Cellblock Callers: Utah to end inmate work program

Utah inmates making telemarketing calls as part of a prison work program solicited the home address of an unsuspecting young Texas girl earlier this year, then wrote her a letter asking if she’d like a boyfriend.

A public outcry ensued when the girl’s family discovered that the letter had been written by a felon. Last month, the state decided to end the inmate work program by the end of August.

“It’s more of an emotional issue than a logical issue,” says Dick Clasby, director of Correctional Industries, the organization that operates the program for Utah’s Department of Corrections. “The statistics are so minute as far as violations go, but when they occur they’re so emotional and so traumatic to the families that receive the contact that we’re just not prepared to continue that kind of operation.”

Utah operated five call centers (two have already closed) using 130 inmates. The centers handle calls for Utah’s Department of Commerce and Division of Travel Development, a company that calls on businesses to promote local training seminars and a telemarketing firm that contracts telemarketing projects. The inmate who wrote to the girl was making calls for SandStar Family Entertainment, a Salt Lake City video marketer.

The Division of Travel Development has used the service for about two and a half years for inbound calls without incident. Of the five inmates hired, three work full-time each week. The majority are sex offenders, says Spence Kinard, assistant director for the ivision.

Kinard maintains that his unit went to great lengths to protect the public by instituting a number of safeguards, with Kinard personally interviewing each inmate hired. Every phone conversation was recorded so it could be pulled up and played back if a concern arose. Names and addresses taken to provide fulfillment were entered into a computer that immediately sent the information to a database at the division’s Salt Lake City facility.

In addition, a full-time staffer oversaw operations on site at the call center and overheard all conversations. Note pads were numbered and accounted for at day’s end. And any caller wanting more information was transferred to an off-site facility where a rep there took the data. “We felt that all these things were precautions that prevented the misuse and abuse of the public trust,” Kinard says.

Several benefits contribute to the appeal of the service, Kinard adds. Live operators proved more popular than automated recordings or a voice-activated system. The program also helps inmates learn a skill and improve their time in prison. One inmate who worked for Travel Development got a job within the travel industry after his release, Kinard says.

And the cost of using the program is substantially lower than that of private sector call centers. Travel Development paid $7.50 per hour per inmate, or a total of $80,000 last year. A nearby large telemarketing service quoted an average rate of $25 to $30 per hour, Kinard adds. “It’s a shame that one or two bad apples have to ruin the whole barrel,” he says of the state’s decision to shut down the service.

An investigation into the incident with the 15-year-old Texas girl revealed that after she answered the phone the inmate, who had been hired five days earlier to work for SandStar, had deviated from the script, Clasby says. The inmate, 25-year-old Michael L. Hardy of Utah, was fired and disciplined, and correspondence was sent to the Utah Board of Pardons requesting additional prison time. Hardy was incarcerated for auto theft, failure to stop for an officer and distribution and arranging to distribute a controlled substance. He was expected to be released July 1.

To make matters worse, the Texas family had requested to be placed on SandStar’s do-not-call list, but through some fluke it didn’t happen and the family received a second call from an inmate, Clasby says. The family has not yet taken any legal action against the state.

SandStar – after trying for four weeks to continue participation in the program – pulled out and moved its equipment to one of the private sector telemarketing services it had been using. SandStar executives had not returned calls at press time.

Two other incidents added to the decision to end the program. One inmate initiated separate contacts with two young Utah woman. Both received letters saying the inmate worked for a firm that sells family films. The letter asked the women if they would like to write, date, hold hands and have sex.

An investigation into those incidents revealed that the inmate did not work for the service (he had a friend who did) but had seen photographs of the women in local newspapers and had a friend’s family in those areas obtain their addresses.

The families involved were sent photographs of the inmates and local law enforcement personnel were notified of the prisoners’ expected release dates. The families are also to be told when the prisoners are released, Clasby says.

According to a study released by The U.S. General Accounting Office last year, 5,539 inmates in both state and federal prisons have access to citizens’ names and addresses. The inmates work by contractual arrangements with government agencies or private companies and do general support work for correctional programs.

At the time of the GAO study, other states besides Utah that offered telemarketing services using inmates were Illinois, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, Oklahoma and Oregon. Other areas of work involving inmates included order fulfillment, data entry, shipping, printing, order taking and bulk mailing.

Nine incidents between 1991 and 1997 were reported in the study, resulting in the cancellation of five programs, Clasby said. Six incidents involved an inmate contacting someone whose personal information they had acquired through the work program, two involved credit card theft and one involved two inmates who attempted to smuggle copies of birth certificates out of the prison through the U.S. mail system. The certificates were sent back by return mail.

The former Metromail Corp. was embroiled in a controversy several years ago when a Texas convict working for a Metromail vendor called a female survey respondent and made suggestive remarks.