For years, a US telecommunications company has been building proprietary AI models using phone and video calls placed by inmates in US prisons as building blocks. According to MIT Technology Review, the private equity-backed Securus Technologies has been developing its AI products since 2023, but it has troves of recorded conversations going back far longer. The AI models are designed to detect “criminal activity” in real time, Securus president Kevin Elder told Tech Review. “Here’s another part of myself that I had to give away again in this prison system,” he said at the time. Prison phone systems, for example, make up a formal industry called Inmate Calling Services (ICS).