This is the best summary I could come up with:

Two lawsuits filed by a civil rights group allege that county jails in Michigan banned in-person visits in order to maximize revenue from voice and video calls as part of a “quid pro quo kickback scheme” with prison phone companies.

In the other lawsuit, defendants include Genesee County Sheriff Christopher Swanson and prison phone company ViaPath Technologies.

“Across the United States, hundreds of jails have eliminated in-person family visits over the last decade,” the group said, adding:

So the companies offered sheriffs and county jails across the country a deal: if you eliminate family visits, we’ll give you a cut of the increased profits from the larger number of calls.

This led to a wave across the country, as local jails sought to supplement their budgets with hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from some of the poorest families in our society.

This “decision was part of a quid pro quo kickback scheme with Securus Technologies, a for-profit company that contracts with jails to charge the families of incarcerated persons exorbitant rates to communicate with one another through ‘services’ such as low-quality phone and video calls,” the lawsuit said.

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