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FCC Can't Cap the Cost of Cross-State Prison Phone Calls, Court Rules (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The Federal Communications Commission does not have the authority to cap the cost of prison and jail phone calls within states, an appeals court ruled in a decision today, dealing a massive blow to inmates and their advocates who have spent years litigating caps on the cost of such calls. Over several years, the FCC, under Democratic leadership, moved to cap the cost of calls for inmates. Activists argued that prisoners were effectively being extorted by private companies charging exorbitant rates -- a move that benefited private prisons and the states that got cuts of the revenue. Some of those states joined with companies in appealing the FCC's rules. The agency first moved to cap rates across state lines, and then, later, within states. Today, the court ruled that the FCC had overstepped when it attempted to regulate the price of calls within states. In the majority opinion, the court left little wiggle room for advocates of price-capping, with the possible exception of the cross-state caps, which are a minority of calls made by inmates. The opinion vacated not only the agency's proposed caps for in-state calls, but said the agency also lacked justification to require reports on video calling services. It also vacated a provision that would ban site commission payments.
So any lawyer working with inmates in a certain state just needs to get a virtual phone number in another state, and have it forward to his regular phone number.
Is it all going to the ultra-rich as they line their pockets from private prisons for profit?
Well, is the President not black?
There, that answers your question.
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Every article I come across seems to involve the FCC getting slapped down over pretty much everything, especially when it risks a corporations profits.
If no one wants them to regulate anything. why even bother having an FCC at all at this point?
Long distance calls are as cheap as local ones so all it takes is buying a calling card or an organization willing to set up an at cost dial in card for prisoners.
And there needs to seriously be a shamming program for administrators and bureaucrats that advocate stupid things like gauging prisoners.
So the correct answer to the problem would be to complain to the states' own legislatures, which are supposed to be more responsive to their constituents than federal organizations anyway.
The blurb only quotes the article and neither of which links to the decision. What did the court say that limited what the FCC can do? What was their reasoning and why did it 'leave little wiggle room'?
The sentence makes an okay headline but without an actual article describing the decision it doesn't make any sense.
This is an Appeals court, not a Supreme Court ruling.
Big difference.
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I somehow doubt this is an issue any longer. (insert something about Ajit Pai here)
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This is a CRIME in and of itself, and MUST be stopped! My uncle had a warrant for a traffic ticket he forgot about once. He called my mother for bail so he could get out and deal with the ticket and warrant. That 10 minute call, cost my mother 300$. Its robbery. Simple as that. A dollars worth of Phone call, in town, for 300x that amount... Only thieves and CRIMINALS do such things!
So what's the argument in favor of letting them gouge prisoners and their families on phone calls? This seems counterproductive to the stated purpose of a prison, reform. Their punishment if supposed to be time behind bars, not high phone bills.
staying out of trouble != not doing the crime. Some examples.
I see a business opertunity where a company - perhaps a not-for-profit - crates a phone center in some state that takes long distance calls from Inmates and forwards them to their "loved ones". Of course this will require registration, perhaps by the inmates lawyer of family to prevent inmate scams... The cost could be kept low because of not-for-profit status, certainly it could be done for less than the Phone Company Scammers.
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You mean "if you ain't got the dimes, don't do the crimes"?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
USA has too many prisoners in the first place. Everything is a crime and if something is not a crime that's temporary. Shutting down the DEA would get rid of what, over half of the prison population at least?
Of-course this goes against the profit motive of the well politically connected prison industrial complex, so that's another problem in itself - the government passing the laws that put people to prisons and then handing out contracts to private corporations to keep those people there. There is a profit motive here and it starts with the politicians. Of-course the opposite of prisons would be freedom and liberty and we can't have that in the United States of America.
Freedom and liberty to do with your body as you wish, freedom and liberty to sell any product that people desire to purchase. Freedom and liberty not to be locked up for either using or selling any substances.
How about only locking people up for violence against other people? How about private prisons *NOT* getting government contracts?
AFAIC there shouldn't be any public police or public roads or public education or public health care or public courts, everything should be private. Everything should be paid with use fees and insurance payouts, not with any taxes. There shouldn't be income and wealth taxes, there shouldn't be anything that can allow the public to place people into prisons. All matters are private, event the most violent once.
At that point the question of the phone call pricing is no longer in the hands of any public authority / government, it is a private question. The size of the prisoner population is no longer in the hands of any public authority / government, it's private. You get robbed, beaten up, murdered, your insurance has to pay out, it can use the money to investigate and to place the offender behind bars of a private prison after going through a private court room.
Why would insurance do that? Because it needs to reduce the number of robberies, beatings, murders so that the number of payouts goes down.
You can't handle the truth.
Well? What is next? We haven't started with this so we don't know what is next. We already privatized and profitized imprisonment.
This is a power grab. Not everything is a federal issue. We have unelected federal bureaucrats telling a state what it can and can't do inside the state. What the state is doing is unethical, but it's not the FCC's place to regulate. This should be handled by state civil right groups, state regulators and state courts.
no public health care = prison is nice place to be hell even $3 min phone calls are bargain next to an private doctor that bills $100+ for an 15 min visit with lab fees on top of that.
Or $15K-20K + for the ER.
Title says "can't cap the cost of cross-state prison phone calls", the summary says "little wiggle room for advocates of price-capping, with the possible exception of the cross-state caps".
The title should really say intrastate (or in-state) prison phone calls.
Doesn't anybody read anymore?
A doctor visit may be 100USD per 15 minutes or maybe without government interference the prices actually come down. Maybe without government income and wealth taxes, business regulations, involvement in every nook and cranny the actual *free* market, free *from* government oppression and theft provides the health care system that people are able to afford *out of pocket* in the first place.
Insurance then would be used for what it is supposed to be used - high deductible, low monthly payment plan to cover actually expensive events.
Maybe without government creating inflation through the borrowing and the Federal reserve the prices would stop creeping up and instead would start coming down... prices on everything.
You can't handle the truth.
whatever the cable companies want so long as Trump's in the Whitehouse. As for why bother, well, the Cable companies need somebody to rubber stamp their large cash subsidies.
Not saying we get rid of the FCC. It did fine for 8 years of Obama. Let's find ourselves another Obama and maybe give him a congress he (or she) can work with.
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That's obviously a completely irrelevant, and shockingly callous statement. Don't you find it a little strange that the more disadvantaged someone in your society is, the more difficult and expensive everything becomes? Live in a poor neighbourhood, pay more in insurance. Suffer poor health, pay more in health insurance, if you can even get it. Wind up in jail, be unable to afford a telephone call to your family, who may very well be the only people you have left.
The whole thing is tilted, so that once you start falling, you tend to keep going, and there may be no way back. Whatever good fortune you have experienced in your lifetime, I'd wager much of it came from luck. Perhaps I'm wrong, perhaps you pulled yourself out of the gutter, perhaps you were born into poverty, suffered ill-health, wound up in jail through no real fault of your own, and still managed to survive, and eventually to overcome.
But that's pretty vanishingly unlikely. I certainly didn't. I was born with good health, a reasonable brains, into a comfortable situation. Education was both provided for free, and I was expected to undertake it. When I completed it, a job was easy to come by. I bumped into a wonderful girl by accident, and how I have a beautiful family, and a good and happy life. All of that, all of it, was nothing better than luck. That luck could change any day. I am not so conceited and blind to imagine otherwise.
You do realize that under the opposite system the rich and connected ... do whatever they want and stomp on the poor, except everwhere instead of just most places.
When you create new levers of federal power, who do you think is going to be most interested and able to manipulate them?
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Wouldn't this issue be a matter of antitrust laws instead of the FCC regulating things?
The foundation of Federalism is that the levers of power must remain as close to the people as possible, with the Federal government handling issues between States, with other Nations, and with the Native Americans that can only be dealt with at a national level. Matters of public health, safety and education belong to the States, which are "closer" and more responsive to the voters.
And it is extortion. I had someone in the Brevard Co, FL jail in '04, and $50 min "deposit", use it or lose it, *and* you could ONLY CALL FROM ONE PHONE NUMBER. And you had to register that phone # with the jail before hand, so they were limited in who they could call.
And most of you are too young to remember pay by the minute phone calls, and this was long-distance pricing in the same freickin' county.
Note: it is a documented *fact* that the more contact a prisoner has during their imprisonment, the lower the recidivism rate.
Perhaps I'm wrong, perhaps you pulled yourself out of the gutter, perhaps you were born into poverty, suffered ill-health, wound up in jail through no real fault of your own, and still managed to survive, and eventually to overcome.
I pulled myself out of the gutter. None of my childhood friends did. They are all dead or in prison for life now. :(
Regardless, bad luck could have kept me in the same conditions as my childhood friends. I needed plenty of good luck get out of the gutter.
TL;DR, you are correct.
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