WASHINGTON — A decade after families of prison inmates asked for action, the Federal Communications Commission agreed to limit how much companies can charge for phone calls made from behind bars.
The FCC voted 2-1 to cap interstate phone rates at 21 cents a minute for debit or prepaid calls and 25 cents a minute for collect calls. Companies wanting to set higher rates would have to file a request for a waiver and could not charge more until that waiver was granted.
The FCC has said that inmates, or people who pay their bills, are being charged fees that range from 50 cents to $3.95 to place calls, plus additional per-minute rates from 5 cents to 89 cents. In some cases, a 15-minute call has cost $17, and numerous fees have been tacked on to call charges. Inmates’ families, many of them poor, usually are stuck with the bills. For security, inmates are not allowed to have cellphones.
‘‘For 10 years, the families and friends of inmates have been asking the FCC to ease the burden of an inmate calling rate structure.,’’ said FCC acting chairwoman Mignon Clyburn.
The petition asking the FCC to regulate inmate phone call rates was filed in 2003 on behalf of families after a judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by Martha Wright-Reed against a private prison company. She had struggled to keep up with phone bills while her grandson was incarcerated.
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"Advocates, families fight jail phone fees" by Milton J. Valencia | Globe Staff, July 13, 2012
One woman said she had to consider her grocery bill every time the phone rang. Another told her son that she could no longer take his calls, that she could not afford the fees.
That is because the callers were behind bars, and every time they call, it costs the person answering far more than regular collect calls, in some cases $10 for a chat of just a few minutes.
The high phone rates for prison calls, inflated by surcharges, also draw the ire of public defenders, who say they are spending more than $100,000 a year accepting collect calls from jailed clients.
Oh, the PHONE COMPANIES behaving JUST LIKE BANKS, huh?
Ummm, Americans, YOUR ECONOMIC SYSTEM has been BANKRUPTED by the MONEY JUNKIES!!
“It’s a huge amount for any one of us to pay, just for a single phone call,” said Bonita Tenneriello, a staff lawyer with Prisoners’ Legal Services, an inmate advocacy group. “The families, they often don’t have a lot of resources, and for them it’s a real hardship.” Some calls can carry a surcharge as much as about $3 before a conversation starts.
How much do they get for giving blood?
Now a team of inmate advocates, public defenders, prisoners, and their friends and families have joined in a petition to the state Department of Telecommunications and Cable, asking the regulatory agency to reduce what they call the astronomical costs outside vendors charge for phone calls from prisons.
After years of complaints by inmate advocates, the department opened a case in the fall, and a long-awaited public hearing is set for Thursday.
At issue is how much the vendors who run the phone services from jails and prisons can charge for phone calls and whether extra commissions that they pay to the prison facilities, part of their contracts, should come from the vendors’ profits, or from families struggling to pay the bills.
Two corporations run the phone services at the majority of the state’s prisons and county jails: Securus Technologies of Texas and Global Tel Link of Alabama.
No Massachusetts companies could handle it?
Representatives of those companies could not be reached for comment, but the companies have opposed the rate reductions since the Depart ment of Telecommunications and Cable opened the case.
The companies have also maintained that the rates are proper for the costs of operating and that the surcharges are allowed by state law....
Ju$t because it is legal does not make it right!
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