New technology driven by artificial intelligence (AI) is helping prison wardens and sheriffs around the country crack unsolved crimes and thwart everything from violence and drug smuggling to attempted suicides... [In a recent call] an inmate allegedly threatened to kill the judge... and the prosecutor in his case... according to a partial transcript provided by officials with LEO Technologies ... LEO Technologies embeds its own investigators into the corrections and law enforcement agencies it contracts with, and those investigators seed the databases with keywords, phrases and prison slang specific to the region... the system picks up suspicious language or phrasings, a rapid-response process that company officials claim has prevented dozens of attempted suicides over the past two years.

The $1.2 billion prison phone call industry has also come under fire in recent years for charging exorbitant rates for calls... as well as for tracking the locations of individuals called by imprisoned inmates, before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that practice illegal... One of the nation’s largest prison phone company has also spurred controversy by recording privileged attorney-client phone calls, sparking litigation that remains ongoing... Prisoners' rights activists point out that the AI technology to mass-monitor phone calls is being used in not just prisons but jails, where many of the inmates have been charged but not convicted of a crime, and may not be able to afford bail.