Cuyahoga County Receives Over $846,000 Refund from Securus Technologies
In 2016, prison communications profiteer Securus Technologies offered to implement XJail, a jail management system, at the Cuyahoga County Jail in Cleveland, Ohio. Despite the system’s promise to publicly display booking information, charges, bond amounts, and mugshots, Securus never installed XJail and the project was abandoned in 2021. For the next two years, the company—which also operated phone and video services for detainees at the jail—continued to deduct fees from the county’s share of the telecom commissions.
As reported by cleveland.com, payments to Securus for XJail amounted to more than $1.1 million and were first discovered by an inspector general investigation in 2024. That figure includes the monthly fees of $15,111 that were withheld even after the XJail was abandoned, for a total of $241,778. Cuyahoga County was able to claw back $846,222.16, meaning that Securus was still able to pocket several hundred thousand dollars from what one city councilmember described as a “boondoggle.”
A spokesperson for the county has said that it has negotiated a new contract for a jail management system that is scheduled to launch in 2027—and that, this time, the terms and conditions would be more carefully vetted. The inspector general’s 2024 report, however, placed the blame largely on the Sheriff’s Fiscal Office, finding the office “had not established a contract compliance function or reconciliation process, which could have prevented or timely identified the underpayment of the commission revenue.”
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