the state account’s reconfiguring process, the default setting of ‘zero draft email’ was chosen. This was simply a technical/technician mistake and once realized, it was corrected and returned to WA DOC settings where there is no limit to draft emails. WA DOC email app is working correctly now.”

“Like all technology, our services are not immune to disruption, and we acknowledge the inadvertent deletion of drafts saved within the e-messaging capabilities on Securus tablets provided to incarcerated individuals in Washington State Department of Corrections (WADOC) facilities,” a Securus spokesperson told Motherboard in an email.

“The e-message draft option is not intended for long term storage which is why all Securus tablets have an optional feature that limits storage of e-message drafts to 24-hours for users, giving incarcerated individuals time to compose and complete their communication,” they continued. “The 24-hour feature was unintentionally enabled across WADOC during a system check.  After identifying the issue, which prompted the deletion of users’ drafts older than 24-hours, the storage feature was restored to its original configuration. We apologize for the frustration and confusion caused to our consumers resulting from the lost drafts.”

When asked whether it was possible to restore any lost drafts, the spokesperson wrote, “Unfortunately, the deleted drafts cannot be retrieved. We understand the frustration caused by this incident and we will work with WADOC to consider alternative options to support freestyle writing.”

Mari Cohen, Blackwell’s editor at the magazine Jewish Currents, said that even if the draft deletion was a mistake, it highlighted a major problem with the prison communication system.

“I do think these are very incompetent companies,” Cohen told Motherboard in a phone call. “I’ve been using Securus, JPay, others like them to communicate with prisoners in various locations for five or six years at this point, and they’re very difficult systems to use. They don’t work well. They’re very buggy, things get deleted—it’s a big problem because these things have a monopoly. This is the only way to communicate with these prisoners. So if they’re buggy, these prisoners are totally cut off. It’s a big problem that these companies interfere with people’s lives just by making a mistake—and they do make mistakes—but the prisoners don’t have an option to go use a different email service.” When Motherboard attempted to join the Securus platform and add funds to send messages to incarcerated individuals, we received an error message multiple times and were ultimately unable to do so.

This is apparently not the first time Securus’s system has made such errors. In 2021, Blackwell posted on X (then Twitter) that JPay, a Securus subsidiary which has since merged with the company’s messaging platform, had “updated their operating system so that you cannot save drafts to edit or make paragraphs,” which he said was “an intentional change to silence those of us that write.”

In a reply to his first post, Blackwell wrote that JPay “claims the deletion of drafts was unintentional & they’ll restore. Still unable to make paragraphs & the text appears all in one line--making it near impossible to edit. Are those impediments to writing unintentional too?”

On the phone, Blackwell told Motherboard that Securus also doesn’t allow its users to cut-and-paste from emails, which he said they had told him was for security reasons.

“What security reasons?” Blackwell said in the phone call. He said he could simply re-type the email by hand—but that this extra work made it more difficult for him to make edits on drafts he had emailed to editors at outlets around the country. “It’s just a delay.”

Cohen said it was critical for Blackwell to be able to do his reporting. “There are things he knows about that other journalists wouldn’t be able to get the story on, because they’re not [incarcerated],” she said. “People deserve to be able to represent their own voices, so it’s also very important in that sense.”

“This is the DOC weaponizing an abuse of power to block incarcerated journalists from exercising first amendment rights,” Blackwell said. “They want to make it as difficult and as much of a struggle as possible. We’re already dealing with having a hard time getting publishers to work with us because of how difficult it can be. They hope this can stop people from writing—but it won’t deter many of us. There are some of us that have a lot of people who are willing to put a vast amount of resources into this.”