8/6/2014
PRISON INFO./ADVICE;- Every prison in the state of Ohio has services for the inmates through a company called Jpay. This is a fairly new company in the prisons here in Ohio, as recent as just the last couple of years. In the beginning Jpay consisted of outside friends and family members being able to type emails and send them to the inmates through this secure website. Once the email was sent, the inmates would then receive a printout of said email within 24-48 hours. The inmates would then be able to respond by writing on a blank response paper attached to the email received and then place it in the mailbox with regular outgoing postal mail. After that the family member or friend would receive the response in the form of an email posted on the Jpay website. Since then, in the past year Jpay has made some major
upgrades. First they started off by installing a kiosk in every unit, dorm, or specific area designated and made available to every inmate. The kiosk enables us to do a number of things like type emails and send them out immediately, or check personal status updates such as security levels and review dates, transfers to other prisons, waiting lists for programs, job status, finances and much more. Shortly after that they added a feature similar to skype, simply called video visitation. Any friend or family member on our approved visitation list would be able to schedule a video visit, enabling us to sit in front of the kiosk, watch our loved ones sit in the comforts of their own homes and have a
conversation face to face. I’ve had many video visits and I love every minute of them. In the past year Jpay came out with mini tablets for the inmates, enabling us to do everything we once had to do from the kiosk and more. Now I can sit in the confines of my cell and type my blog or personal letters. We can even purchase music and listen to it through our tablet, we can view pictures sent to us by friends and family, and soon they’ll even have Instagram. Our tablets even have features that store a couple of games and a calculator, I often use the calculator but I’m just not into the games like I used to be. With all these cool features on our tablets we still have to plug our tablet into the kiosk in order to send/receive emails, or download music, etc. Unfortunately our kiosk just caught fire yesterday, well I wouldn’t say literally. For the past few days we could smell the electronics burning inside the machine, the kiosk was taking longer to respond to our commands and we all knew it was just a matter of time before the system fried completely. Now that the system is down I can’t send out emails or receive them. This is something that I do every day. In the mornings when the guards unlock our cells around 6am I’m usually the first person to plug in to the kiosk because it gets very busy during the day, other inmates are always on the machine, people wait in an unorganized fashion, there’s often arguments about who was next, sometimes people get in fights and that’s a headache I don’t need in my life. Unfortunately now nobody in our unit is able to use the kiosk, we just hope that it gets fixed real soon. For anyone else who may be interested in communications with me, please feel free to set up a Jpay site with me, Steven A. Dybvad inmate number#665-418 @ Jpay.com. I’d be happy to answer any questions about prison, or the choices I made in life which led me here.
STEVEN DYBVAD
