New Transformation Commitments

Affordable communication is inseparable from effective rehabilitation and reentry because of the human connections it sustains and fosters. Aventiv has seen firsthand and heard repeatedly from experts and those with lived experience that more frequent communication with friends and family leads to better outcomes in rehabilitative justice.

Outside the walls of correctional facilities, for the most part, communication has become inexpensive because access to infrastructure from wireless technology to high-speed broadband is near ubiquitous. That’s not true in correctional facilities, where we must build and deploy technology infrastructure for modern technology, often from the ground up, working to address some of America’s remaining technology deserts. Because of the unique safety and security requirements that must be factored into a correctional facility’s communication infrastructure, fees and costs are higher.

As we continue to expand on our commitments, providing accessible and affordable communications services to keep incarcerated individuals and their loved ones connected remains a central focus. We plan to offer more free services and lower costs by implementing the following initiatives.

Access to money is an important part of obtaining resources inside the walls of correctional facilities, including services that play an integral role in successful reentry. Many of our consumers’ families and loved ones are unbanked and have limited access to technology and options to send money.

Especially at a time when the costs of goods and services are rising for the friends and families of justice-impacted individuals, consumers want and deserve affordability, accessibility, and predictability in all product pricing.

With our consumers in mind, we’ve started transforming money transfers by building on what we learned from our progress reforming phone calls and have begun work reducing the costs of money transfers by testing different solutions to find the best ones. We will continue to identify innovative solutions to reduce costs by adhering to the following initiatives.

Reentry must begin the day someone enters the system – not the day they leave it. We have the unique opportunity to reach more people earlier with education, training, and services through high-quality and safe technologies to make reentry successful.

Every product, every tool we provide, must be carefully engineered so it can’t be hacked or misused to hurt anyone – including personnel, other justice-impacted individuals, or those outside facilities who must be protected from threats and harassment. Because of this, correctional facilities have become technology deserts, which impacts a number of factors including recidivism and reentry.

One of our most important initiatives is to expand Aventiv into a technology company that can provide smarter products and services that contribute to better reentry outcomes and eradicate these technology deserts.

Aventiv is committed to protecting the civil liberties of all those who use our products while keeping incarcerated individuals, correctional staff, and the public safe and secure. Our correctional agency customers require that we record outbound calls to help prevent and detect attempts to threaten victims or coordinate criminal activity.

At the same time, we provide all our customers a variety of safeguards to prevent the recording of “Private” calls, including calls to attorneys, clergy, and medical personnel. In extraordinarily rare instances, however, factors outside of our control can contribute to the inadvertent recording of calls to phone numbers which users intended to be Private. Estimates have placed this occurrence at well under one-tenth of one percent of our call traffic.

When that happens, we take immediate efforts to resolve the issue, including removing the call recordings from our database so they cannot be accessed and coordinating with the impacted customer to ensure the number is treated properly going forward.

But defending the minuscule number of times a call to a Private number is inadvertently recorded is much less important to us than taking concrete action to address those factors outside of our control. Instead, Aventiv is acting to provide a new and innovative solution.

At Aventiv, we are opening the architecture of our company to receive and respond to inputs and work with an array of stakeholders, from consumers and customers to regulators and policymakers. What we’ve found is that customers, consumers, and affected communities all want to improve the status quo – and they have much more in common than some assume.

In response to this, we have already interwoven collaboration with regulators and a data-driven approach to our overall transformation process. We have acted on some of the outputs of these initiatives by building an Advisory Board of experts and advocates in reentry, rehabilitation, and education and piloted subscription calling plans after hearing directly from consumers about the importance of budget predictability.

We have more listening to do as we reform corporate policy, transform services and technology provided to consumers, and seek talent to join the Aventiv team.