By Jason R. Glascock, Racine Correctional Institution
[Editor’s note: The Idaho Department of Correction is currently in the process of replacing its prison messaging and media provider, JPay, with GettingOut (formerly GTL). The agency’s residents and their loved ones are curious as to what to expect from the new service.
Earlier this year we heard from Wisconsin prisoner Jason Glasscock, who described extreme delays and confusion in a similar switchover.
Now that Wisconsin’s switchover is complete, Glasscock provides a thorough review of the service. ]
The IC Solutions Getting Out platform is poorly conceived, poorly designed, and poorly implemented across the board; and staff think that it’s inappropriate for prisoners to remark on the system.
The physical devices are eight inch screen tablets that are underpowered and have a high defect rate. While some are just setup incorrectly, others come damaged. The headphone jacks pop and crackle, sometimes painfully, in your ear. Some of the jacks broke after only a month of use.
On the plus side, the screens seem to be calibrated well.
As to network performance, the devices require a consistent Wi-Fi connection. If there is any interruption, the device sends the user back to the login screen.
The servers regularly go down. When they do, the user will experience what they think is content buffering, but the buffering will go on indefinitely. When communications fail through server or networking faults, the included apps hang when they don’t get the expected system messages. On pay-per-minute services, this burns through the users’ funds. Sensible system error handing provisions for imperfect communications and software issues appear to be missing, leading the apps to be stuck in an indefinite state. All we know is that the system stops providing content.
The software can simply be described as bad. It fails often. Screen real estate is taken up by huge headers that do nothing. Virtually all the apps are slow, have poor response time, and are prone to losing history and context. For example, the Westlaw library app has a full third of the screen used for a header. The app will either send the user back to its Home screen or shutdown completely after a few minutes, making research practically impossible.
The email app uses a message thread structure where each contact gets one thread. I can’t start a new thread for the same contact. Also, the number of messages in the threads appear to be related to response time. After only a month of emailing, some of these threads take 10-12 seconds to load. What will it be after a year? Five years?
Each email is limited to 2,000 characters, but keyboard response time begins to degrade at only 1,000 characters, strongly deterring longer messages. At 1,600 characters the lag badly impedes typing. One aspect of the lag is when backspacing will pause on-screen making the user think that’s the current cursor location, and then it will start again and wipe out several words beyond the intended deletions.
The system uses a keyword scanner to approve or flag messages. If flagged, the email goes to a “pending” status for staff. Staff report that some emails that passed their review are not not being forwarded, and they don’t know why. Emails have been seen to sit in the pending state for up to four days.
The pay-per-minute profiles begin charging the user as soon as the profile is selected. In order to halt the charges the user must log off the tablet. If the tablet loses its Wi-Fi or server connection without logging off, the system will continue to charge the user even though the tablet has become unresponsive. People naturally just turn their devices off and walk away, and the meter remains running.
There is a mechanism for staff to post memos to the tablet such that the user must acknowledge having read them. These memos stay and each require three taps minimum to navigate through, so as these memos increase over the years the number taps and screens will likewise increase. Currently, it takes seven taps to get through what we have, and each memo lags and hangs as the app communicates with the server.
We are still having problems with Pluto TV buffering. Sometimes it buffers for a longer time than it shows content. Buffering appears to be related to network traffic at times, but at 2 AM there aren’t that many people awake using the network and it still buffers, indicating that other causes are also present.
From awkward, burdensome logins to losing context, the entire system gets a 1 out of 5. A fail.