California made waves when it handed tablets to nearly 90,000 incarcerated people, giving them access to free calls, messaging, and entertainment for the first time. For many, it was genuinely life-changing. But now the state is switching to a new vendor, and the transition is becoming a total nightmare.

The state contracted with Securus Technologies to replace the current Viapath tablets starting last year. The deal was supposed to save money for both the state and incarcerated people through lower rates on calls and messages. Sounds good in theory, right? Except Securus devices were supposed to be installed everywhere by the end of 2025. We’re now in spring 2026, and most prisons still haven’t made the switch.

When the first facility did transition, things got messy fast. Prisoners and their families discovered that Securus was charging way more for text messages than the 3 cents per message promised in the contract. Turns out the company had a secret character-count-based pricing scheme nobody knew about. After CalMatters started asking questions and incarcerated people complained, Securus quietly fixed the billing and issued $10 credits to everyone affected. The company still hasn’t publicly explained what happened.

But here’s where it gets really frustrating: the entertainment fees are another story entirely. Movies are priced at regular retail rates, like $8.99 for newer releases, with only 48 hours to watch them before they disappear. Meanwhile, most incarcerated people earn less than 74 cents an hour for prison jobs. “They’re making bank”, said Grace Coleman, incarcerated at the California Institution for Women in Chino. “These are like normal world prices”.

The rollout has also been clunky. Internet connectivity keeps dropping, landlines have gone down repeatedly, and the whole system feels half-baked. Technical issues aside, there’s something way more troubling happening here: personal data is about to vanish forever.

When people turn in their old Viapath tablets for new Securus devices, nothing transfers over. No photos, no videos, no messages from family members. Three years of digital memories just… gone. Viapath doesn’t offer any way to back up this stuff, and prisoners can’t access cloud storage services like Google Drive without direct internet. The only option? Pay per page to print out photos and messages before the old tablets become defunct. After that, it’s all permanently deleted.

The silver lining is that California is genuinely leading on prison communications policy. It’s one of only five states covering the cost of incarcerated people’s phone calls. State Sen. Josh Becker, a Democrat from Menlo Park, wrote the 2022 law that made this happen and is now pushing to make electronic messaging free too.

“It’s the injustice of the whole thing”, Becker said. “And not only injustice, but also the illogical nature of charging in a world where telecommunications costs are moving closer to free”.

Until then, incarcerated people and their families are caught in a frustrating transition that’s costing them money, service reliability, and irreplaceable personal data.