A Legal Battle Exposes the Big Business of Exploiting Prisoners for Profit

The yacht is moored on the mouth of the Miami River, within the lengthy shadows of town’s luxurious inns and high-rises. It’s of Italian design: modern, imposing, with a flybridge and sundeck and 5 cabins, and a worth level of about $10 million. On the hull, daring silver lettering declares its title: Convict.

The Convict is the crown jewel of jail expertise firm Sensible Communications, whose CEO, Jonathan Logan, has a status for flaunting the hundreds of thousands he has made within the enterprise of prisons and jails. There may be additionally Logan’s $300,000 Lamborghini, with a license plate that reads “INMATE.” There are the photographs he posts dressed in garish suits, posed within the driver’s seat of his Rolls-Royce.

The yachts, the vehicles — all of them kind a part of Sensible Communications’ “empire,” as insiders check with it. The corporate rakes in tens of hundreds of thousands in income annually from its jail communications tech, a enterprise mannequin that principally entails charging individuals incarcerated within the U.S. jail system to ship emails (50 cents a pop) or make telephone calls (7 cents a minute) or go away 30-second voicemails ($1 every).

It’s an empire over which Logan is now battling for management.

Logan as soon as owned the corporate collectively along with his father, James Logan, who died in 2022, leaving his shares in Sensible Communications to his spouse. Ever since, Jon Logan has been waging a vicious combat to wrest management of the corporate from the remainder of his household, a succession battle that has performed out in a number of courts throughout a number of states, drawing yachts and mansions and a dozen unique vehicles into its crosshairs.

Inadvertently, the bitter feud has additionally pried open the interior workings of Sensible Communications. The result’s an unparalleled look into the immense fortunes and aggressive gross sales techniques driving the for-profit takeover of the nation’s carceral system.

During the last decade, Sensible Communications has emerged as a brand new pioneer within the ongoing privatization of prison services, a market that’s always discovering new methods to squeeze pennies out of incarcerated individuals and their households, one of many poorest demographics in the country. The $10 million yacht known as Convict is a floating metaphor for the unchecked earnings of the trade.

In 2022, reporting from The Attraction revealed that Sensible Communications was offering cruises in the Caribbean to sheriffs and jail officers who purchased the corporate’s expertise. On the time, Logan claimed that no such cruise had set sail. But a trove of court docket paperwork now reveals how Sensible Communications has — over the course of a decade — wined and dined public officers to construct its enterprise. Firm executives introduced sheriffs to steakhouses and strip golf equipment in an effort to win contracts. They provided them all-inclusive hotel stays, spa therapies, and booze cruises.

Presiding over all of it was Jon Logan, the corporate’s flashy and risky CEO, who — all whereas internet hosting glamorous yacht events in Miami — has gone to nice lengths to maintain the corporate in his personal arms. His parents alleged that this included holding them at gunpoint whereas demanding his father flip over his firm shares.

The Lever’s account of Logan and Sensible Communications is predicated on a evaluation of lots of of pages of court docket paperwork that span practically twenty years, inside firm emails obtained by The Lever, and interviews with a number of former firm workers, together with an worker who labored on the Convict. The Lever additionally spoke at size with Logan, who stated he was being “publicly crucified over false data” (together with the alleged gun incident) and that his authorized battles are being waged to guard the corporate.

“The larger story is how persons are prepared to do that, to attempt to extort cash from an harmless individual,” he informed The Lever. “Which, I’m sorry, however that’s me. I’m an harmless individual. I constructed a enterprise, I make use of lots of people, and I join loads of households, and I’ve carried out nothing improper. And but I’m being painted because the unhealthy man.”

As for the Rolls-Royce he’s been photographed in? Logan famous that his Phantom is a 2015 mannequin. “Guess what? It’s a 10-year-old Rolls-Royce,” he stated, including that he had purchased it (and his $350,000 Ferrari Spider) used. “I like vehicles. There’s nothing improper with that. I’ve earned that.”

“A Higher Mousetrap”

Charging individuals in jail to speak with the skin world has lengthy been good enterprise. For a few years, this was the area of jail telephone corporations, which started working payphones within the nation’s prisons and jails in the 1970s. It took a while, although, earlier than these suppliers started to deal with prisons as a captive market. At first, the price of making a telephone name in jail was roughly the identical as on this planet past. By the Nineteen Nineties, that had modified: Charges for jail telephone calls were rising dramatically, whilst telecom prices decreased for everyone else.

Perks for jail bosses have all the time been a central characteristic of this enterprise, though they haven’t all the time taken the type of strip golf equipment and Caribbean cruises. As telephone corporations jockeyed for prison contracts within the ’80s, they started to court docket corrections officers by providing companies a share of the income. For each $1 a prisoner spent on a telephone name, say, the telephone firm would take 60 cents, and the jail would take the remainder. Perversely, then, telephone corporations competed within the jail market not by reducing charges however by elevating them.

Jail telephone calls had been quickly stacked with surcharges and extraneous charges, income that was then funneled again to prisons (the overwhelming majority of which were taking a cut of the earnings). There was a round logic to the expansion of the trade: Mass incarceration within the Seventies and ’80s had saddled new prices on county jails and prisons, leaving sheriffs and corrections companies strapped for cash. Income from jail telephone calls, then, was a welcome salve. And the extra individuals who had been incarcerated, the extra telephone calls can be made.

By the mid-aughts, jail telecom had turn out to be extremely consolidated, with just two firms controlling many of the market. There was additionally regulation on the horizon: The nation’s telecom regulator, the Federal Communications Fee, was poised to cap prison call rates after years of pressure from reform advocates, which might imply swift cuts to corporations’ earnings. The second was ripe for brand new competitors.

It was at simply this second that Trey Engelke met the Logan household. Engelke was an insurance agent in Tampa, a magnate with deep pockets and highly effective associates. His circle included Pam Bondi, now President Donald Trump’s U.S. legal professional basic, who on the time was working for state workplace in Florida. “A giant touring man, and often had an entourage anyplace he went,” as Jim Logan would later describe Engelke. And, critically, he was the man who “paid for just about the whole lot for everyone.”

In 2009, Engelke was relationship Alexis Logan, Jon Logan’s older sister, who would later function Sensible Communications’ legal professional. (Alexis declined to be interviewed for the story when reached by telephone, and didn’t reply to extra inquiries.) Over dinner one evening, Jim Logan informed Engelke about an concept his son Jon had conceived: E-mail for jails, which might be put in in payphone-like kiosks within the mess halls.

“Your complete idea had potential,” Engelke would later recall in a court docket deposition. Cellphone calls and snail mail had been, at the moment, the one technique of communication in prisons, which had allowed telecom corporations to cost sky-high charges. This, he thought, “appeared like a greater mousetrap.”

There was, although, the problem of cash. At one time, earlier than the household moved to Florida, Jim Logan was a enterprise mogul in central Michigan, the place he and his spouse, Janice, had raised their two youngsters. He owned a marina and some completely different auto companies. However court docket information point out that, by 2009, he was in sizzling water with the Inner Income Service, and cash was tight. It was additionally the peak of the monetary disaster — capital was laborious to come back by.

Over drinks and oysters, the Logans started to court docket Engelke as an investor. Alexis had reservations in regards to the potential enterprise partnership, Engelke later recalled. However he was more and more satisfied that there have been hundreds of thousands to be made within the Logans’ new enterprise, Sensible Communications, which had by the summer time of 2010 secured a contract to supply the e-mail expertise in a small county jail in southeastern Florida. In just a few installments, Engelke put down $250,000.

That summer time, Engelke and the Logans started what they known as “prospecting,” assembly with completely different sheriffs throughout Florida and the South to attempt to promote the expertise to county jails. However enterprise was gradual. Sheriffs had been skeptical in regards to the product. “It was laborious to get different jails to wish to set up this,” Jon Logan later testified in court docket.

There was, although, one thing that Engelke thought might take the corporate nationwide: The American Correctional Affiliation (ACA). He known as it their “golden goose.” “The hub to the spokes, if you’ll, was, in my view, at the moment the ACA,” he stated in a 2022 deposition.

The American Correctional Affiliation, the venerable commerce affiliation for the corrections trade, a conduit to sheriffs and jail officers throughout the nation, an incubator of cutting-edge jail applied sciences — Engelke noticed the group as the trail to large earnings. And he knew the man who led it: Mike Wade, a sheriff in Virginia.

The corporate’s efforts to win Wade’s favor turned the playbook it might observe with different targets within the years to come back. An affiliate of Engelke’s flew Wade all the way down to Tampa in order that the sheriff might “speak with Jim and I extra about potential with ACA,” Engelke stated in a deposition. The pair took the sheriff out for $100 steaks. They introduced him to a celebration and to the Mons Venus, a strip membership in Tampa. (Wade, who has since retired, didn’t reply to inquiries from The Lever. Engelke declined to touch upon the occasions.)

As Engelke tells it in court docket pleadings, from that time ahead, Wade was all in. “I had [Wade] telling me, ‘I feel I could make this large, and I’ll not run once more subsequent time period, and I’ll even come to you for a job,’” Engelke recalled. The American Correctional Affiliation gave the impression to be behind them. The winds within the jail expertise enterprise had been shifting.

On the identical time, cracks had been rising throughout the operation. Engelke’s relationship with Alexis Logan was fraying; they’d cut up by the top of 2010. He started to grasp there was deep underlying strife among the many members of the Logan household.

“[Alexis] and her brother hated one another,” Engelke stated. “I feel Jon hated his mother, too.” However the one manner out was ahead, he thought: “I attempted to, let’s assume, information by means of these waters, or handle round them, in order to not sink the empire.”

Engelke additionally started to have issues about how company {dollars} had been being spent. At lunch with Jon Logan early on, he remembers confronting the younger govt a couple of company-expensed journey to the Florida Keys.

“That is my fucking firm,” Logan shot again, in response to Engelke. “And if I wish to take a lady to the Keys for the weekend and cost it to the corporate, I’ll achieve this.”

(“Did you ever examine whether or not Jon Logan took this journey to the Keys utilizing [company] cash?” a lawyer requested Jim Logan years later. “I didn’t,” he replied.)

There was one other matter: Jon Logan was on probation for a prison cost again in Michigan. And it was critical.

“Viciously Merciless”

In one in every of his final communications to his son earlier than his demise in 2022, Jim Logan wrote of his son’s early “lifetime of absolute indulgence.” There have been bikes, four-wheelers, snowmobiles, and jet skis; there have been private mechanics and private trainers. “Your mom and I even paid somebody to do your college homework so you possibly can race bikes,” he wrote.

Again then, the household lived in Lansing, Michigan. Jon Logan describes his relationship along with his mom and sister as “estranged” from a younger age.

“Ever since I used to be a younger child, she’s sort of had this fashion about her,” he has stated of Alexis.

However he was nearer along with his father, and as an grownup — following a stint doing skilled motocross — he started working with him on a car-dealership enterprise. By 2007, when Logan was 25, father and son had been doing enterprise with one other automobile seller within the neighborhood, a person named Blake Mossholder, who lived along with his spouse, Amy, and their three younger youngsters.

Sooner or later, Mossholder and the Logans acquired right into a dispute over cash. There have been allegations of greater than $75,000 being stolen; past that, the small print of the dispute are unclear from court docket information. The battle rapidly spiraled uncontrolled. Mossholder accused Jon Logan of chasing him in a automobile and took out a restraining order in opposition to him. Then, in November 2007, a series of Craigslist ads appeared on-line in Lansing.

The posts had been crude and clearly written by somebody conversant in the Mossholders, since they included their cellphone numbers and deal with. Beneath the class “erotic companies,” they marketed sexual companies offered by Mossholder’s spouse — “My charges are the very best on the town” — and requested that events name or knock on the door. Every ended the identical manner: “Ask for soiled amy.”

On the time, Amy Mossholder was present process chemotherapy therapies for breast most cancers; by the point that native authorities had traced the posts to Jon Logan and arrested him, the most cancers had metastasized and unfold to her lungs. She died in 2010. The Mossholders would recount in court docket the barrage of telephone calls that got here in response to the Craigslist advertisements, the vehicles that arrived at their dwelling. “We had been in worry,” Amy Mossholder testified at Logan’s sentencing listening to in August 2008. “He has not proven regret for that, and I’ll always remember it.”

In 2008, Jon Logan pleaded responsible to a cost of aggravated stalking, a felony. At his sentencing listening to, the choose stated she was “shocked past phrases on the extent of the course of conduct and the harassment that you just engaged in with this household.” It was, she stated, “viciously merciless what you probably did to them.” She sentenced Logan to 11 months in county jail.

It was throughout these months in jail that Jon Logan says he developed the thought for Sensible Communications, an origin story he repeated to The Lever.

“I do know the expertise of being incarcerated,” he stated. “I do know the ache that it causes. I do know the separation you’ve gotten out of your family members, and that’s why I created a system that has reworked this trade.”

By the point he began the corporate in 2009, the Logans had moved to Florida, removed from Michigan and the Mossholders. The primary boat Jon Logan purchased along with his newfound riches, some years later, was a $1 million Nor-Tech. He named it Soiled Amy. “Associates we will probably be taking #DirtyAmy on the market and packing it stuffed with loud music and chilly drinks and epic instances,” Logan wrote on Fb in June 2016. “All aboard the #DirtyAmy.”

Logan claims that he didn’t write the Craigslist advertisements — “I used to be deliberately framed,” he informed The Lever — and emphasised that as a part of his plea deal, the fees associated to these posts had been dropped. But he doesn’t deny the boat’s namesake. “[The Mossholders] don’t deserve sympathy,” he stated. “I deserve justice.”

He added: “I wish to do a tongue-in-cheek title on my boat, that’s my proper. I earned it.”

“The Trojan Horse”

In the summertime of 2018, Pennsylvania jail employees started getting sick. That August, in response to state corrections officers, jail employees had been despatched to the emergency room for potential drug publicity 48 instances. Jail guards had been falling ailing as they processed mail and searched jail cells. In reality, they had been falling ailing throughout the nation. The incidents fed into a growing hysteria in regards to the potential risks of airborne publicity to fentanyl and artificial cannabinoids.

Specialists are dubious that it’s potential for hint publicity to such medicine to trigger sickness, to not point out an overdose. However on the time, the Pennsylvania corrections company was in a full-blown panic. All state prisons and their mailrooms had been locked down. Officers believed that there have been medicine being despatched through the Postal Service, that the jail mail was, in the words of Sen. Bob Casey (D-Penn.), “saturated in fentanyl.”

Inside weeks of the 2018 lockdown, the Pennsylvania Division of Corrections inked an emergency no-bid $15.8 million contract with Sensible Communications for what was then the corporate’s latest innovation: MailGuard, mail digitization software program. Letters can be despatched to Sensible Communications as a substitute of the jail, which might scan them and supply inmates a digital copy — in principle reducing off the move of contraband.

The Pennsylvania contract represented a giant break for Sensible Communications.

“That was after they began to actually construct their enterprise,” stated Bianca Tylek, the founder and govt director of Value Rises, an advocacy group targeted on jail industries. “After [Smart Communications] acquired that contract, that apply began to unfold across the nation.” Prisons and jails in additional than two dozen other states now digitize their mail.

Earlier than the Pennsylvania contract, Sensible Communications was “mainly on the verge of extinction,” Logan would later testify in court docket. The private-equity-owned jail telecom giants — corporations like Securus and International Tel Hyperlink — had been shifting into jail e-mail, squeezing Sensible Communications out of the market.

Mail scanning modified the whole lot. Whereas not significantly worthwhile by itself, Sensible Communications used the expertise as bait to win greater contracts by bundling MailGuard with the corporate’s telephone and messaging companies.

“MailGuard was the Malicious program,” Logan defined in court docket this February. “If you happen to want MailGuard, you’ll produce other companies solely by SmartComm.”

These different companies are the real moneymakers within the jail tech enterprise: Emails, video chats, music streaming, all offered on bodily tablets that inmates should purchase. Messaging revenue alone (the 50 cent cost per e-mail) introduced Sensible Communications income of greater than $25 million yearly as of 2022.

“We truly… earn more money by giving [MailGuard] away totally free and getting all of the revenue-generating companies,” Logan testified.

Whereas mail-scanning expertise was an essential level of entry to new earnings for the corporate, its affect on incarcerated individuals is to additional sever them from the skin world. As a substitute of handwritten letters from their family members, individuals in Pennsylvania’s prisons obtain digital scans, some so poorly rendered that they are illegible.

Even when readable, there’s a distinction between receiving a birthday card or baby’s drawing which you can maintain in your arms and one that’s scanned in a warehouse in Florida, despatched to you digitally, after which destroyed. As one mom whose son is incarcerated told The Nation, “You can’t scan or copy the tears of a beloved one!”

“One of many best predictors of whether or not or not somebody goes to efficiently reenter society after their launch is whether or not they have sturdy household and friendship connections that they will depend on as they work to reestablish their lives,” stated Mike Wessler, communications director on the Jail Coverage Initiative, a analysis group that intently tracks jail expertise and its impacts. Mail scanning was only one instance of the ways in which privatized jail companies can erode these ties, Wessler defined. So, too, does paying exorbitant telephone and messaging prices, which ship prisoners and their households into debt.

“These millionaires have discovered a technique to squeeze more cash and sever these connections which are so essential,” he stated. That, he stated, was “what these yachts signify.”

Regardless of the fervor that gained Sensible Communications its Pennsylvania contract, it’s not clear that mail digitization solves the issue of medication getting into the jail system. In 2023, 5 years after the state began mail scanning, a PennLive report found that individuals inside Pennsylvania prisons are testing optimistic for medicine at an excellent larger price than in 2018.

That leaves one clear beneficiary of the expertise: Sensible Communications.

“They’ve simply inserted themselves as a intermediary and are taking cash off the highest,” Wessler stated.

Logan argues that his improvements — jail e-mail specifically — have helped to attach people who find themselves incarcerated with their family members on the skin.

“I let inmates use my kiosk system that I paid for, I constructed, I designed, and all I do is ask them to pay the identical quantity that they’d pay the U.S. Postal Service — solely they get to immediately talk with their household,” he informed The Lever.

These techniques have made Logan wealthy. His firm’s development because the 2018 contract has been fast. Sensible Communications now operates in 29 states, in over 100 jails and prisons. Between 2021 and 2023, its income jumped from $32.3 million to $56.2 million. Final yr, he recorded a wage of $1.2 million (which he says he has since forfeited, given his authorized troubles).

Round that point, Logan purchased his superyacht.

“Borderline Legal”

There got here a second, within the early days of Sensible Communications, when Engelke started to really feel nervous in regards to the Logans’ dealing with of funds, a narrative he informed a number of instances in court docket depositions. Again in 2010, he says, he lent some cash to Alexis Logan. A while later, he tried to recoup it, solely to find that her mom, Janice, had allegedly used the money on a face-lift. (Jon Logan’s attorneys additionally allege in court docket pleadings that relations used firm cash for “beauty and medical procedures.”)

From that time ahead, Engelke says, he was distrustful of the household.

“I used to be very uncomfortable with the way in which they had been taking cash out of the corporate and abuse of bank cards, issues like that,” Engelke stated in a deposition. Nonetheless, he too had his eye on future riches: “I wish to make hundreds of thousands with you, then celebration like a rock star on our yacht!” the investor wrote to Jon Logan in a 2010 e-mail.

However he by no means noticed the hundreds of thousands or the yacht. By the point Sensible Communications started to take off in 2018, Engelke had been reduce out of the corporate. He maintains that he’s a ten % shareholder and has spent the higher a part of the final decade suing Sensible Communications and the Logans to get his slice of the pie.

“I used to be the only investor at first,” Engelke informed The Lever. “I saved the corporate alive by loaning substantial quantities of cash for growth.”

Thus far, he has been outmaneuvered, and Sensible Communications has remained a household enterprise.

The Logans contest who amongst them rightfully controls the corporate, however all of them have been spending its cash. That is made clear in court docket information, by which Jon Logan and his mom commerce dueling accusations in regards to the different’s “company waste.”

There are the vehicles Jon Logan purchased: the Rolls-Royce, the Ferrari, the Lamborghini. However his father, too, was allegedly shopping for vehicles with firm money earlier than he died, together with a $100,000 BMW in addition to two Stingray Corvettes.

Janice accuses her son of losing firm cash on meals and journey — a $1,600 sushi dinner, a $10,000 ski journey to Colorado, a $3,000 fishing constitution — and on yacht journeys. Jon accuses his dad and mom of spending $150,000 on diamond jewellery. His mom factors to his luxurious $1.5 million apartment in downtown Miami and a $4 million waterfront dwelling in Tierra Verde. Jon claims his mom and sister secretly purchased a $1.2 million trip dwelling in Michigan with firm funds, and that his sister was charging private bills to firm bank cards for years after she left her place there.

Then there may be the Convict. The $10 million yacht, which the corporate owns, prices $10,000 a month to harbor at a marina in Miami. In keeping with court docket pleadings, Logan employs a full-time captain, who’s paid a six-figure wage, and a full-time deckhand. One one who labored on the Convict described to The Lever the events Logan was “all the time internet hosting” on the boat: traditional “party-scene Miami,” they stated.

“Jon has handled the corporate’s sources as a private piggy financial institution and grossly wasted company property,” his mom’s attorneys wrote in an August 2023 court docket submitting.

Such extravagance, although, is in some sense a pillar of Sensible Communications’ enterprise. The corporate sells its expertise partly by promising a style of the “resort life” that jail telephone calls can purchase. To its shoppers — sheriffs and jail officers — Sensible Communications gives cruises and all-inclusive retreats at Florida resorts, along with beneficiant cuts of the income from its jail companies.

In 2022, Sensible Communications got here beneath scrutiny after The Appeal reported that the corporate had provided a number of sheriffs a complimentary cruise that “sails out of Tampa Bay to the Caribbean.” In some instances, the cruise was stipulated in contracts that jails signed with Sensible Communications. On the time, Logan stated that there had been no cruise to the Caribbean. “This occasion by no means got here to fruition and has by no means occurred,” he informed The Lever.

What have taken place are Sensible Communications’ “summits,” retreats for shoppers in Clearwater Seaside, Florida (“well-known for its white sands and clear blue waters,” the corporate advertises). In keeping with an itinerary of one in every of these occasions from 2022, the “Elite Sheriff’s and Leaders Summit,” attendees had been handled to a three-day, all-inclusive keep on the Hyatt Regency Seaside Resort & Spa, the place charges begin at about $600 an evening. Actions included dinner at an area steakhouse, spa therapies, {golfing}, and a “sundown boat cruise.”

In keeping with emails obtained by The Lever, the corporate prolonged an analogous supply in September 2020 to Main Shaun Klucznik, the jail administrator on the Hernando County Sheriff’s Workplace in West Florida.

“We are going to take you out to eat, put you up within the Hilton Clearwater Seaside Resort,” a Sensible Communications gross sales consultant wrote, providing “a selection of fishing or golf and ladies having a seashore tour” in addition to “a Booze Cruise within the gulf.”

“I recognize the supply however we can’t take part in occasions like this,” Klucznik replied.

“Properly darn!” the corporate’s gross sales consultant wrote again. “Simply wished to point out appreciation to our shoppers!”

In Could 2024, the gross sales consultant once more reached out to Klucznik, who by that time was also serving as vice chairman of the board of the American Jail Association, a jail trade group. That spring, the affiliation was holding its annual convention in Fort Lauderdale. Sensible Communications, the consultant wrote, already had “one thing particular deliberate for the board” — however the firm had a further supply for Klucznik, a “as soon as in a lifetime expertise”: a “hospitality occasion” on “our 100 ft personal yacht.” (Klucznik says he additionally declined this proposition.)

In response to questions in regards to the summits, Logan stated that the occasions “usher in exterior educators for corrections professionals that educate lessons that contribute to agency-required accreditation coaching hours annually, in addition to showcase Sensible Communications’ latest applied sciences of the long run.” Attendance, he stated, is “open to all correctional professionals and has no relation to present, previous, or future enterprise involvement with Sensible Communications.”

Different rivals and potential shoppers have raised moral issues in regards to the overtures. “We felt the proposal was borderline prison and positively was unethical,” one county jail administrator in Arkansas said of their dealings with Sensible Communications. The 2019 contract bid included a promised “three-day cruise to Mexico” and an “rapid” $100,000 payout for the county, no strings hooked up. (Logan known as the feedback an “intentional mischaracterization” made amid an ongoing authorized dispute between Sensible Communications and one other vendor.)

One rival of Sensible Communications complained that the corporate was offering gratuities, which can be illegal, to win contracts, in response to reporting from The Attraction.

The legality of such steak dinners, cruises, and lodge stays “on the native stage depends on state ethics legal guidelines, which fluctuate,” stated Aaron Littman, a professor on the College of California, Los Angeles College of Legislation, whose analysis has targeted on sheriffs and jails. However he known as the gives “actually troubling.”

Sensible Communications’ brazen methodology of courting sheriffs, Littman stated, highlighted simply how little exterior accountability exists for sheriffs and native jail techniques, regardless of the potential for conflicts of curiosity with distributors. “Their insulation from public oversight is admittedly on show right here,” he stated.

The Lever reached out to 18 sheriff’s offices and jail directors that contract with Sensible Communications asking if they’d participated in retreats or cruises. All 12 that responded stated they’d not, though some acknowledged receiving the gives. The remaining didn’t reply.

“Storm Clouds”

“I’m not one to fuck with on what I created with sheer willpower and brains,” Jon Logan wrote to his father in September 2022, weeks earlier than his demise. “If you happen to, Janice, or Alexis attempt to take anymore [sic] from me, I’m ready to do issues the traditional human might by no means fathom.”

As his well being declined within the fall of 2022, Jim Logan had began making preparations for his demise and the succession battle he anticipated was to come back. Though he had taken a again seat in firm operations in recent times — partly on account of his reported struggles with alcoholism, which a Florida choose concluded had been “getting the higher of him” by the top — father and son nonetheless owned 50 % every of the corporate shares.

Jon Logan wished to purchase his father out. “I need a easy contract and a easy buyout and clear separation,” he wrote within the September e-mail. His father refused.

As a substitute, days earlier than a dangerous surgical procedure, the elder Logan transferred his shares within the firm to a belief that he left within the arms of his spouse, Janice. He wrote his son again days later, quoting the sooner e-mail: “Most people might by no means fathom a son who says that to his household for any motive, not to mention a son sitting atop his $10,000,000 yacht, subsequent to his $2M apartment, with a Rolls, a Lamborghini, and Ferrari parked at his $5,000,000 seashore home. Precisely what did your loved ones take from you?”

Two completely different attorneys representing Janice Logan didn’t reply to a number of inquiries from The Lever for this story.

In his dad and mom’ telling, Jon Logan had gone to extraordinary lengths to persuade his father handy over his shares of the corporate. That included allegedly threatening them with a firearm. Jim Logan, in an email, claimed that his son had “damaged into our dwelling and held us at gunpoint demanding that I signal my shares over,” along with vandalizing his dad and mom’ vehicles and sending demise threats.

Logan says that is “a false, baseless, zero proof declare” that his mom is utilizing to win the court docket’s sympathy. Regardless of the battle, his father had been his “greatest pal,” Logan informed The Lever. “I don’t assume anybody might blame me for not being happy that among the worst communications I’ve had with my useless father now are being publicly displayed and rummaged by means of,” he stated.

Jim Logan died in October 2022, leaving Janice Logan, by means of the belief, as a 50 % shareholder of Sensible Communications. (Jon Logan claims that his mom eliminated him from the belief, leaving solely herself and his sister as its beneficiaries.) Ever since, Janice and her son have been battling over the corporate’s hundreds of thousands, a combat that has turned more and more ugly.

Preliminary negotiations between the 2 stalled after Jon Logan provided his mom a $20 million buyout, which she refused, as a substitute demanding $100 million, in response to textual content messages between the 2. “I stated… ‘Why would I settle for $20 million?’” Janice testified at a February trial. “And he acquired actual ugly with me and used language I don’t use. So I simply hung up on him.” As a substitute, she despatched him a letter demanding, amongst different issues, that he promote the Convict and provides her management over the corporate’s spending.

Janice Logan lives in a $4 million mansion owned by the corporate, a gated villa with a house movie show, stables, and an indoor pool with a waterfall. It lies on a 20-acre property on the outskirts of Sarasota, alongside an expanse of untamed Florida marshlands and longleaf pine forest. This spring, Logan filed for eviction in opposition to his mom, demanding that she pay $35,000 a month to be able to keep within the dwelling.

Jon defined to The Lever that he desires to promote the property: “When the corporate owns the asset, the corporate must have its proper to do what it desires with the asset,” he stated.

Thus far, the courts have principally rejected Jon Logan’s makes an attempt to wrest again management of the corporate. A Sarasota choose intervened and stopped the eviction case in July 2023, permitting Janice to remain within the mansion. Jon then tried to maneuver a few of Sensible Communications’ subsidiaries to Delaware, seemingly to flee the Florida courts. A Delaware choose — noting the “alarming nature of the allegations” within the Florida case — froze the proceedings.

Then in November 2024, days after a Sarasota probate choose had set a date for trial, Sensible Communications filed for chapter, claiming that it was in tens of hundreds of thousands of debt to a Delaware firm owned by Jon Logan. On Feb. 26, a choose additionally blocked that case, sending it as soon as once more again to Florida court docket, the place the Sarasota choose has issued a number of rulings in favor of Janice.

“Jon Logan right here has spite and animus in the direction of his mom and his sister, and that’s what’s driving choices, not enterprise judgment, not what’s good for the corporate,” the choose stated at a latest listening to.

“We haven’t been getting a good shake with these judges in any respect, and it’s evident,” Logan stated of the litigation. In a subsequent e-mail to The Lever, he stated he was “a sufferer of terrorism by means of the authorized system,” and that his mom and sister had been attempting to “extort” cash from the corporate.

There are, too, different “storm clouds on the horizon,” as one choose put it. In 2023, former President Joe Biden signed the Martha Wright-Reed Act into regulation, which directed telecom regulators to cap charges that jail telephone suppliers, together with Sensible Communications, might cost. Though jail telecom corporations and states have flooded the courts with litigation to cease them, the speed cuts went into impact in November 2024.

“It’s fully gutting the enterprise mannequin of suppliers in our area,” Logan testified in court docket in February. The foundations required the corporate to chop charges, which, he stated, represented a revenue lack of “half 1,000,000 {dollars} a month.”

But Sensible Communications has discovered success by means of the years by figuring out new, unregulated corners of the jail market.

“I feel that’s the place Sensible Communications was forward of the sport with a few of their expertise,” Wessler stated. “They had been shifting into these unregulated market areas earlier than most of the different main gamers within the jail telephone trade.”

They’ve been, in different phrases, a bellwether of kinds within the jail expertise market.

The place is Sensible Communications pivoting now? Regardless of the authorized drama, the corporate has been on the highway promoting its flashy new merchandise, advertising them at correctional industry conferences across the nation: a supposedly first-of-its-kind smartwatch for inmates, a jail train bike. A latest PowerPoint presentation included in court docket paperwork promoting the corporate’s newest improvements seems, at first look, just like the flyer for a yoga class, that includes a person standing in a grassy meadow, gazing an amorphous orb of sunshine.

“What’s the subsequent Revolution of Corrections?” it asks. “Thoughts. Physique. Spirit. Sensible Communications welcomes you to the way forward for incarceration.”