by Leah Sakala, July 9, 2013
Why are families forced to pay $17 for a 15-minute phone call from a loved one in the Hampden County Jail in Massachusetts?
Our new video has the answer:
Outraged? Learn more and get involved to bring fairness to the prison phone industry!
by Leah Sakala, July 8, 2013
Now that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is thinking about how to regulate the predatory prison phone industry, the commissioners are asking for lots of information to guide their deliberations. Most recently, the Commission asked for more data on the many fees associated with prison telephone service.
It’s great that the FCC is looking into these fees because, as we found in our latest report, they’re a really big deal. Nationally, we estimate that 38 cents of every dollar spent on prison phone calls goes right to fee revenue for the phone service corporations.
Given how profitable these fees are in the prison phone industry, I shouldn’t be surprised that the phone companies have so far been totally unwilling to share information about their fees with the FCC. (If you ask me, that lack of response is yet another reason why the FCC should act without further delay.)
Fortunately, however, we’ve given the FCC a lot to work with. Our 28-page report, Please Deposit All of Your Money: Kickbacks, Rates, and Hidden Fees in the Jail Phone Industry, documents the many fees associated with prison phone service, and explains how exactly prison phone companies justify the charges. We documented our report’s 120 footnotes with 54 exhibits containing 1,225 pages of the industry’s own documents. We submitted all of that in to the FCC’s docket record in May.
In response to the FCC’s call for information on fees, on Friday we submitted a letter to the FCC, drawing their attention to several tables in our report containing extensive information on charges such as deposit fees, refund fees, and account maintenance fees. We also attached an exhibit that’s particularly relevant to the FCC’s question, Exhibit 48, which presents a chart of the account fees charged by 10 of the companies in the prison and jail telephone industry. Our exhibit includes the “justifications” for each fee in the companies’ own words.
Hopefully our submission will inspire the phone corporations to offer up some data of their own.
by Leah Sakala, June 28, 2013
Our Executive Director, Peter Wagner, was featured in a Northampton Community TV segment about the Western Mass Hackathon’s Unlocking Prison Phone Data project, along with team member Jake Mitchell:
The project’s website will be launched shortly. Stay tuned!
by Peter Wagner, June 18, 2013
On Sunday, some families had to choose between wishing dad a Happy Father’s Day on the telephone and putting food on the table. These days, most telephone calls are practically free, but for the 2.7 million kids in the United States who have an incarcerated parent, a call home can break the bank.
Most prisons and jails give their telephone contract to a single company that charges up to $17 for a 15 minute call. Phone bills are high in part because the prisons and jails demand that the phone companies kick back up to 84% of the revenue to the facility, and in part because the Federal Communications Commission has stalled on regulating the industry for more than a decade.
Continue reading →
by Leah Sakala, June 11, 2013
Yet another phone company is recognizing the broken nature of the prison phone industry, and this time it’s a big one.
In a letter filed yesterday with the FCC, the second-largest phone company in the prison phone industry, Securus, has agreed that, “certain practices, which serve to artificially inflate the cost of prison phone calls, are egregious and should be eliminated.”
Which practices? For example, Securus writes, charging customers extra fees to refund their money is “restrictive and unwarranted.”
The fact that Securus officials are speaking out against exploitative industry practices is great news. But will they take their own advice and stop charging customers $4.95 just to get their own money back? Only time will tell.
by Peter Wagner, June 3, 2013
Challenge representative Peter Wagner of the Prison Policy Initiative explaining how the FCC organizes data by separate “proceedings”. (Photo: Stephen Brewer)
Sondra Morin, Gyepi Sam, and Al Nutile exploring the name space of the FCC’s database structure. (Photo: Stephen Brewer)
Al Nutile (center) sharing an idea with Gyepi Sam (left) and Peter Wagner (right). (Photo: Stephen Brewer)
John Tobey and daughter weigh in on the database structure. (Photo: Stephen Brewer)
Jake Mitchell reviewing the project plan. (Photo: Stephen Brewer)
The team listening to the ideas of Aaron Smith (rear, left) about his discoveries on how the FCC was organizing their data. (Photo: Molly McLeod)
Gyepi Sam explains the team’s code to the Hack for Western Mass group. (Photo: Molly McLeod)
A team of civic-minded hackers in Western Massachusetts have built a tool to make it easier for advocates, policymakers and journalists to access documents and weigh in on telecommunications debates currently before the Federal Communications Commission.
Critical debates about telecommunications policy are archived in plain sight on the FCC’s website, but they are organized in a way that’s extremely difficult to use. Focusing on just one issue currently before the FCC — the possible creation of price caps to reduce the $1/minute cost of phone calls from prisons and jails — the team created an alternative interface for the FCC’s data. This dataset was particularly challenging because it includes the comments of about 100,000 people in approximately 7,000 pdf files, and the content ranged from well-formatted pdf files to bad scans of handwritten letters from incarcerated people.
On the first morning of Hack for Western Mass, I made a short pitch about the prison phone industry and the need to make the data more accessible. A team was formed to make this data searchable and to add some basic tag support so that journalists and others could more easily find relevant filings.
The software written by the team scrapes the FCC website for new comments, downloads the pdf files, extracts or OCRs any text, and stores that text in a database so that it can be searched. When someone finds a document of interest we then link back to the original PDF on the FCC’s website.
Our software also imports all of the meta data currently available on the FCC website (submitter, date, address etc.) and contains a tagging system so that documents can have metadata added that is useful to the people interested in a specific proceeding. For example, the FCC scans in all letters that come in to proceeding in batches and labels them all with the author “numerous”. To fix this, our system allows users to manually tag each page with two pieces of meta data: the state of origin and one of a number of different content types: whether the document or page is from telephone companies, correctional system administrators, state regulators, incarcerated people or the people who aren’t incarcerated and have to pay the high rates required by the monopolistic contracts. With these tags, users can search for keywords and filter by the existing tags. In this way, a journalist or a member of Congress could quickly find the comments of people from their particular area.
The basic structure of the site and tool is done, but the data is still being processed. The scraper was written in Python, and a series of Python scripts then convert PDFs to the portable network map format, clean the images using OnPaper, and perform the optical character recognition using GOCR. Rails manages the database and ActiveAdmin GEM provides an interface to manage content for authenticated users. Solr is setup as well for fast search results. The scripts to download and process PDFs from the FCC website work, and thousands of documents are currently being processed. Tagging has already begun in a spreadsheet, and when the data is fully imported, we’ll set it up to add new FCC entries nightly and we’ll make an interface so that the tagging can be crowdsourced.
This project was conceived to empower people concerned about prison telephone regulation to have better access to this data. But it could be readily adapted to other issues of concern at the FCC. (And could, perhaps, inspire some improvements in how the FCC manages and publishes public comments.)
One idea we didn’t get to — and can’t until the text importation is complete — is to use our database of the text of the filings to perform various kinds of statistical analyses about who is making which arguments.
A final website with the data will be unveiled soon after the data processing is complete. The team’s code is available now on Github.
Many thanks to this weekend’s team:
Stay tuned for the public launch of the FCC tool!
by Peter Wagner, May 29, 2013
In our report, Please Deposit All of Your Money: Kickbacks, Rates, and Hidden Fees in the Jail Phone Industry, we catalog the many fees customers pay at every step of the way, including fees for making deposits, keeping accounts open, and getting refunds. Our report puts these fees in a larger context, and discussions we’ve had since the report’s release lead us to some additional observations about fees. In our report, we wrote:
To be sure, businesses in many industries incur some processing costs by accepting credit or debit cards in person, via the internet, or over the telephone.65 Businesses usually respond by setting minimum purchase levels for a take out food order, charging a slightly higher rate per gallon of gasoline, or by simply writing it off as the cost of doing business. But this section of the report suggests that prison telephone companies may be approaching the question from the other end: providing telephone services in order to make money by charging extra fees. Indeed, because the commission system reduces the potential for corporate profit from the telephone calls, fees that should be no more than supplemental income are turned into a central source of profit.
Continue reading →
by Peter Wagner, May 28, 2013
Several phone companies have been keeping busy in the couple of weeks since we released our new report exposing the hidden fees in the prison phone industry, mostly for the better.
I’m proud to report that, as a result of the report, at least two companies, Turnkey and NCIC, made several clarifications and improvements to their fee policies:
Continue reading →
by Leah Sakala, May 8, 2013
The newest Prison Policy Initiative report exposes the prison phone industry’s hidden fees, which saddle the families of incarcerated people with staggeringly high phone bills.
by Leah Sakala, November 15, 2012
At a Nov. 15th phone justice rally in Washington D.C., we, along with our partners at SumOfUs, delivered signatures from 36,690 people across the country calling on the FCC to rein in predatory prison phone rates. And it looks like the FCC will act soon — Commissioner Mignon Clyburn announced that the FCC Chairman has circulated a prison phone regulatory proposal that the commission will now vote on.
Resources, tips, and best practices to help advocates working to end mass incarceration.
All of our recent reports about prison/jail growth, racial disparities, and more, re-organized by state.
The U.S. incarcerates over 1.9 million people, more than any other country. Where are they locked up and why? Read our report.
