A recent article on the website of the British newspaper The Guardian discusses the impact of the high cost of telephone calls from U.S. prisons. This issue has become more and more prominent, culminating in the recent bipartisan letter to the FCC calling on the Federal Communications Commission to stop phone companies from charging inmates what they call unreasonable and predatory rates to make phone calls.

The Guardian article highlights the critical importance of telephone communication between prisoners and their loved ones. It is a key tool to reduce recidivism we support by offering a secure prison cell phone solution which enables more calls with more privacy while providing prisons a new source of funding to offset lower prison pay phone rates:

When a person is sent to prison, one of the most obvious and important ways to ensure a successful re-entry to society upon release to is maintain and strengthen familial bonds during incarceration. Most families are willing and eager to stay connected with their loved ones. Unfortunately, however, there are many barriers in place to prevent them from doing so, not least of which are the prohibitively expensive and sometimes downright exploitative costs.

One woman I spoke to (I’ll call her Jennifer) described the difficulty of staying in touch with her brother, who has spent the past 10 years in prison.

“After 10 years, my brother was finally transferred to a location where it’s only half a day’s drive (550 miles) to visit. One has to make an appointment up to three weeks in advance to be able to visit; the hotel rates in the area are double anywhere else; and the emotional and financial costs to get there are great because families are made to share the cost of punishment in very literal ways.”

Jennifer outlined some of those “very literal ways”, such as the $70-100 on gasoline per trip, the $90 per person for a hotel room, the $50-100 for food in the visiting room. Besides, she pays $40 to maintain a landline she wouldn’t otherwise have in order to be able to receive the one 3-5min collect call her brother is allotted each month, plus up to $20 for the cost of the call itself. That comes to around $400 for one five-hour visit and one five-minute phone call. Hardly what you’d call “meaningful contact”. But it is nonetheless necessary.

At least in Jennifer’s case, she and her husband are fortunate enough to be able to absorb these costs. That, however, is not the case for many families who cite similar experience. Most prisoners are housed in facilities located between 100 and 500 miles from their homes; some are housed more than 500 miles away. That makes regular contact visits impossible to many people – and means that phone contact is all the more crucial.

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An interesting article tackling the contentious issue of prison telephone systems vendors paying per minute commissions to jails and prisons. In Louisiana, as in other states, the rate can be as high as 55% of the per minute cost of the call. According to the article, phone commissions are an important source of revenue, state corrections officials say. The challenge is to balance the need to find sources of prison revenue to fund operations in a difficult economy that has slashed state and local budgets while at the same time encouraging prisoner communication with family to reduce recidivism. As the article states, “it can be harmful to re-entry and rehabilitation goals if an inmate’s family can’t afford to stay in touch with him while he’s incarcerated.”

One strategy is to reduce the commissions, and therefore the cost of the telephone service, and offset this lost revenue by offering the new meshDETECT secure prison cell phone service. Many prisoners and their families would be willing to pay a premium to have the convenience and privacy a cell phone would provide their conversations. This will increase total revenues, reduce the contraband value of smuggled cell phones and offer more opportunities for prisoners to stay in touch with family and friends.

Every time a Louisiana prison inmate picks up a telephone and places a call, it’s money in the bank for sheriff’s offices and correctional facilities across the state.

The Louisiana Department of Corrections has received $10.2 million in commissions from vendors operating prison phones during the past three fiscal years, records show, and sheriff’s offices in Louisiana’s 64 parishes have received millions more.

For the most part, the money comes from the families of inmates — many of them poor — who pay the tab in the form of collect call charges that critics say are exorbitant, unfair and ultimately counterproductive to rehabilitation and re-entry objectives.

Now, the system is under scrutiny by the Louisiana Public Service Commission, which regulates the rates that telephone companies are allowed to charge.

The commissions that vendors are required to pay sheriff’s offices and the state — as much as 55 percent of gross revenues — are a big factor in the steep phone charges, records show.

A local collect call of zero to five minutes from East Baton Rouge Parish Prison means a charge of $1.31 under existing allowable rates, with a 50-cent charge for each five-minute period after that, meaning a 15- minute phone call costs $2.31, records show.

Pam Laborde, a spokeswoman for the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, said the cost of 15-minute local collect calls from state prisons average $1.05, while intrastate collect calls average $5.55.

The charges can be a crushing blow for poor families trying desperately to stay in contact with loved ones behind bars, said Louisiana Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell.

“A lot of people think this is grossly unfair,” Campbell said. “This affects a lot of families in Louisiana.”

He recently prodded the PSC to hire outside legal counsel to analyze rates, examine regulations and compare them with other jurisdictions to determine if they are “just, fair and reasonable.”

Campbell said he tried to deal with the issue when he was a state senator but politically powerful Louisiana sheriffs blocked attempts to cut phone rates.

Cleo Fields, a lawyer who served in the state Senate with Campbell, said it was tough legislation to try to pass.

“Obviously, the Louisiana Sheriffs’ Association opposed the bill vigorously,” Fields said. “They felt it would be an infringement on their revenues. My argument is they shouldn’t use those types of revenues to balance their budget.”

Fields said the person being penalized is not the one who is incarcerated but rather the mother, child or other family member who is being charged the high rates.

Laborde said collect phone charges for the 19,000 inmates housed in state-run prisons in Louisiana are much lower than is the case for prison inmates in the neighboring states of Texas and Mississippi.

She said the local rate for a 15-minute inmate collect call in Mississippi is $2.85, while a 15-minute long-distance call is $14.55. In Texas, the rates are $3.90 for a local collect call and $6.45 for a long-distance collect call, she said.

Under its contract to provide inmate telephone services in state-run prisons, Global Tel Link pays 55 percent of its gross revenues to the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections.

The commissions generated $3.3 million for the fiscal year that ended June 30, according to figures provided by the department.

Although a small part of a public safety department budget that is $480.6 million this year, phone commissions are an important source of revenue, state corrections officials say.

Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections Secretary Jimmy LeBlanc said the agency has done everything it can to cut expenses short of closing or privatizing prisons.

“It would be a major impact to us if we had to cut $3.3 million from our budget,” he said.

LeBlanc said staff levels have been sharply reduced during the past three years and cutting corrections officer positions is not an option.

He said that means the ax likely would have to fall on services such as rehabilitation and re-entry programs designed to help inmates transition successfully back into the community. He said that’s not a direction he wants to see the department take.

“Our staff, from the bottom up, are committed to re-entry,” LeBlanc said.

He also noted that family ties are not always healthy and conducive to an inmate’s successful re-entry into the community.

“Family culture sometimes is not the best thing because they may have come up in a culture of crime,” LeBlanc said.

He also said money generated from phone commissions helps cover the costs of investigators who review recorded calls for security purposes, often generating useful information for the FBI, State Police or other law enforcement agencies.

Like the state corrections department, sheriff’s offices in Louisiana have also come to rely on income from phone commissions to help run their operations.

For example, the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office includes $620,000 from phone commissions payments in its $79 million budget for this fiscal year.

Casey Rayborn-Hicks, a spokeswoman for the Sheriff’s Office, said in an email that the money goes into the sheriff’s general fund to help meet operating expenses, including such things as a crime victim’s assistance program.

The Sheriff’s Office’s agreement with American Phone Systems of Lafayette requires the company to pay 48 percent of its gross revenue to the Sheriff’s Office.

The contract is similar to that for other parish sheriff’s offices The Advocate examined. The same contract also sets the commission rate at 48 percent.

Michael Ranatza, executive director of the Louisiana Sheriffs’ Association, said the LSA doesn’t compile information on how much money sheriff’s offices statewide receive from phone commissions.

“I don’t know from parish-to- parish what it generates,” Ranatza said.

He said he wouldn’t speculate on what position the LSA might take on any attempt to eliminate commissions as a way of reducing phone charges that relatives of inmates have to pay.

“That’s something that’s not on the table right now,” Ranatza said. “We would look at the merits of any proposal based on what is presented and make a determination at that time.”

Curt Selman, chief executive officer of Payphones of Arkansas LLC and past president of a trade association for specialized communications providers, said phone systems installed in prisons have to be able to screen, record and block calls and must have other security features that make such systems more expensive than others.

He acknowledged that the commissions paid to state or local correctional facilities — sometimes amounting to more than half of gross revenues — drive up the costs for inmates and their families. But, he said, it’s a tradeoff because the money goes back into operating the prisons, reducing costs for taxpayers.

“There is some pressure from individual counties, states and parishes to get the commissions as high as possible and who can blame them? They are trying to run a jail and revenues are down,” Selman said.

He said companies bidding to provide phone services try to set rates at levels people can afford but also have to accommodate the requirements of prison systems that are trying to maximize the revenues they receive.

“Most of the providers of the service are not making outlandish profits,” Selman said. “Their margins are actually pretty slim.”

The PSC’s Campbell said his objection is to the tacked-on commissions that drive up phone rates and have nothing to do with the cost of providing the service.

Moreover, Campbell said, it can be harmful to re-entry and rehabilitation goals if an inmate’s family can’t afford to stay in touch with him while he’s incarcerated.

“You should do the human thing and let the man talk to his wife and children,” Campbell said. “It shouldn’t cost an arm and a leg.”

He said it is wrong to fund sheriff’s offices and prisons by “taking it out of the hides of the poorest of the poor.”

Fields said the current practices are predatory.

“We’ve got to take the profit out of prisons, period,” Fields said. “At this point, it’s profitable to incarcerate people. It should not be a way to make money.”

The phone commission system used in Louisiana is similar to that used in many other states.

A publication called Prison Legal News earlier this year found that phone service vendors, on average, paid state corrections departments 42 percent of their gross revenues from phone calls made by prisoners.

The report found that “pure, unabated greed by both the phone companies” and state prison systems controls the rates set for inmate phone services.

The report said that eight states have banned prison phone commissions — Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, Rhode Island, Michigan, South Carolina, California and Missouri.

Author: Greg Garland
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An interesting article about the challenges of newly booked prisoners using the prison pay phones in county jails. As stated in the article, the inablity to make collect calls to cell phones, “strikes people strange that, in this technologically advanced and cellphone-reliant age, there is no easy way to make a collect call to a cellphone, particularly as the number of people without a land line increases. According to a 2010 Centers for Disease Control report, 25 percent of U.S. households don’t even have a land line.”

At meshDETECT, we have developed a solution to this problem that provides new detainees a prepaid account and telephone access at the time of intake. Please contact us to find out more about this innovative solution.

Where was Stephen Petrick? That was the question among his friends in mid-November after the 67-year-old retiree suddenly disappeared.

At the time, no one knew that he had been trying to help a pregnant woman kick a nasty heroin habit by locking her inside his Santa Monica home so she couldn’t buy drugs, or that she had tried to flee and things turned ugly fast, ending with the cops arresting Petrick on a charge of false imprisonment.

Not one of Petrick’s friends had an inkling that Petrick was stuck inside the Los Angeles County jail system — for five long nights — unable to contact them or a bondsman because of the phone setup inmates are forced to use.

“You supposedly have the right to bail,” Petrick says, “but it was effectively denied by the way the phone system works. It should be criminal.”

Petrick says he was arrested in Santa Monica, where he was fingerprinted and booked at the city jail. When he asked to make a phone call, officers told him he had to wait until he was transferred to the L.A. County jail later that day.

At the county jail, Petrick says, he told the deputies that he had high blood pressure and diabetes, so he was placed in a medical unit. He describes it as a large room with 20 to 30 inmates, a few narrow, stainless-steel benches and two or three telephones.

Immediately, Petrick says, he walked up to one of the old-fashioned-looking pay phones, a big black box with patches of chrome but absent a coin slot. Petrick lifted the receiver and placed it to his ear, listening to the automated voice tell him he’d be making a collect call and that it may be recorded or monitored.

Petrick reached out to dial a number. He paused.

Like many people, Petrick had come to rely on his cellphone. He wasn’t as good as he used to be about memorizing phone numbers. Excitedly, he recalled one person’s cell number and dialed it.

His elation, however, quickly turned to anxious frustration as the automated voice told Petrick that he could not place a collect call to a cellular phone. He could only call out to a land line. Trouble was, he hadn’t memorized any land-line numbers.

Hell, he hardly even knew anyone with a land line anymore.

“I realized right away that I had a problem,” Petrick says.

Next, Petrick says, he looked around for a phone book or a posted list of bond agencies so he could arrange to pay bail. The bond was $150,000, an amount Petrick says he had no problem paying. But he needed to call someone on the outside to help.

Unfortunately, he says, he could not find a list of phone numbers for bail bondsmen. When he asked a deputy for help, Petrick says, the deputy was resolutely unhelpful, telling him, “That’s your problem. If we gave you the number, that would be showing partiality.”

After spending a few sleepless nights in the large room filled with other inmates, Petrick says, he was moved to a more permanent cell with access to a common room containing phones. Doubting they would be any different, Petrick tried once again to place a call. But the results were the same. No collect calls to cellphones. No phone list of bail bonds agencies.

Petrick says he was not able to arrange bail until after he had his first court appearance — four days after his arrest.

“There was no way in hell for me to call anyone or to get a bondsman’s number,” he says. “The phones in there effectively denied me the right to make bail, and I don’t know if many people know about this.”

Jeff Stanley, owner of Bad Boys Bail Bonds, one of the largest bond companies in California, with offices from San Jose to San Diego, says the phone situation at L.A. County jail is one of the worst in the state.

“The individuals in custody are held hostage to this phone system that they have to use to talk to an attorney or a bondsman — something they have the legal right to do,” Stanley says. “I truly believe that it’s a violation of their civil rights, because everyone has a right to bail, and this is interfering with that right.”

Says Esther Lim, the jails monitor for the American Civil Liberties Union and one of the few people actually allowed inside the notoriously restricted facility, “I didn’t see a listing of bail-bonds companies near any of the phones I’ve looked at. I have seen listings by the phones for your ambassador if you’re not a U.S. national, but nothing for bail bonds. It’s ridiculous.”

Nicole Nishida, spokeswoman for the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, confirms there are no phone numbers provided for bail bondsmen near phones to which inmates have access.

“And we have no plans of doing it in the future,” she says.

Nishida calls the problem a “vending issue” that would have to be resolved by the L.A. County Board of Supervisors. She says it boils down to fairness: making sure the Sheriff’s Department does not display favoritism toward any particular bail bonds businesses.

Officials in other counties, however, say they’re having no such problem and have found easy ways to provide phone numbers to everybody in jail.

An Orange County jail spokeswoman, for example, says that a list of bond companies, with phone numbers, is posted in both the booking area and in the common rooms used by inmates. She says the bond agencies must contact a company that contracts with the county, and they pay to get on the list that goes inside the jail.

In San Diego County, the Sheriff’s Department used to provide inmates with the Yellow Pages but recently replaced the bulky phone book with an alphabetical listing of bail bonds companies provided to the jail by a local association of bail agencies.

“L.A. County does not post a list,” says bondsman Stanley, “and I have no idea why. L.A. County marches to its own beat.”

In addition, it strikes people such as Stanley, Lim and Petrick as strange that, in this technologically advanced and cellphone-reliant age, there is no easy way to make a collect call to a cellphone, particularly as the number of people without a land line increases. According to a 2010 Centers for Disease Control report, 25 percent of U.S. households don’t even have a land line.

Stanley’s is one of them.

“Many families like myself don’t have a land line,” he says, “and I think it’s about time they moved into the 21st century.”

Dorothy Cukier of Global Tel Link, a company that specializes in prison phones and operates the system in L.A. County, told the Weekly via email that collect calls in general — whether they originate from a jail or not — are limited to land lines. The company is allowed to jump in when inmates call a cellphone, offering the recipient of the call a chance to sign up for a service, AdvancePay, which lets calls to cellphones go through, by using a credit card. Another option, Cukier says, is for inmates to put money into an inmate debit account, out of which they can pay to call a phone that does not ordinarily accept collect calls.

Petrick says he was never offered an inmate debit account and has no idea whether a Global Tel Link agent jumped in to ask the friend Petrick had called if he’d accept the charge. All Petrick knows is that he couldn’t get through to his friend.

Two months after Petrick finally arranged bail and got out of jail, he settled his criminal case, which prosecutors apparently agreed wasn’t as serious as the initial charges implied. He pled guilty to misdemeanor false imprisonment. He received three years of probation and, ironically, credit for time served for his five nights missing in the jail system.

As for the future, Petrick says, “The first thing I’m going to do is carry a bail bondsman’s number with me at all times and memorize it in case there’s some fluke and I get in trouble again. I don’t want to ever get stuck in jail like that again. It was a nightmare.”

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Illinois becomes the latest state DOC to investigate the use of legislation and technology to block the use of smuggled cell phones in prison. Although the use of contraband cell phones seems to be less of a problem than in other large inmate population states.

That’s the latest message from state officials, who are poised to start cracking down on people who try to smuggle portable phones into prison.

Faced with the prospect that inmates could be using smuggled cellphones to plan escapes or run criminal enterprises, the Illinois Department of Corrections is asking companies how much it would cost for them to install special equipment at Illinois’ nearly 30 prisons that might detect whether illegal cellphone calls are being made from within the prison walls.

The scanning technology is just one front in the state’s battle against cellphones.

State Sen. Ira Silverstein, D-Chicago, recently introduced legislation that would strip an inmate of up to 90 days of credit against their sentences if they are found in possession of a cellular phone.

The push in Illinois comes just a month after California approved similar measures designed to stop the flow of cellphones into their prison system. The sponsor of that legislation said the number of cellphones confiscated in California prisons grew from 261 in 2006 to more than 10,700 in 2010.

In Illinois, however, Corrections’ officials say the number of cellphones flowing into the prison system is a mere trickle.

“It is not a common occurrence. The average is about five cellphones confiscated per year, but we are at eight for this year, so it is up a little,” said IDOC spokeswoman Sharyn Elman.

It has been a problem elsewhere.

A National Institute of Justice report on cellphones in prison notes a number of examples where phones played a role in potential crimes.

In Nevada, the report noted, prison officials fired a dental assistant for helping an inmate get a cellphone to plan a successful escape. In New York, an inmate used a cellphone to orchestrate an attempted escape while on a medical transfer.

The federal report added that prison officials in Tennessee banned jars of peanut butter after learning that an inmate accused in the shooting death of a guard had used a jar to hide the cellphone he used to coordinate his escape.

For now, Illinois officials are not saying how much they are willing to spend on one of a number of potential systems designed to thwart inmates from using cellphones smuggled to them in prisons.

“We have no plans to utilize this service at this point,” Elman added. “We are simply requesting information to learn more about what is available.”

In the meantime, Illinois inmates are still allowed some phone privileges using older, landline technology.

Under current state prison rules, all inmates have an approved list of numbers they are allowed to call using phones at each prison. For general population offenders who are not under any disciplinary measures there is no limit on collect calls or prepaid calls. The phone system will disconnect the call after 20 minutes but the offender can then dial it again if no one is waiting for the phone.

“If an offender is under any form of discipline his or her phone privileges can be limited to one call per month or no calls at all,” Elman noted.

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This article discusses the impact prison telephone service commissions have on the overall cost of prisoner’s calling loved ones. The article quotes the recent GAO study on contraband cell phones at the BOP, “lowering rates could increase communication between inmates and their families, helping the inmates reintegrate when they got out of prison. But there would be less money available for things like paying wages for inmate labor and offering education and recreational activities.” Bureau of Prison officials told the GAO that the programs were important because “inmate idleness increases the risk of violence, escapes and other disruptions”

Another approach to enhanced prisoner communication and reduced idleness is to offer a secure cell phone service. Prisoners will have many more opportunities to communicate with family, commissions can be lowered because overall call usage (and therefore total revenue) will increase and contraband cell phone usage will be reduced.

Kimberly Scardina-Gomez has pawned jewelry and even skipped paying the electric bill so she can afford for her 16-year-old son to talk on the phone with his father, who is serving a robbery sentence at a state prison in Illinois.

What really irks her is that phone companies are giving a chunk of the revenue they make from handling calls for families like hers — 42 percent is typical, according to an analysis finished this year— back to jail and prison operators in exchange for the business.

Prison Legal News, a West Brattleboro, Vt.-based publication that advocates for the rights of inmates, found that among state prison systems, commissions cost prisoners’ families, friends and attorneys more than $152 million in 2008, the year studied. A report released this month by the Government Accountability Office found that of the $74 million in revenue generated in 2010 by the Bureau of Prisons’ inmate telephone system, about $34 million was profit.

Under pressure, states such as Kansas and Florida have reduced commissions while others such as Nebraska and New York have stopped accepting commissions. In California, which ended commissions earlier this year, phone rates declined by 61 percent, Prison Legal News found. Advocacy groups want more prison and jail operators to follow suit or persuade the Federal Communications Commission to establish caps on inmate phone rates.

“It’s not fair,” said Scardina-Gomez, a 35-year-old laid off paralegal and second-year law student from Chicago. “You see all kinds of studies talking about how to reduce recidivism, how to stop repeat offenders. Things of that nature all start with family structure. They all start with positive reinforcement, yet they don’t try to reinforce that at all.”

Because of the commissions, receiving calls from inmates cost as much as $15 to $25 for a 15-minute conversation — often five times as high as ordinary collect call rates.

“Whenever you’ve got money in the mix, it’s hard to get away from it,” said Paul Wright, editor of Prison Legal News. “It’s like telling a crack addict to lay off the dope. Even if they know they should, it’s hard to get them to do it.”

The GAO, which studied phone rates as part of a larger report on contraband cell phones being snuck into federal prisons, said lowering rates could increase communication between inmates and their families, helping the inmates reintegrate when they got out of prison. But it said there would be less money available for things like paying wages for inmate labor and offering education and recreational activities.

Bureau of Prison officials told the GAO that the programs were important because “inmate idleness increases the risk of violence, escapes and other disruptions” but noted that Congress would be unlikely to chip in the money. Even critics of the commissions acknowledge it’s tough to generate sympathy for inmates, and Wright said their families are “right up there with single welfare moms and illegal immigrants as far as bashable, disenfranchised constituencies that no one gets too concerned about.”

And the expense isn’t just borne by the families of the 2.3 million people incarcerated in U.S. jails and prisons but often by the attorneys who represent them — a practice that some groups allege discourages attorneys from talking to their clients.

The phone companies defend the rates in briefs filed with the FCC, saying their phone systems require costly security devices to keep inmates from harassing potential witnesses or orchestrating crimes from behind bars.

Plus, states and counties — many of them facing deficits because of the recession — have become dependent on the money they earn from the commissions.

“It offsets other costs and allows certain programs for inmates to continue — some training programs, some rehab programs,” said Fred Wilson, director of operations for the National Sheriff’s Association. “However, we have taken a stand and said the rates need to be reasonable.”

Stephanie Joyce, an attorney for Dallas-based inmate communication provider Securus Technologies Inc., which offers phone service for about 2,300 correctional facilities in 44 states, said the issue of who pays for jails and prisons is one for policymakers to decide and that Securus merely collects the commissions when contracts require it to do so.

“If my client doesn’t want to go bankrupt and pay out more than it takes in, then the site commissions must be recovered,” Joyce said. “It wasn’t Securus’ decision to invent site commissions.”

Fifty-five-year-old Samella Green has benefited from a 40-percent reduction in phone rates in Kansas. But the Wichita woman and her husband, who live on federal disability payments, still spend about $200 a month to talk to four incarcerated relatives.

“It’s an enormous weight for people to carry because so many people have family in there,” she said.

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