Show HN: Ameelio.org – Free Prison Communication Platform

I actually discovered Ameelio last year through a Hacker News post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21129557) that didn't gain much attention. Zo, the founder, had reached out looking for support and contributors through a hiring post. When I read the post, I decided to look more into the project. My first thought was just "Wow!". I really vibed with the concept because it's something that hits really close to home.

I've had friends and family that were incarcerated before so I know exactly what it's like dealing with the struggles that come from that experience. When someone is incarcerated, it's not just a punishment for them. It's an attack on their families, as well. In my experience, poverty is oftentimes a direct cause for incarceration. Mistakes are made and you get put into a situation, a system, that doesn't value reformation, but instead looks to profit. To communicate with a loved-one on the inside means spending money that you don't have. If your family is struggling financially, it means that you're out of luck. This shouldn't be the case.

I believe that a system focused on reformation would be much better for our society than a system based on profit. Why should a corporation be able to take control of communication between an incarcerated individual and their loved-ones meahwhile charging high prices knowing that it's their only option? Why have we allowed that to happen? Being a part of this project is my way of stepping up and making sure we can deliver an alternative option for those families that are struggling.

I've received amazing support from this community before and thanks to you guys I've been able to focus my efforts on projects like this. Any and all feedback is welcome. If you're interested in using our app then feel free to check it out. It's free and we'll do all that we can to keep it that way.

While it’s free for us to videoconference on Zoom and Facetime during quarantine, it can cost up to $25 to make a 15-minute phone call to an incarcerated person.

Some of you might be thinking: “Is it just a letter mailing service?” Though for many stamps might not seem expensive, costs add up. Many of the families lost their jobs during the crisis. One in three families with incarcerated loved ones is forced into debt by the cost of visits and exorbitantly priced calls.

In the past weeks, we’ve learned first-hand from our users about the challenges of staying connected.

* Carol is completely blind and finds it too difficult to send physical mail but has now been able to connect with her incarcerated nephew using Ameelio

* Ellie is stuck in Norway and mail would normally take weeks to send to her incarcerated husband Kasey who is in the US, but with Ameelio she can send mail in 4-6 business days

* Nikki explained to us it is much more meaningful to “read and hold” a letter “close to them” than to send a text message or scanned letter - her husband calls Ameelio letters “little treasures”

* Samantha shared with us that she cannot afford stamps to talk to her husband

Our vision is to keep reconnecting those that are impacted by incarceration through free technology.

As an ex US federal prisoner (long story, teenager, petty financial hacking crime, extradited from a foreign country years ago) I am intimately aware of the terribad state of Jpay and corrlinks and all the other overpriced communciations methods for prisoners. What I do now is whenever I want to buy a new technical book I usually send it to a random prisoner not incarcerated for something heinous and do it with them via letters, it's good motivation because once a guy in jail for cheque kiting absolutely slayed a vector calculus book I was trying to do and I had to pick up the pace in order to keep up with him.

HN has their list of 'request for startups' and one of them is employ over 1 million ppl and I've always thought that the perfect situation for this is prisoners if you can somehow navigate the political arena to make it happen. There's just tons of people there willing to work and do anything to improve their situation, as long as you aren't Ikea maximum profiteering off convicts and help them as much as you help yourself everything should be cool.

As our founder said, we're completely self-funded and all volunteers right now. That's to say - we really need $$ to keep sending letters. If you have spare resources during these times, we would really appreciate it if you could help us out and donate! Here's a link: https://www.aplos.com/aws/give/ameelio/general

Y’all need to apply for YC’s non profit program (edit: I see you’re already in Mozilla’s accelerator, equally good!). I hope you can scale up to audio and videoconferencing with more resources and backing (donated compute, open source tooling like Jitsi Meet or similar) and chip away at the for profits in the space taking advantage of the families and loved ones of the incarcerated.

There's room here to innovate. I had a product that effectively allowed inmates to have a Soundcloud from the prison phone. It pissed off a few people.

https://www.flikshop.com/

?

If not, I’m happy to put you in contact.

Do you have any (formerly?) incarcerated members on your leadership team?

Clearly, it's meant as "make communication between prisoners and their loved ones outside of prison free of cost"

But because of the phrasing, I read it as "make prison communication-free" or "make it be such that prisons are free from communication" which is a scary draconian dystopia that I can sadly imagine happening in my and many other parts of the world.

Can you add links to the sources for these stats? They just sound unreal and I'd like to understand better how the cost of maintaining contact becomes so high.

But Ameelio sounds like Emilio. Using latino men's names is probably not the most appropriate idea for this

Some sour negativity for good balance, from someone unfamiliar with criminal systems :

Are there mechanisms in place for verification of the sender and some potential criminal misuse of your platform?

The Ameelio Ambassadors has been a great help towards spreading the word. They are a group of people who are passionate about bringing a change to the current communication system in prisons and detention centers, volunteering to increase awareness about the service we provide. Together with their help and the support we are receiving from organizations that responded to our outreach, I believe that Ameelio will able to bring tangible changes to the current communication system, envisioning a legislative change in the future that would provide the people with their basic needs: communicating with their loved ones with no burden.

You might want to make the homepage a bit more politically correct by changing up the first (and only?) two incarcerated ethnicities from being Black and Hispanic.

I am aware they make up the majority of the American prison population, but they really shouldn't.

Seems like a worthwhile project though. Good luck!

The co-founders are all from Yale, and have the best of intentions, but don't realize they have to some extent been manipulated.

I think this phrase was a little concerning as well. There is a decent historical record that has been built up over the last 10 years of stuff like this being abused: "We also use machine learning tools to make predictions". What are they trying to forecast? When did talking and letter writing necessarily need machine learning? I'm not at all saying it is dumb...but we should approach all of this with caution and hesitancy.