Court Stops FCC's Latest Attempt To Lower Prison Phone Rates (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Prison phone companies have convinced a court to halt new rate caps on inmate calling for the second time this month. The first stay was issued March 7 and prevented the FCC from implementing new rate caps of 11 cents to 22 cents per minute on both interstate and intrastate calls from prisons. But the stay -- which remains in place while the prison phone companies' lawsuit against the FCC is still pending -- did not disturb an earlier "interim" cap of 21 cents to 25 cents per minute that applied only to interstate calls, those that cross state lines. The order also didn't specifically object to the FCC changing its definition of "inmate calling service" to include both interstate and intrastate calls. Seizing on this ambiguity, the FCC decided that it could impose the interim caps on both interstate and intrastate calls. But prison phone companies Securus Technologies, Global Tel Link (GTL), and Telmate all asked the federal appeals court to stop the caps from being applied to intrastate calls. A court order issued Wednesday sided with the prison phone companies, saying that "petitioners have satisfied the stringent requirements for a stay pending court review." As a result, the interim rate caps will still apply only to interstate calls.

Comments

Where do inmates get money for calls?

[Anonymous Coward]

They're allowed access to their finances? Does this create a rift in equality? Why don't they just get an allotment of minutes?

recidivism rates

[OrangeTide]

I think if a particular prison's recidivism rates are too high, that they should not be permitted to charge more than 1 cent per minute.

If a prison is successful, then they should be permitted more leeway in how they operate.

Of course allowing prisoners to have more frequent contact with family members, has been shown to improve a convict's chances of staying out of prison when they get out.

(excellent rates for recidivism would be anything under 20%, typical in a US prison is 70%)

The elephant in the room

[DNS-and-BIND]

I see nobody has any actual experience dealing with prison calls. It's all the usual claptrap that people have heard somewhere online and are repeating. Long ago I used to work for a company that collected past-due phone bills. It was mundane work, just call them and remind them they're overdue, will be cut off from the carrier if they don't pay by a certain date, etc. Nothing threatening or weird. Once in a while we would get a batch of jail calls, all made collect from the jailhouse phones. The reaction on these was different. Usually the person who answered was a woman, and more than once she was relieved that we would be cutting her off from these calls.

She couldn't pay for them anyway, and the man inside didn't give a shit. He was bored, or controlling, and would call again and again. I had the call records and the guy would call for 15 minutes, get automatically cut off, call again, and again, and again. Day after day after day. Something the "they neeeed to talk to their faaaamilies!!!" crowd apparently has totally failed to consider. Maybe their families don't want to talk to them because they're horrible manipulative evil people who belong in prison.

Re:The elephant in the room

[wbr1]

These women have the choice and freedom to decline the calls. I was in virginia prison for a decade. There are people who prey on a caring wife/mother etc wasting money with constant calls. These are a small portion and your view is biased by your job in only seeing those that went to collection. I knew far more people that called rarely due to high rates, or sent some of their extremely low inmate pay to family to!cover costs of calls. In Virginia formexample inmate pay was 0.23 to 0.45 per hour inluess youhad an industry job. Those could go up to 2 per hour and were very limited, IE hard to get.
As for myself, I almost never called as my main contact, my mother, moved to England, and international calls were not allowedexcept from a staff phone, prepaid with supervision. I didn't care!about the supervision, but none of the staff knew or were willing to help with this
Make no mistake, prisons phones arema profiteering racket, so is prison medical, commissary, industry.. Corruption is incredibly rampant, so is regulatory capture and more...