Securus advertises that Threads “processes” more than two million calls a day, the suit says. The lawsuit states it is unclear how long the Correction Department keeps the recordings.

“There is no published or enforceable retention policy for this biometric data,” the lawsuit alleges. ”It appears that Securus retains all information indefinitely.”

In 2015, The Intercept reported Securus’ system was hacked exposing 70 million recordings, including 14,000 lawyer-client calls, across 37 states. Securus has been sued at least 10 times elsewhere for recording privileged calls, and has settled a number of those cases.

Starting in 2018, public defender groups in New York City began assembling anecdotes that lawyer-client calls were being improperly recorded.

As the evidence built, Correction Department leadership, including Commissioner Lynelle Maginley-Liddie, then a rising DOC official, resisted attempts to identify the scope of the problem, the suit alleges.

In March 2021, The News disclosed that 1,500 lawyer-client calls had been improperly recorded, with the Correction Department attributing it to a “clerical error.”

A later Correction Department audit found that 3,847 calls had been improperly recorded. But the analysis did not include calls prior to March 2020 or calls involving privately-retained lawyers.

Following those disclosures, the Correction Department renewed the Securus contract in April 2021, gave it a contract to provide electronic tablets to prisoners in July 2022 and in September 2022, when the department moved unsuccessfully to ban detainees from receiving physical letters, sought to give Securus the contract for scanning all letters.

The lawsuit accuses the Correction Department of not fixing the lawyer call problems that were revealed. Mayor de Blasio ordered the city Department of Investigation in 2021 to look into the problem. In its May 2023 report, DOI relied heavily on Correction Department audits and concluded only a “small percentage: of lawyer-client calls were recorded, the suit says.

“Securus took responsibility, quickly and transparently … and implemented safeguards to prevent future problems,” DOI concluded.

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