Message service for detainees will not return

ANP

NOS Nieuws•vandaag, 20:27

Inmate messaging service eMates is no longer returning. The Judicial Institutions Agency (DJI) has decided this, writes Minister Weerwind for Legal Protection to the House of Representatives. The messaging service has been shut down for almost a year after warnings from the Public Prosecution Service that detainees could use the system for criminal activities.

Prisoners could use the system to communicate with, for example, the home front, in addition to writing letters and calling. But the Public Prosecution Service said in March last year that dozens of messages were sent per detainee every day that could not be properly checked.

Minister Weerwind then commissioned an investigation by the State Audit Service. It concluded that information security and privacy are not in order at eMates, which is managed by a commercial company. There was also something wrong with the agreements between the company and the DJI.

How did eMates work?

Someone could send a message to a prisoner via an account. That message was printed by a DJI employee and handed to the detainee. The detainee could write a response on an answer sheet and return it to the DJI employee.

This message was scanned by the DJI and emailed to eMates. They then put it on the special page of the person to whom the message was addressed. The company said last year it sent 18,000 messages a month.

In retrospect, Weerwind calls it logical that eMates was chosen in 2014, but says that “the fight against continued criminal activity was less dominant at the time than it is now”. According to him, higher requirements are now being set for information security.

The prisons are going to look at an alternative to the messaging service. The intention is that it is managed by the DJI itself. Weerwind also wants to investigate whether artificial intelligence can be used in the future to control message traffic.

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