FCC Rightly Limits Prisons’ Costly Game of Telephone
Newly passed reforms will trim the exorbitant phone charges that prison inmates and their families face.
Incarceration often brings financial devastation to the families of inmates who are behind bars. Legal expenses and the loss of a potential breadwinner can push families into poverty, if they haven’t landed there already.
But once an inmate is serving time for his or her crime, one might think that society’s interests would best be served by rehabilitating prisoners and taking at least modest steps to ensure their families — sometimes victims themselves in the prisoner’s criminal activity — aren’t damaged by the system. Extensive studies have found that maintaining close contact with families and community is a key factor in helping prisoners change their ways once they are released.
Yet when it comes to the most basic means by which inmate and family can keep in touch with one another — the telephone — the prison system and its vendors are nakedly ripping off prisoners and their families, pocketing fat fees and exorbitant charges at a level that seems criminal itself.
As Civil Beat’s Rui Kenaya reported Monday, those charges can amount to $3.75 for a 15-minute call; and that doesn’t take into account the $5.95 charged per prisoner every time money is deposited into their accounts to cover phone use (in required increments of $25). These costs, by the way, are slapped on the hundreds of inmates Hawaii ships off to a for-profit mainland prison in Arizona. It amounts to a brutal tax on virtually all personal interaction between these inmates and on-island families.
On-island prisoners pay as much as $1.95 to start a local call, and up to 14 cents a minute to talk, or more than $4 for a 15-minute call. Hawaii Tel-Com, which serves Hawaii prison facilities, straight up gouges families of the incarcerated with a $9.75 fee to reload each prison phone account.
Hawaii is a small state with fewer prisoners than many others; but even here, prison phone service amounts to big business. Nationwide, 90 percent of the billion-dollar prison phone business is controlled by Securus Technologies and Global Tel*Link. The latter company provides service for the Saguaro Correctional Center in Eloy, Arizona, where one-fourth of Hawaii prisoners are housed.
With 2.2 million men and women behind bars across the United States, these two companies, both held by private equity firms, are making millions off the backs of families already experiencing some of the most difficult times we might expect anyone to endure.
Enter Mignon Clyburn.
A former South Carolina Public Services Commission member, and the daughter of U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, S.C., Clyburn was appointed in 2009 by President Obama to the Federal Communications Commission. Clyburn and her fellow commissioners regulate interstate communication over multiple devices, including telephones.
Not surprisingly, the FCC had to pull hard to drag the money trough away from the two profit hogs: Securus Technologies and Global Tel*Link, which is threatening to sue the commission over the matter.
She’s been a vocal critic of inflated prison phone charges, and led a push for the commission to step in. The FCC created a plan that enabled the commission to establish new caps on charges for out-of-state calls for all prisons in August 2013.
Last month, at ܰ’s urging, the FCC expanded those regulations with rules that will cap per-minute phone costs for all U.S. prisons at 11 cents, and dramatically lower associated fees for such things as reloading prison phone cards.
“The truth is that each of us is paying a heavy price for what is now a predatory, failed market regime,” she said in encouraging her colleagues to vote for the reform measure. “None of us would consider ever paying $500 a month for a voice-only service where calls are dropped for seemingly no reason, where fees and commissions could be as high at 60 percent per call and, if we are not careful, where a four-minute call could cost us a whopping $54.”
Not surprisingly, Clyburn and company had to pull hard to drag the money trough away from the two profit hogs: Global TelLink and Securus Technologies fought the new regulation tooth and nail. Clyburn and two other Democratic appointees prevailed in a 3-2 vote, but Global TelLink’s CEO is threatening to sue the FCC over the matter.
Still, the regulations are set to take effect next year, and when they do, they’ll reduce charges by as much as 45 percent.
ܰ’s quoted from late South African President Nelson Mandela, who “is known to have said … that ‘a nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.’”
In finally providing relief to the families of prisoners in Hawaii and across the country, the Clyburn and the FCC notably pass that test.
