Cable operators offer generous discounts to correctional facilities and their underemployed denizens. Some inmates in Pennsylvania have paid as little as $6 for basic.

Inmates and wardens agree on one point: Interactive educational programs don't do a lot of educating.

George Feigley makes no secret of his preference for cable over satellite TV. His old service, from Adelphia Communications, gave him about 50 channels and cost just $13 a month. But now he has to pay 17% more for only 35 channels from a satellite provider.

Most customers who share his gripe could simply switch back to cable, but Feigley doesn't have much choice. He's an inmate in Pennsylvania's Smithfield Correctional Insitution, a two-time prison escapee serving a sentence for statutory rape. And his beef exposes a growing threat to cable operators, who for years have enjoyed a profitable hold on the ultimate niche market, the nation's 1.5 million-strong inmate population.

In an arrangement that Feigley complained to federal regulators was a ?bizarre socialistic scheme,? Pennsylvania last year contracted with Correctional Cable TV Inc. of Tyler, Texas, to beam a centralized palette of programming ? via satellite, not cable ? to all 26 state prison facilities. Over the next seven years, as the cable contracts of the state's prisons expire, all 18,000 multichannel subscribers in Pennsylvania facilities will switch to the satellite feed, authorities say, locking the state's cable providers out of roughly $3 million in annual revenue.

Other states are following suit, as prison authorities seek educational programming for their inmates as well as a means of filtering out content deemed offensive. Correctional Cable TV, a subsidiary of Austin, Texas-based MSO Classic Communications, serves more than 300 facilities in 33 states, according to company vice president Ronald Schaeffer. Authorities in Florida say they may be the next to sign up. Another prison satellite programmer, Corrections Learning Network of Spokane, Wash., has cut deals with 232 facilities in 38 states.

Of course, prisons represent a relatively small market for cable operators. But providing entertainment for inmates is a growth area. ?There are 1.5 million people behind bars,? says corrections consultant Art Leonardo, a former warden in the New York state system. ?I think the market is probably unlimited.?

What's more, the emergence of satellite outfits like Correctional Cable points out some of cable's drawbacks: Limited by franchise boundaries, one cable system can't service the prison facilities of an entire state. Nor have operators found it easy to tailor programming for a specific institutional facility such as a prison.

?Cable companies could not come in and provide selective programming,? says Schaeffer, who founded Correctional Cable in 1987. ?What if a facility wanted just three channels? It would be cost-prohibitive for the cable company to chop out, say, 52 others.?

According to Pennsylvania state officials, approximately seven cable providers stand to lose business with the new arrangement. Comcast Cable Communications, for one, will lose contracts at three prisons, according to company spokesperson Jaye Divine. And Chet Isset, general manager of Adelphia's Huntingdon system, says he'll lose 781 subscribers at Smithfield.

?Unfortunately, they chose a provider from out of state,? says Brian Barno, vice president of government affairs for the Pennsylvania Cable & Telecommunications Association. ?It's a loss of business for our companies, which we regret.?

Some inmates aren't happy with the switch either. ?Several channels will be ?educational? or otherwise purely propaganda, controlled and produced by the state, while essential outlets of unbiased information will be excluded,? Feigley wrote in a complaint last year to the Federal Communications Commission.

As of last December, prisoners at state facilities numbered 1.23 million, while the federal prison population stood at 145,000. According to Federal Bureau of Prisons spokesperson Traci Billingsley, ?close to all? federal prisons prohibit TV sets in cells ? meaning that inmates watch in designated TV lounges, which are all hooked up to either cable or satellite, according to Billingsley. The 84 federal penitentiaries have an average of eight such viewing areas per facility.

The real money for cable providers, though, lies at the state level. A Cable World survey ? along with data from the American Correctional Association ? found that 35 states, including California, New York and Illinois, allow inmates the privilege of in-cell television. Nearly all such states allow cable TV. Cable World estimates that state prisons across the country house roughly 370,000 potential cable subscribers ? not to mention thousands of additional cable hookups in TV lounges at the 1,320 state facilities.

To be sure, the prison population isn't quite the dream demographic for the Home Shopping Network. But many inmates rely on TV as their sole source of entertainment, and in state penitentiaries across the country, it's not uncommon to find cellmates with individual TVs wired to cable, taking in the audio with headphones. ?Inmates like cable TV and will forgo cigarettes and potato chips to get their cable TV,? says John S. Shaffer, deputy secretary for administration with the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (PDOC).

The captive market explains why cable companies aren't happy that Correctional Cable and other competitors are winning contracts with facilities that allow individual TVs. Mary Cotter, president of the Syracuse, N.Y., division of Time Warner Cable, counts the 20 correctional facilities in her jurisdiction among her best customers. In all, the Syracuse division pipes basic cable offerings to 450 inmates in central and northern New York state, a service area stitched together with 7,200 miles of plant.

Cotter says she aggressively pursues business with these facilities for several reasons. State facilities simplify payment practices; Cotter's Time Warner unit, for example, has a contract to provide cable to 41 accounts at the Riverview Correctional Facility in Ogdensburg, N.Y. Riverview doesn't spend any taxpayer dollars to defray the cost, according to New York Department of Correctional Services spokesperson Mike Houston. Inmates, many of whom work at low-paying jobs in the prison, pay for their individual service, and cable in common areas is funded by proceeds from concessions and the prison commissary.

However, the state each month cuts a check for the full amount of services provided to Riverview. Cotter says that after a one-time delay to push the payment through the state bureaucracy, the checks come on time. ?They're pretty good on payment,? says Cotter.

Nor does the facility demand a lot of maintenance. Cotter notes that she rarely has to dispatch repair trucks to Riverview, which has a vested interest in keeping away outside visitors. ?They don't want us coming in and out of the prison all the time,? she says.

Adelphia's Isset has been servicing Pennsylvania prisons for more than 30 years and can't recall a single service snafu. ?They'll just call us and schedule an appointment,? he says, noting that his technicians have never had a problem getting past security.

Another point: Prisoners, whose telephone privileges are strictly curtailed, aren't the sort of customers to hog the lines at an operator's call center.

In addition to demanding little service, prisons are stable customers for executives like Cotter. Thanks to the get-tough-on-crime craze of the '90s, the nation's prison population nearly doubled from 773,000 in 1990 to 1,383,000 in 2000 ? meaning that institutions like Riverview will remain a steady source of loyal cable customers for decades. Most of her prison contracts, says Cotter, span the entire 7- to 10-year length of her franchise agreements with municipalities.

With long-term, bulk contracts in hand, cable operators offer generous discounts to correctional facilities and their underemployed denizens. Riverview inmates, for example, pay $17.25 for basic cable, less than half of the $38 that a nearby Ogdensburg resident must shell out for the same service. And some inmates in Pennsylvania have paid as little as $6 for basic.

?We work with correctional facilities the same way that we would any other large institutional facility,? says Comcast spokesperson Jenni Moyer, confirming the company's discounting policy for prisoners.

Reports documenting discounted cable TV for inmates occasionally prompt charges from correctional hard-liners that authorities are going easy on felons. In 1998, for example, a Pennsylvania state legislator proffered a bill mandating that prison cable watchers pay the same as those on the outside. ?Right now, if you commit a crime, you get a break on your cable bill. It's outrageous,? said the sponsor, Rep. John Lawless. The measure did not pass.

Concerns about coddling inmates explain in part the federal ban on cable TV in prison cells.

But while the states won't embrace the federal asceticism on in-cell TV, they are moving toward greater control of programming that seeps through the cinder blocks ? and that's what has helped create an opening for Correctional Cable and others. According to Correctional Cable's Schaeffer, state penitentiary officials want a greater emphasis on educational offerings and less shoot-'em-up fare. ?Institutions are getting away from the ESPN-TNT mind-set and going to things that are redemptive for the inmate and for society,? says Schaeffer.

Florida is among the states embracing redemption through television. A hard-line law-and-order state, Florida prohibits in-cell television but is now trying to harness the medium for the betterment of state inmates, according to Clarence Rudloff, assistant chief of the Bureau of Community and Institutional Programs at the Florida Department of Corrections.

Over the next month, Rudloff expects to sign a contract with Correctional Cable TV to test some decidedly unsexy cable channels along with educational programming at the Gulf Correctional Institution in Wewahitchka, Fla. ?It's not for entertainment,? says Rudloff, adding that the only channels allowed on the TV menu will be the History Channel, Discovery Channel, the Learning Channel and Animal Planet.

Even with that inoffensive lineup, Florida corrections officials will screen the TV listings with an eye toward blacking out shows that run counter to the prison system's rehabilitative mission. ?We'll be selective on the programs we'd allow them to see on those channels,? says Rudloff. ?I don't see us developing a curriculum around a bear sleeping in the wintertime.?

Instead, Florida will pay Correctional Cable TV to supplement the wholesome cable offerings with shows touching on the catch-word themes of prison reform, including victims awareness, life skills and self-improvement, according to Rudloff. The educational programming will reach clusters of inmates at 38 viewing stations in the Gulf facility. That arrangement, says Rudloff, saves the state the cost of hiring a platoon of life-skills instructors, who demand $20 per hour for their services.

If the experiment at Gulf works, it may eventually debut at all of Florida's 52 correctional facilities, Rudloff says.

Among other states, Delaware is also gearing up to educate prisoners over TV. The state has wired all 600 cells in the Delaware Correctional Center in Smyrna with monitors whose central purpose will be to show educational videos and the like. Although Delaware hasn't yet contracted with a cable or satellite provider to fill those screens, the infrastructure is in place. ?We're moving toward having in-cell programming as much as we can,? says Delaware Department of Correction spokesperson Beth Welch.

Still, some states stick to the old-fashioned notion of TV as boob tube, not as vehicle for educating inmates. ?It sounds like, ?Let's just serve nutritional food to our children at lunch ? like beets and greens.? You know they're not going to eat it, but you can certainly serve it and you'll feel better about it,? says Matt Davis, spokesperson for the Michigan Department of Corrections. And Larry Todd, spokesperson for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, says the system is happy with conventional cable service. ?Running cables into buildings has worked for us,? says Todd. ?The biggest complaint is that the inmates don't get enough time to watch TV.?

Whatever their plans for prison TV, states interested in experimenting with new approaches can look to Pennsylvania as a test case. The state last year signed two contracts with Correctional Cable TV ? one for 35-channel TV service for inmates and lounges and another for a steady stream of interactive educational programming piped through the system.

Contract terms were generous: The company stands to rake in $14.25 per inmate per month for video services, yielding $3 million annually once all 18,000 inmate subscribers switch to the satellite feed. (The state skims off a $1 monthly administrative fee for each inmate.) For educational programming, the state pledged to pay Correctional Cable TV $2.20 per inmate per month for all 36,000 Pennsylvania inmates, or nearly $1 million per year.

PDOC's John Shaffer says the transition to the video service has been ?pretty smooth.? As part of the arrangement, the state yanked all inmate access to premium channels and offers only basic fare on the new satellite system. And if the state doesn't like what's playing on a basic channel, it can arrange for a preemption or two. ?When we put a system into a facility, that facility has total control of viewing times and can turn the system by channel on or off at their discretion, at any time of the day,? says Correctional Cable's Schaeffer.

The new channel lineup includes BET and two stations in Spanish, says PDOC's Shaffer, the better to serve the multicultural inmate population.

The system saves the PDOC's janitorial staff some trouble, too: Whereas the facility used to have to rewire the cells every time a cable customer moved in or out, the new, fully addressable system allows management to accomplish that task with the flick of a switch.

Thus far, PDOC has received only 15 complaints about the system from prisoners, according to Shaffer, most of whom express frustration with losing programming ? primarily premium channels like HBO and Showtime ? once available to them over cable lines.

Inmate Feigley takes issue with the state's rosy view of the system. ?There is broad dissatisfaction among the inmates,? Feigley, who founded the pro-inmate website www.prisoners.com, wrote in an e-mail dictated to a relative. ?We have no way of knowing when [prison authorities] have interfered with programming.?

Inmates and wardens, however, can agree on at least one point: The interactive educational programs didn't do a lot of educating. ?They were not accepted among the inmates nor among the teachers,? writes Feigley. Critics said the system was too complex and demanded a degree of self-motivation rare among inmates serving long sentences.

The shortcomings prompted state officials to cancel the contract last spring. ?It was poorly implemented on our part, and we had some concerns about the quality of the programming on the part of the provider,? says PDOC's Shaffer.

Correctional Cable TV's Schaeffer says his company is trying to come up with new programming for Pennsylvania and insists the key to a long-term plan is appeasing the state's in-prison teachers. ?They felt that distance learning was a threat to their teaching positions,? says Schaeffer.

In the meantime, Pennsylvania is turning to educational programming supplied by Corrections Learning Network. Shaffer says the state has to pay only $1,000 per facility to install the outfit's hardware; from that point on, the programming is free, thanks to a five-year federal grant secured by the network.

Anne Charles, the network's project manager, insists her outfit doesn't compete against Correctional Cable TV or any other company on the market. However, Charles did say that by the end of 2004, the network may well reach more than 800 correctional facilities.

Both firms know that prison authorities are always looking for ways to distract, if not educate, their charges. ?Television is the greatest baby sitter that was ever devised,? says former warden Leonardo.

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