The Succession Battle For A Prison Empire
March 21, 2025 at 05:30PMExploiting incarcerated people is lucrative business. For The Lever, Katya Schwenk pulls back the curtain on Smart Communications, a prison technology company that has made millions charging incarcerated people and their families for basic communication—squeezing money from an already vulnerable population and further severing their connection to loved ones and the outside world. At the center of this story is Jon Logan, the company’s flashy CEO, who is now fighting to keep control of the business after his father’s death. (Think Succession, but without an annoyingly charming Kieran Culkin-type sibling to root for.) Schwenk’s reporting unpacks a bitter family feud and, zooming out, the larger corruption within the for-profit prison industry in the US.
Perks for prison bosses have always been a central feature of this business, although they have not always taken the form of strip clubs and Caribbean cruises. As phone companies jockeyed for prison contracts in the ’80s, they began to court corrections officials by offering agencies a share of the revenue. For every $1 a prisoner spent on a phone call, say, the phone company would take 60 cents, and the prison would take the rest. Perversely, then, phone companies competed in the prison market not by decreasing rates but by raising them.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/03/21/the-succession-battle-for-a-prison-empire/
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