[the appeal]

The Slow Death of a Prison Profiteer: How Activism Brought Securus to the
Brink

On the hook to repay $1.3 billion of debt this year, the nation's
largest prison telecom company, Securus, is on the verge of bankruptcy.
Its failure would represent a remarkable victory for advocates - and a
potential beginning of the end for the industry as we know it.

Dana Floberg, Morgan Duckett
Apr 04, 2024

Last week, the nation's largest prison and jail telecom corporation,
Securus, effectively defaulted on more than a billion dollars of debt.
After decades of preying on incarcerated people and their loved ones with
exploitative call rates and other predatory practices that have driven
millions of families into debt, Securus is being crushed under the weight
of its own. In March, the company's creditors gave the corporation an
eight-month extension to pay up, urging its sale to a new owner to stave
off an otherwise imminent bankruptcy.

Securus is one of two corporations that dominate roughly 80 percent of the
U.S. prison telecom industry, forming an effective duopoly that thrives on
the captive markets found inside the nation's lockups. Both companies
are owned by private-equity firms: Securus, by Platinum Equity, and
ViaPath (previously Global Tel Link), by American Securities.

The slow death of the largest player in this space is not accidental. It
follows six years of intense advocacy to expose the vulnerability of the
prison telecom industry's business model on both ethical and economic
grounds. Organizers have waged a strategic war against Securus, educating
investors and the public about the company's predatory practices while
successfully advocating for legislation and regulation to rein them in.
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rest:
https://theappeal.org/securus-bankruptcy-prison-telecom-industry/
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Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key
dannyb@panix.com
[to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]