One of the most frequent complaints of jail and prison inmates, their families and advocates is that telephone companies overcharge them for making phone calls to their loved ones. On Wednesday, the Federal Communications Commission announced that it will soon decide whether to limit phone call rates and service fees for inmates.
On Oct. 22, the FCC will vote to decide whether to regulate the phone companies, which make $1.2 billion a year serving prisons and jails.
Rates are typically very expensive for inmates — as high as $14 a minute. Add in exorbitant service fees and phone bills can grow to as high as $500 a month, typically paid by inmates’ families. And as a recent study found, families (usually mothers, girlfriends and wives of inmates) often go deep in debt trying to pay the costs associated with incarceration, including court fees and phone bills.
The new rules would charge inmates far less — from a maximum of 11 cents a minute for prison inmates to a maximum of 22 cents a minute for jail inmates.
With momentum continuing to build for significant reforms to America’s criminal justice system, prisoner re-entry — the transitioning of offenders from prisons or jails back into communities — is a priority. This is related to that question because lower phone bills would help former inmates reenter society and succeed in post-prison life (and thus stay out of prison) by ending their and their families’ financial exploitation in an obviously government-created monopoly market.
The New York Times has more.
Daniel Allott is deputy commentary editor for the Washington Examiner