Apparently the US will no longer prosecute families who negotiate with hostage takers to retrieve a hostage. [see this]
I have given my family instructions that they should keep their money and not negotiate with any hostage-taker-kidnappers. I'm old; I've had a good life; and I'd rather they have the money to enjoy the rest of their lives. In fact, if I were a hostage, I'd be obnoxious, maybe try to escape, and even seriously consider suicide to keep my family from paying a ransom.
I detest the practice of rewarding hostage-taker-kidnappers. After all, people respond to incentives. Paying a ransom creates an incentive for people to kidnap.
I understand why families pay ransoms. If it were a family member of mine, I would do whatever I could to retrieve them. And since kidnapper/terrorists know families will feel this way, they don't hesitate to kidnap people.
I had a friend who worked in Afghanistan a decade ago for an aid agency. The entire time he was there, he was accompanied by armed guards. When I asked him about it, he emphasized that the major threat to him and to his co-workers was not that the Taliban would kill them; rather, it was that terrorists would kidnap them and hold them for ransom.
For more on the US efforts to retrieve hostages, see this heart-breaking story.
If kidnapper/terrorists believe families will not pay off (either because they are poor or because they fear gubmnt prosecution if they do), they will be less likely to kidnap someone. This announcement of a change in US policy makes it slightly (?) more likely, in some probabilistic sense, that the relatives of hostages will pay off the kidnappers, which is why this de facto policy was not made public for so long.
So here's a strategy: If hostage-taker-kidnappers are less likely to kidnap (take hostages) for whom ransoms are less likely to be paid [go ahead behead me. I'll laugh at you!], then if I announce that my family have all agreed that we're not paying ransoms for each other, we'll be less likely to be kidnapped.
If you were a hostage-taker-kidnapper, would you think "I won't pay" is a credible threat? Probably not. But there's a chance it is a credible, and so you might go after someone else.
And I expect this is what underlay the former US policy.