We the undersigned music industry artists and executives are joining the call to dismantle the prison industry by pledging not to collaborate with corporations profiting off of incarceration.

Recently, Aventiv Technologies, the nation’s largest prison telecom corporation as the parent company of Securus and JPay, announced a hip hop contest for incarcerated people. While the corporation and others in the prison industry bill these types of initiatives as beneficial to incarcerated people, we know better. They are calculated efforts by the industry to appropriate Black culture to whitewash the corporate predation of incarcerated people and their families, who are disproportionately Black and brown due to decades of racist policies and policing.  

Aventiv charges families as much as a dollar minute to speak to a loved ones behind bars. Last year, during the pandemic, when families were struggling to connect with incarcerated loved ones, Aventiv brought in an astounding $768 million. Their extortionary rates and predatory practices inflict undeniable financial and emotional harm. One in three families supporting an incarcerated loved one goes into debt trying to stay in touch, and 87 percent of those carrying the burden of the costs are women, largely Black and brown women.

And sadly, the prison industry is much bigger than just prison telecom. It is a web of institutions that rakes in more than $80 billion each year from a brutal system of mass caging and control that owes its roots to slavery and the racialized terror that has continued since. The prison industry includes construction firms that build windowless cells for solitary confinement, prison healthcare providers that deny people critical care to save on costs, prison commissary vendors that heavily overcharge for necessary hygiene products, correctional industries that abuse unpaid or grossly underpaid incarcerated workers, and the list goes on. But we will not—we will not be complicit, complacent, or silent.

Echoing the spirit of the art community that successfully removed prison profiteers from the boards of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, we make a commitment to not partner with the prison industry. There are other ways to uplift our incarcerated family, friends, and fans that do not rely on collaborating with the very profiteers of their pain. We will explore those options by listening to communities, learning from organizers, and partnering with advocates.

The trauma that the prison industry inflicts, the wealth it extracts, and the lives it destroys devalue our social fabric and hurt us all. We must end the exploitation of our criminal legal system to imagine and design a system that prioritizes healthy, safe, and free communities.

Jason Flom (Lead signer)

Ty Citerman
Lupe Fiasco
Greg Wells
Nina Woodford