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Last year, Street Roots exposed several new contracts at the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office that bled money out of unsuspecting inmates. As a result of the January 2015 story, Sheriff Dan Staton backed away from one decision, to require family members to use video technology to "visit" their loved ones in jail.
Under pressure from county commissioners who nonetheless have no oversight of the sheriff's jails, Staton agreed to at least preserve inmates' ability to use traditional booths, with shatterproof glass instead of video monitors, to meet with visitors.
Now The Nation magazine based in New York City brings us a devastating follow-up, detailing how a subcontract with the company that offers the video visits has badly transformed Multnomah County's system for returning money to arrestees upon their release. Inmates used to get their first $100 back in cash, with the rest by check. Today they get pre-paid debit cards.
That subcontract, with Numi Financial, translates to hefty fees and no recourse for inmates, many of whom are already desperately poor.
Those fees are now the subject of a class-action lawsuit, and as The Nation reports, its lead plaintiff is a woman arrested at a Portland protest following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.
After her arrest, the woman, Danica Brown, "used the Numi card to purchase coffee and groceries. Five days later, she was charged $5.95 for a monthly service fee and then 95 cents for a declined service charge. The criminal charges against Brown were eventually dismissed, but according to transaction records, she lost 22 percent of her money to fees."
The high fees aren't necessarily what local jailers are banking on when they agree to do work with Numi Financial, which pitches its service as a fraud deterrent and added convenience.
That's because company representatives have misrepresented the frequency of their fees, The Nation shows.
"Numi turned over three months of reports from two jails in California and one in Oregon, covering 10,963 Numi cards," the magazine writes. "Of those cards, 30.1 percent went unused; overall, cardholders avoided fees on only 19.8 percent of the cards."
Unused cards are subject to monthly $5.95 charges that can quickly drain cards with small balances.
What's more, those charges can be erroneous.
"Oversight is so minimal that, in Multnomah County, Numi routinely violates its contract," the magazine reports. "Hundreds, even thousands, of Numi cardholders from Multnomah County jails may have been improperly charged the $5.95 monthly fee."
Willamette Week