FCC Passes Landmark Reform of 'Egregious' Prison Phone Charges (vice.com)

derekmead writes: The Federal Communications Commission voted Thursday to crack down on exorbitant prison phone rates, in a landmark victory for criminal justice reform advocates who have long criticized what they call abusive and predatory practices by phone companies. The new FCC rules cap the cost of prison phone calls at 11 cents a minute for debit or prepaid calls in state and federal prisons, and reduce the cost of most inmate calls from $2.96 to $1.65 for a 15-minute in-state call, and from $3.15 to $1.65 for a 15-minute long distance call. The new policy also cracks down on excessive service fees and so-called "flat-rate calling," in which inmates are charged a flat rate for a call up to 15 minutes regardless of the actual call duration.

Comments

11 cents a minute?

[rjstanford]

For a landline call? Still sounds pretty egregious to me. The prisoners already have to qualify for their calls, and from what I understand aren't allowed very many of them in the best cases. Why add another punishment on top of what they're already serving? There's no real reason to break out the phone calls and make them orders of magnitude more expensive to prisoners than they actually are.

Re:11 cents a minute?

[Fire_Wraith]

Sure there is - profit! The corporations involved in this have every reason to jack those rates as high as they can go, because the prisoners are quite literally a 'captive audience'. Privately run prisons are the worst about this, but even publicly operated prisons often contract out to private companies for things like telecommunication services.

What, you mean there are things like morals, ethics, and limits on what should be reasonable? What are you, some kind of Communist?

Re:11 cents a minute?

[vovin]

Doesn't the NSA already do most of this for free*?

* free in the sense that tax payers are forced to pay for something that has no public benefit whatsoever, so why not get something out of it?

Re:11 cents a minute?

[xaxa]

Posting anon because I work in the industry; remember all of these calls have to be archived (sometimes in perpetuity) and inmates are *really* hard on phones (repairs come out of the profit). Small jails will potentially not be worth bidding at 11 cents a minute as 1 dispatch will eat 6 months revenue.

Regardless of the cost, it's not right to make the prisoners pay it. They don't pay for the guards, food, building, locks, why should they pay for a prison-grade telephone?

Re:11 cents a minute?

[Anonymous Coward]

Jail is not prison. State prisons (I was a CO) can and will restrict calls so you don't harass your accusers. All calls are recorded/screened.

Phone priv's were a pain in the ass... if an inmate got bad news or had an argument on the phone that means as a CO my stress level goes up.. will he start a fight? Attack the first person that sets them off??

Re:11 cents a minute?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because people who maintain their family connections and other support frameworks while in prison have a better chance at rehabilitiation and not re-offending than those who don't. Spend 30 seconds googling this and find out.

If you're ideologically driven, yes by all means punish them even if it means higher crime rates in the future. If you're results driven, then allow them to maintain family connections. It's a pretty simple decision to make regardless of what you're driven by.

Re:11 cents a minute?

[Penguinisto]

Regardless of the cost, it's not right to make the prisoners pay it. They don't pay for the guards, food, building, locks, why should they pay for a prison-grade telephone?

Probably because the telephone is considered a privilege (excepting calls to them from their lawyers). Inmates have to earn the privilege, and that privilege is based on their behavior.

It's prison. They don't have to give you time on the telephone, at least outside of legal assistance from the lawyer who is supposed to represent you.

Re:11 cents a minute?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh boo fucking hoo, those poor criminals. Maybe don't steal shit and kill people next time.

Good

[Zak3056]

The costs associated with jail/prison phone calls are ridiculous, and NO ONE has had any incentive to change that. The institutions get a cut, politicians don't want to me "soft on crime" and the net result is that a literally captive market, which has minimal to no resources, gets screwed into the ground.

I'm not the world's biggest fan of the FCC, but good job on their part.

Re:Good

[gstoddart]

As long as people continue to believe this stuff should be ran as profit centers, this is what will happen. The Sheriff gets kickbacks, the companies who run the prisons get kickbacks.

It has nothing to do with punishment or rehabilitation, but ensuring you have as many people in prison as possible to maximize profits.

America has 20% of the world prisoner population, because America has made it profitable to keep people in prison; it's an industry worth tens of billions of dollars, and which uses prisoners as cheap labor.

It's far too profitable to stop. And it has nothing at all to do with the reason for prisons in the first place.

Essentially it's a giant tax-payer funded industry which doesn't offer much benefits to the tax-payer, and doesn't solve any problems.

But states look at them as revenue sources, and keep doing it.

This has been true for a very long time.

not enough

[BradMajors]

A simpler and fairer solution could have been the requirement that the price charged for inmate calls must equal the price charged for prison staff calls.

Re:Good I guess

[MalleusEBHC]

I was arrested for contempt of cop once, and I had a similar experience. When I tried to call my family, they all told me that they got an automated recording with instructions to create an account and pay for the collect call to a cell phone. While they were trying to navigate this onerous system for the opportunity to pay exorbitant amounts of money to talk to me, I'm sitting in a jail cell wondering if I'm ever going to get a hold of them.

Getting arrested is traumatic enough already, and the assholes trying to wring dollars out of a captive audience make it that much worse. Kudos to the FCC for taking a significant step to remedy the problem.

Not really

[rsilvergun]

Prison staff would just use their cell phone or (worst case) wait till their shift is over since, well, it's not like they're prisoners or anything. You're also assuming the wage slaves working for $15/hr at a prison have any pull, which is just silly.

This is why I hate 'simple' solutions. The sound good but are almost always unworkable. Yours was a little easier to point out the problems with, try doing the same with something like Supply Side Economics...