An unidentified inmate talks on the phone in the Josephine County Jail in Grants Pass, Ore. in this March, 2011 photo. For-profit prison phone companies have been able to charge high rates for prisoner phone calls, making it hard for families to stay connected. (AP Photo/Jeff Barnard)
Nine-year-old Kenny Davis is one of the some 2.7 million children in the U.S. who has a parent living behind bars.
Davis said his dad is tall and funny, but because he’s in jail, he doesn’t get to see him a lot. “We never get to spend any time together,” Davis said.
LaTonya Davis, Kenny’s mother, said that because her son’s father is in a facility located about four hours away from their home in Tennessee, they can’t make the commute to see him very often. Because of the long distance, LaTonya Davis said that she and Kenny would call the jail more often — at least once a week — if they could. She said she can’t afford it.
For years the Federal Communications Commission has largely neglected to monitor telephone rates charged to families of inmates, allowing some inmate phone service providers such as Global Tel*Link, which was acquired by American Securities last year, to charge $1.13 per minute for phone calls.
At that rate, a 15 minute phone call costs about $17. Talking to a loved one behind bars once a week for one hour costs around $280 a month.
In addition to the high per-minute charges, some providers also charge upfront fees, which can cost as much as $4.99. Regardless of the length of the phone call or if the connection gets lost, the connection fee is charged every single time.
“Phone calls are a problem because they cost too much,” LaTonya Davis said. “I have other bills, I’m a single parent.”
When asked what he would say if he could talk to his dad right now, Kenny Davis said, “I would say I miss you.”
Prison phone monopoly
For Americans who are not living behind bars, many can communicate with friends and family for no charge besides the cost of Internet access via video messaging providers such as Skype or Google. The price of phone calls is also a lot more affordable, as unlimited domestic phone packages can cost as little as $9.99 a month — the same price as a six-minute phone call from a state prison in Georgia to a neighboring state.
Prison phone providers such as Global Tel*Link say that the high price of the phone calls is related to the fact that phones in prisons require special security features such as the ability to record, monitor and block calls. “Sophisticated security elements [often require] numerous on-site personnel, instruction and training,” the company says.
“Most Americans don’t realize that it’s about ten times more expensive to call anyone from a prison than to call Singapore from your office desk,” said Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “The whole point of incarceration is to punish and rehabilitate so the offender can resume his or her life as an upstanding, productive member of society.
“One way to ensure this is to encourage prisoners to keep their relationships with loved ones on the outside, for moral support, and a safety net to help them readjust to life after being released,” Henderson said. “But many prisons don’t view these precious relationships as rehabilitative or lifesaving – instead, they view them as revenue generators – ways to pad their bottom line. These extra fees are passed on to prisoners’ families in the form of predatory rates for a literally captive audience.”
But others say the real reason behind the high cost is much simpler: greed.
Foster Campbell is one of Louisiana’s five public-service commissioners. He said the prison phone-service providers often give a large share of their revenue from the phone calls back to the prison facility. Sometimes prison facilities share more than half of the revenue they make as a sort of “thank you” gift for allowing them to be the sole phone provider in the facility.
These “commissions” are supposed to help the cash-strapped prison system handle the surge in the number of inmates, but Campbell said the money never goes to benefit the inmate population.
Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), chair of the Congressional Black Caucus’ Prison Telecom Reform Working Group, disagreed, saying she blames loose regulation for phone companies’ ability to “extort excessive telephone rates from the people in society least able to pay them.”
Hilary Shelton, the Washington bureau director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), agreed, saying that the prison phone policies are particularly predatory since the vast majority of those behind bars come from families that either lived at or below the poverty line at the time of their incarceration.
“Families on the outside pay these costs, and are often forced to choose between a phone call and food,” added Amalia Deloney, associate director of the Center for Media Justice. “With nearly 3 million children in the U.S. who have a parent who is incarcerated, this is a decision no family should have to make.”
Inmate families push back
In August, the FCC agreed to listen to testimony of family members affected by phone rates, and eventually decided to limit the rate a prison inmate will pay to make phone calls to no more than 25 cents per minute, which is still higher than what traditional landline users pay.
While the FCC ruling failed to address the price-gouging inmates and their families experience within a state, the new rules will protect families with a loved one behind bars in a neighboring state. So unfortunately for Kenny Davis, his calls to his father will continue to be limited — at least for now.
However, the private prison phone call industry is fighting back, with the CEO of Securus Technologies, the second-largest company in the industry, threatening to file a lawsuit if the FCC enforces the new policy, saying that the FCC’s price caps will cut into the company’s revenue since the prices are already written into contracts with prisons.
“What we’ve built for the corrections industry is very secure and it helps solve tens of thousands of crimes a year, and it helps save thousands of lives a year,” said Richard Smith, CEO of Securus Technologies, giving an example of inmates ordering hits over the phone.
“All of that good work gets undone when you paint us as bad guys who are making lots and lots of money, and we’re just raping the friends and families of inmates. It’s almost like throwing firemen and policemen under the bus, it just isn’t fair,” he said.
But Ulandis Forte, a man who was convicted of murder, says the high price of the phone calls affects people like his grandmother unnecessarily. He said there have “been times when she did have to choose over paying for her medication to talk to me, that really does happen.”
While Forte says he doesn’t blame anyone for putting him behind bars and accepts responsibility for what he has done, he said the pain his grandmother has gone through is unjust.
However, Smith says many prison reform advocates, as well as Democrats and the FCC, have exaggerated the profits the prison phone industry rake in, saying stories like Forte’s are fabricated and that prisoners’ families should easily be able to pay the charges.
“We see lots and lots of people [visiting] jail who have one cellular, two cellulars, drive very nice cars,” Smith said. “I’ve been in the booking areas, I’ve seen lots and lots of visitors in the waiting areas, and every single person has at least one cellular.”
Since the FCC’s ruling, Securus has raised the fee it charges families to deposit money to prisoners’ phone debit cards from $7.95 to $9.95.
Peter Wagner is the executive director of the nonprofit group Prison Policy Initiative. He wrote he “can’t think of a business that I use regularly that charges me a fee to take my money.
“Generally, companies absorb those costs because they want my business. Because this industry has its customers locked in (pun intended), they don’t have to worry as much about competition.”
The post Another Way Prisons Profit Off Their Inmates: Phone Calls appeared first on Mint Press News.