The curious case of Needed Networks 

Most tech founders work on multiple projects at once. They write books or keep a blog. They code from the back of their renovated cruisers and document their #vanlife. They dabble in a wide array of interests in hobbies.

By these measures, Ohio brothers Alec and Patrick McGail perfectly fit the typical tech founder profile. Or they would, anyway, were Patrick not serving 24 years to life at Ross Correctional Institution for aggravated burglary and murder. 

When Patrick was 17, he and his friends robbed a local drug dealer’s house, and things took a turn for the worse. The owner of the house was killed when a gun went off in a tussle, and Patrick and his friends fled. Patrick undertook a series of poor legal pursuits to plead his innocence from there and was tried as an adult. He’s spent the 11 years since his sentencing writing books, painting, and most recently, building a business. 

Patrick’s brother, Alec, currently works as a contractor for NASA. He lives in his van, and when I first spoke to him in April 2023, he was driving across the country to Ohio from Portland, Oregon, to visit Patrick. While Alec was working toward his PhD at Cornell University, the engineering student and lifelong academic put together a simple script to allow Patrick the ability to talk on a three-way phone call despite the prison’s rule against them. Alec built the tool as an app, and Patrick started offering its use to the men in his unit. It wouldn’t be long until the brothers began charging for its use, slowly but surely transforming the side project into a fully functioning business. 

The two brothers would go on to spend a year building a sprawling telecommunications company and operating it with impunity, winning over customers, rolling out new features, and becoming an impossible headache for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections (ODRC). Incarcerated people can spend whole days on facility-issued tablets, and the app allowed for communication over the phone between them – a huge no-no inside the prison. 

Needed Networks was part application, part web service, and entirely new territory for the Ohio prison system. Its customers – imprisoned people – loved it. But the app would come to an abrupt end when the ODRC blocked its use from its digital communication systems for violating an existing prison policy. For a brief moment, though, Patrick, as a partial founder of Needed Networks, offered a portrait of what rehabilitation could look like in the modern era. 

***

A degree of notoriety and respect comes with running a prison business, Patrick said. The first time McGail was met with such distinguished recognition occurred when a fellow incarcerated person placed him in the prison yard after a few moments of conversation. “Oh wow, you’re the guy! The Needed Networks guy! Why didn’t you say anything?”

The idea of a prison business might conjure in some images of drug trafficking or other unseemly operations. One of the only depictions of a prison business existent in modern pop culture can be seen in “Orange is the New Black,” where the girls begin selling worn underwear to men online. Legitimate prison businesses are rare if not entirely nonexistent because running a business from inside a prison can only be done with permission from the warden – permission Patrick did not have. 

“Most people who get their security leveled up in here do something violent or try and escape,” Patrick said. “Then there’s me, this nerdy, goofy guy running a business. With, like, employees.” 

Over the course of a year beginning in 2022, Patrick and his brother turned a few simple lines of code into a sprawling telecommunications business for people in prison. Rough estimates – the only kind one can get when it comes to prison economics – put the app’s user rate at about 10 percent of all incarcerated people in the state of Ohio. The brothers had customers from prisons across the country, too, and a total of 6,000 users on their website.

This operation was largely possible because Alec, then an engineering student and PHD candidate at Cornell, didn’t need any permission to start a business for imprisoned people.

The brothers’ company would run seamlessly for an entire calendar year, operating in the open while also existing in a gray area. Use of their app wasn’t illegal, and it wasn’t strictly against prison rules. But that’s largely just because the need for such rules hadn’t yet presented itself. Functioning within this nebulous space, the brothers would spend a year hiring employees, rolling out new features, developing a budget, and serving support to upwards of 3,000 regular customers a day. 

They called the app Needed Networks. Going up against the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections, it never stood a chance. 

***

“If you’re in here, you need a Needed Networks account.”

That’s what I was told by Becca, who is serving 21 years to life in the Dayton Correctional Institution. She told me that use of the app was especially important to longtime residents of the prison. 

“The ability to actually hear your kids’ messages just brings so much joy,” she said. 

The app allowed people in the prison system use of features that are unavailable to them on their prison-issued tablets, including access to a voicemail bank, the ability to place three-way calls, and even the capability to search Wikipedia with voice commands. Needed Networks offered highly sophisticated tech to a completely underserved customer base. Imprisoned people looking for basic information on, say, cholesterol, suddenly had a resource. With libraries shutting down across prisons and more of their lives inside prison walls shifting online – and usually for a high charge – the imprisoned people I spoke with told me Needed Networks became a real resource. It also worked, and well. A pair of features to which incarcerated people aren’t traditionally accustomed. 

“I could go on and on about how bad the quality of these apps are, how much they lack,” Alec said of the prison-sanctioned communication apps. Eventually, he and his brother would come to see them as their direct competitors. Alec is a master of large language models (like ChatGPT), and he used his programmatic experience in them to rapidly build Needed Networks. 

By the spring of 2023, after about a year in business, Needed Networks was the hottest trend in Ohio’s prison system, sweeping across both male and female facilities. The app was not technically sanctioned for use through the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections, but it was a public-facing company with a legitimate website, offering technical solutions for the gaps existent in the prison phone system. They’d earned more than $100,000 in revenue. Imprisoned people and their loved ones on the outside raved about the app in reviews to Patrick and Alec. 

The brothers, originally from Troy, Ohio, had actively cornered a huge need in their identified target market. The demand they experienced for their product was all consuming. “We had some customers who were using eight hours on the phone every single day,” Patrick said.

The business was ballooning at such a rate that Patrick and Alec began to wonder if they would eventually be able to bring Needed Networks to market as an actual competitor to the prison communication systems. “We were talking about actually competing with GTL, [asking] how many years of running this business would we have to hit before we could level up to actually compete with them?” Patrick said. 

Alec mirrored his brother’s optimism. Their goal was to grow Needed Network’s user base to a competitive size and then figure out how to work directly with the prison system. 

It’s not that there are sparse options for telecommunications providers in the prison system, it’s that there aren’t any options at all. The competitive landscape is so thin that there’s only one major player in the game, and that’s Aventiv Technology, which owns Securus and GTE/GTL communications – the platforms currently used by most (if not all) Ohio jails and prisons. 

Their dream was big, but business was scaling at such a rate that the brothers felt protected. Patrick and Alec would take regular business calls about Needed Networks together during the day with the guards listening. Nothing about the business was kept a secret, and Alec said there were never any cease and desists. The pair continued to beta test and roll out new features, with Patrick acting as a muse and product manager in concert with Alec’s engineering mastery. 

Their plans changed in April 2023, when the prison shut the service down without prior warning. 

“It seems like everything was shut down because of money,” said Patrick, who believes the ODRC wanted to preserve the current telecommunications model, which generates income for the prison system.

“The proper use of technology plays a significant role in the rehabilitative process,” ODRC spokeswoman Jenn Truxall wrote in reply to a request for comment from Matter News. “Needed Networks was an unusual occurrence that violated DRC policy 76-VIS-02. Programs that circumvent existing security policies pose several risks, including potential unauthorized victim contact, conducting unauthorized business, and allowing contact with individuals to whom a separation order applies. DRC quickly took action to address these potential security risks by eliminating access to the Needed Networks system.” 

First, the internet and phone lines went out for a few days across the prison sector. When the phones came back on, there was a new voice memo at the end of the automated prompt that informed users that the use of third-party apps to communicate were strictly prohibited. 

Needed Networks was officially blacklisted from the prison phone systems. Imprisoned people could no longer use their pin pads during phone calls, making the platform completely inaccessible. Thousands of incarcerated people across the state suddenly lost access to their treasured voicemails – those brief moments of digitally preserved reinforcement from loved ones.

The impacts of the abrupt shutdown left Alec physically and financially drained. In total, Alec said he refunded some $100,000 between April 2023 and January 2024 – almost all of the revenue the brothers had taken in from the app. Additionally, the solutions Alec implemented to keep Needed Networks running completely overpowered their servers and drained his bank account. It was over – even as the psychological fallout continued to linger.

“After [Needed Networks] was shut down, I was extremely paranoid,” Alec said. He’d spend the next year looking over his shoulder and cobbling work on his PhD back together after putting his whole life on pause for Needed Networks. 

Patrick, under the direct supervision of the ODRC, was sentenced to 30 days in isolation for his role in the business. He had a notebook in his cell filled with pages on Needed Networks, and after guards swept his cell, they put him in the hole for his participation. He said authorities also put him back on Level Three security clearance, the second highest in prison. All his good behavior had been wiped away, and he was prosecuted as a profiteer, jeopardizing his future release on parole. 

“I found out as part of the investigation that I needed permission from the warden to run a business,” Patrick said.

When Alec was unable to get a hold of his brother or anyone else at the prison for days after the tech shutdown, he ended up journeying to Ohio to ask about his brother’s whereabouts. He was turned away and told that Patrick was in solitary. So, Alec spent the rest of the day calling administrators up and down the prison chain of command, trying to get word on any kind of investigation. He wasn’t always outright ignored – he said a few people answered his call before hanging up. Eventually, though, Alec said he reached a director for the ODRC who was able to confirm there had been an investigation, but who couldn’t give him any further updates on its progress. 

“I always had a policy of radical transparency, and she basically just stonewalled me,” Alec said. 

In spite of the shutdown, the brothers have since built work arounds, and both said they felt confident that they could successfully run the business once more. The only thing stopping them is Patrick, who risks more severe punishment should he continue to work on business operations. And yet, for some reason, both have flirted with the idea of giving it another try. 

“We thought about bringing it back and announcing it in this article,” Alec said. 

Patrick concurred, telling me that he was all for bringing the app back online and that it was Alec who was overly cautious, worried about the welfare and future of his younger brother. 

“We know how to make it run again, even with all these new technological barriers,” Patrick said. “We stopped because Alec was worried [prison officials] would continue to hurt me. Even if they kept me in the hole forever, if I knew it was still running, nothing could hurt me.”