When Chuck Meire and Shawn Weneta gained seats on the board of directors at Assisting Families of Inmates, the men were galvanized by the Virginia nonprofit’s mission. But shortly after they joined in 2021, the unlikely duo — Meire, then a Harvard graduate student and Weneta, a recently pardoned felon — came to believe that their organization wasn’t living up to its namesake.
Their problem: the cost of the Zoom-like video calls — run by AFOI and its partner ViaPath Technologies, the giant prisons communications firm — connecting inmates at Virginia prisons with their loved ones. At first, the price for the mobile device or at-home video calls was 40 cents a minute. Then, AFOI and ViaPath cut it to 20 cents a minute. Though Meire’s research found that rate was among the least expensive in the country, he and Weneta believed that their nonprofit shouldn’t be collecting any money from incarcerated people or their families for the calls.
They pushed their nonprofit internally to make the change. When that didn’t work, they headed to Richmond to press lawmakers. Now, after two years of lobbying — and then quitting their nonprofit board — a bill that they helped craft and that takes aim at the video call prices awaits Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s (R) signature. The bill, which passed both chambers of the General Assembly this legislative session, would require video calls to be set at the “lowest available rates.”
Typically, criminal justice advocates and incarcerated people direct much of their ire against prisons and the corporations that charge excessive fees for phone calls, emails, even snacks and deodorant inside the prison commissaries. But, in this case, a nonprofit — which has eight full-time employees and partners with one of the nation’s largest prison phone companies — has attracted the scrutiny.
“AFOI has fallen into the same profit-seeking trap that the prison communications industry thrives on. This money is coming from disproportionately Black, Brown and poor communities,” said Meire, now the deputy policy director at the civil rights nonprofit JULIAN. “Every dollar AFOI takes for video calls means families have to choose between seeing their loved one and paying bills.”
Fran Bolin, AFOI’s executive director since 2001, said those criticisms are unfair, noting that the nonprofit also covers the cost of the video calls for families that can’t afford them.
“We don’t have a motivation other than serving families,” Bolin said. “It is very painful and hurtful to the organization and to the nearly 50 years of good works that we’ve been doing to cast us in those lights. If we want to talk about a billion-dollar prison industry and look at some of these providers and what they do when they take in these revenues … that’s not in one second in the same realm of what AFOI is doing.”
An unlikely duo
When they joined AFOI’s board in November 2021, Meire and Weneta came with experience working with prisoners. Or, being one.
Meire, a 2018 graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, had just begun a master’s degree program in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Weneta, a CPR instructor, spent 16 years behind bars for embezzling tens of thousands of dollars from his employer before earning a pardon in 2020.
Meire and Weneta admired AFOI’s altruistic history when they signed on as board members. Since 1978, the nonprofit has been busing friends and families of inmates to Virginia prisons at nominal sums. It launched video conference calls at Virginia churches nearly 15 years ago so people could see their loved ones without the long hauls — calls that also now cost 20 cents a minute. Then, in 2019, AFOI, partnering with ViaPath (formerly known as Global Tel*Link), began the program allowing people to make the video calls from their mobile devices or computers.
Soon after they attained seats on AFOI’s board, Meire and Weneta registered their frustrations about the video call prices to the nonprofit. But they couldn’t persuade the organization — which says it agreed with them in principle — to make the video calls at no cost to families. So, the men turned to the General Assembly.
This year, the men found traction with Del. Sam Rasoul (D-Roanoke), the patron of the bill that would require the video call fees to be set at “the lowest available rates.” Rasoul told The Post that the bill should “drastically reduce” the price from 20 cents a minute.
Nationwide, video-calling rates for prisoners are much higher than regular phone calls for inmates, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, a Massachusetts nonprofit. Later this year, the Federal Communications Commission, empowered by a law signed by President Biden in 2023, is expected to release new rules that could cap the amount of money prison video calls cost to users, the group said.
Bolin said the nonprofit would one day like for families to pay nothing for the video calls. But she said that AFOI and ViaPath need to continue charging because some of that revenue — along with a $3 million covid-related federal grant awarded to the state’s corrections department — helps pay for the installation of more video visitation stations within the prisons. Right now, inmates can face long waits to use the video-call areas because, depending on the prison, there are only so many.
The nonprofit also believes that, at a minimum, the video-call charges offer insurance against potential cuts in state appropriations.
“We continue to put out family surveys and one of the most recent ones directly addressed the cost — and the cost to families, per their own feedback, is not the issue,” Bolin said. “What they’re concerned about is the availability of [video] visits, the quality of those visits and successful technologies.”
Weneta, who after his release from prison is now the policy and advocacy strategist at ACLU of Virginia, contends that AFOI could afford “slashing” the video-call price.
Given their donations, grants, state appropriations and income from the video-call contract, he said, “they have more than enough money.”
According to AFOI’s most recently available tax filings, the nonprofit reported a net income of more than $543,000 in fiscal 2022 and $1.14 million in revenue. The year before, it made nearly $500,000 and about $815,000 in revenue. Those net incomes, Bolin said, reflect funds that AFOI held between March 2020 and March 2023, when, due to the prisons’ coronavirus restrictions, the nonprofit wasn’t renting charter buses for in-person visitations.
AFOI receives money from a range of sources: General Assembly appropriations; the video-call contract; and a network of individual, corporate, foundation and faith-based donors.
Since fiscal 2022, Virginia lawmakers have given the nonprofit $470,000 in annual appropriations mostly for two initiatives: AFOI’s program that buses friends and loved ones to prisons; and, its “Milk and Cookies” program, which offers mentoring sessions for 125 elementary school students in Richmond who have incarcerated caregivers.
Additionally, AFOI has received portions of an annual $250,000 appropriation to Virginia’s corrections department to fund and expand its video-call systems; establish a fund for needy families who can’t easily afford the calls; upgrade the video-call centers at various churches across the state; and, to offset its reduced profits when AFOI and ViaPath agreed about a year-and-a-half ago to cut the video call price to 20 cents a minute.
As for the video-call contract, after ViaPath recoups its infrastructural expenses every month, the tech firm and AFOI evenly divide the revenue made off the calls, Bolin said. For this fiscal year, the nonprofit expects after expenses the deal to generate for itself a net income of about $400,000, Bolin said. That money, she said, supports the rest of the group’s family and in-person and video visitation services.
But Meire and Weneta say that AFOI is a middleman artificially raising costs. The vast majority of states, if not all of them, they said, simply contract directly with a prison phone company. The nonprofit, they argue, isn’t providing the technology powering the video calls. If AFOI wasn’t involved, they said, then, theoretically the video call price would only be 10 cents a minute — not 20.
Bolin said that claim is “just an easy, nonfactual assumption to make if you see AFOI as an obstacle.” She added that the nonprofit helps people nationwide set up their online ViaPath accounts and register for the video calls. More states, she said, are considering emulating AFOI’s partnership with ViaPath.
“There are many young people today that are able to and understand how to set up their account on their own, register and schedule a visit, and download the apps,” Bolin said. “But we help thousands of families each year get those steps taken because they’re not able to understand that process or they don’t have the technology. So, we’ll help them set up an account, schedule in-person or video visits, troubleshoot or even help provide a tablet.”
‘It’s dirt cheap’
By the summer of 2023, less than two years into his tenure on the AFOI board, Meire quit. Then, in January, Weneta also resigned, denouncing in his farewell letter that the video-call rate was “nothing but a regressive tax on the poor families AFOI claims to serve.”
The organization, Bolin said, was eager to move on after they left. The nonprofit believed that their lobbying in Richmond posed a conflict of interest with AFOI’s goals. Meire said AFOI never requested him to stop and that their advocacy to cut video-call prices was on behalf of other civic organizations that they belonged to — not AFOI.
The pair acknowledged that the bill requiring video-call prices to be set at the “lowest available rates” is not ideal, but said it was better than the status quo.
Bianca Tylek, the founder and executive director of Worth Rises, a New York-based nonprofit that seeks to end the commercialization of the nation’s prisons, said she doesn’t support any legislation short of making all prison communications free to incarcerated people or their families.
“It could be potentially harmful to pass something that suggests that there is an acceptable low rate,” she said. “It might hinder future action to make free video calls.”
Bolin said she also doesn’t know yet to what degree the bill might lower the 20-cent-a-minute rate.
The Post asked ViaPath the same question, but Matt Caesar, ViaPath’s chief strategy officer, said in a statement to The Post only that the company endorses prisons and jails “transitioning to free calling … We applaud the Virginia legislation that would lower costs to end users.”
Sandra Weaver, of Midlothian, Va., who uses one of AFOI’s video conference call centers to talk with a loved one on the weekends, has no complaints about the price. Since her incarcerated relative is imprisoned several hours away from her home, the price of the video calls is especially affordable compared to the cost of an in-person visit.
“It’s dirt cheap,” said Weaver, a retired state government employee. “If it’s snowing and there’s ice where he’s imprisoned, the roads are hazardous, but at least I can still see him on video.”
But some people who use the video service say the video often lags, stalls out or is grainy. In its statement, ViaPath said it was “continuously investing in technology and the infrastructure necessary to deliver these services effectively.”
Since users can only pick between a 20-minute call for four dollars or a 50-minute call for $10, the shoddy video can mean a waste of time and money, said Paulettra James, a co-founder of the advocacy group Sistas in Prison Reform, whose husband and son are serving time in Virginia.
She stopped using the service altogether, even after the price dropped to 20 cents a minute. “The cost felt like punishment on top of punishment,” said James, an executive assistant at a D.C.-based consulting firm. “I’d have to worry and ask: Do I pay my electric bills? Or talk to my loved one?”
Her husband, Jerry Lorenzo James, incarcerated at Caroline Correctional Unit in Hanover, Va., said in a telephone interview that he wishes the video calls were free and didn’t freeze up as much.
“It’s frustrating because our loved ones are paying for something that doesn’t have the kinks out of it yet,” said James, who was convicted of robbing several banks in Virginia Beach in 2000, according to a letter his attorney wrote supplementing his petition for a conditional pardon.
Bolin said she is well aware of those criticisms.
“That’s part of our role in this,” she said, “to continuously push for better technologies, better connections.”
