Updated 5:37 p.m.
Civil rights and conservative groups have banded together to form an unlikely coalition to ask the Federal Communications Commission to end "exorbitant" fees that many prisons charge inmates to make phone calls.
It can cost 10 times more to call anyone from prison than it does to call Singapore from a cellphone, said Wade Henderson, president of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, during a conference call with reporters this morning. A 15-minute collect call from prison typically costs $10 to $17 - rates that garnered $152 million in revenue for prisons in 2011. “These are predatory rates for a literally captive audience,” he said.
David Keene, former chairman of the American Conservative Union, agreed. “It’s a tax directly on the poorest people in our society,” he said. “It makes no sense to cut off or make it impossible for prisoners to communicate with their families.”
Coalition members stressed that phone contact helps prisoners maintain ties with their families, and that the most important factor in a successful rehabilitation is a strong, intact family.
"It's a fight for the right to call home," said Amalia Deloney, who noted that while letters are also a way to stay in touch, “It’s hard to tell a 4-year-old that the only way to stay in contact with mom or dad is through crayons and paper.”
The issue has languished before the FCC for a decade. Martha Wright and 19 other people with relatives in prison in 2000 filed a class action in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia seeking a ruling that the phone service contracts entered into by prisons were illegal. The case was remanded in 2001 to the FCC, which issued a notice of proposed rulemaking in 2003, said Lee Petro, of counsel at Drinker Biddle & Reath, who is representing Wright pro bono.
Four years went by without resolution, so the petitioners in 2007 suggested that the FCC set benchmark rates of 20 cents per minute for calls placed using a calling card, and 25 cents a minute for collect calls. Still, the FCC has not taken action. Petro said he believes the reason for the delay is simply “a lack of interest to resolve the matter” at the FCC.
He noted that FCC employees who had been working on the issue were reassigned to help with the national broadband plan, the first priority of Chairman Julius Genachowski. Once the broadband plan was in place, personnel were diverted to work on reforming the Universal Service Fund, also now accomplished. “That’s why we’re trying to push for it now,” Petro said. “There isn’t one subject everyone [at the FCC] is focused on.”
Among those backing prison phone rate reform are American Values president Gary Bauer; the American Civil Liberties Union, Free Press, Consumers Union, the NAACP, Galen Carey of the National Association of Evangelicals and the Rev. Lou Sheldon and Andrea Lafferty of the Traditional Values Coalition.
“We write to you as organizations and individuals that represent a wide variety of views on many issues, but that stand united on the need to reduce the exorbitant rates for telephone calls from prisons,” the groups wrote in letter sent to the FCC today. “Unreasonably high prison phone rates unjustly punish the families of people who are incarcerated, and contribute to rising recidivism rates by deterring regular telephone contact with family members and loved ones.”
Actually, even some of the inmate phone companies are in support of rate reform. The $.20 / $.25 rates recommended actually seem fair, but what was left out is the labor costs to establish accounts. The FCC is inundated with so many requests, so the squeakiest wheel will get the grease. Also, while addressing the phone rates, it might also want to address the rates on video visitation which will be the next generation of inmate phone service.
As an inmate phone provider, I would hope the FCC to address these rates with input from the corrections industry and the inmate phone industry.
Posted by: Bill Pope | May 24, 2012 at 11:10 AM
Now maybe we'll see an end to this officially sanctioned legalized robbery of the poor. Hopefully this will also cover county jails.
Maybe they'll also deal with the way this was rigged so, as a lawyer, I had to pay for unwanted collect calls from jail in the middle of the might or let the phone ring all night.
This was and is one of several cases of illicit financial and sexual relations between private businesses, their executives and lobbyists, i.e. bag men, and the politicians, parties, and kept regulators that should and, if those we elected were honest, would never have been permitted.
Incidentally, this article and others omitted the work done on this issue, among others of recent note like the long-overdue prison rape regulations, by Prison Fellowship and its late founder Chuck Colson.
Posted by: Peter S. Chamberlain | May 21, 2012 at 06:05 AM