Phones archives

Our latest comments urging the FCC to regulate advanced communication services in correctional facilities.

by Alison Walsh, February 12, 2016

Spurred by our January 2015 report, Screening Out Family Time: The for-profit video visitation industry in prisons and jails, the Federal Communications Commission requested further comment on the regulation of advanced communication services such as video visitation and electronic messaging (or “email in prisons”).

Building on our last series of comments to the FCC, in which we identified solutions to four unresolved issues in the prison phone industry, we recently submitted comments calling for oversight of video visitation and electronic messaging.

Our latest video visitation comments encourage facilities to employ video systems that charge users on a per-minute basis and do not require advanced scheduling. We also highlight examples of video visitation companies attempting to profit from contracts that mandate the elimination or restriction of in-person visitation, and point out the danger in allowing government officials to cede control over visitation policies to private companies. Demand for video services should be achieved through reasonable pricing and flexible scheduling, not at the expense of traditional in-person visitation.

Our new report, You’ve Got Mail: The promise of cyber communication in prisons and the need for regulation, documents the benefits and drawbacks of electronic messaging in correctional facilities. And our comments on this topic affirm the FCC’s jurisdiction over electronic messaging, arguing that this emerging technology warrants FCC protection.

We recommend that the FCC put these safeguards in place to ensure that these new technologies facilitate communication rather than take advantage of people with no other options.

In response to the FCC's request for comments, we submitted four analyses of unresolved issues

by Aleks Kajstura, January 21, 2016

In response to the FCC’s call for further comments on their regulations of the prison and jail phone industry, we submitted our analysis of and recommendations on four unresolved issues:

  • Single Calls: we explain how the FCC’s attempt to rein in “single call” programs left a significant loophole that can be easily closed.
  • Western Union and MoneyGram: we highlight an unintentional loophole in the FCC’s regulation of fee-sharing schemes between the phone companies and money transfer providers, and suggest that the FCC could instead copy Alabama’s solution to the problem.
  • Bundling unrelated services: we outline how bundling phone services with unrelated financial and other technology services is creating a growing opportunity for companies to create an end run around the FCC’s current regulations in the short term as well as undermine the FCC’s long-term goals of fostering a self-regulating ICS market through competition.
  • Video visitation: we updated the FCC on issues surrounding video visitation, showing that a national consensus has developed acknowledging that the growing trend of video visitation replacing traditional in-person visitation is a major step in the wrong direction and providing 5 recommendations for regulation.

    • Reply comments are due February 1, and can be submitted online for docket number 12-375.

The Iowa Governor's Working Group On Justice Policy takes up our recommendations on phone justice.

by Peter Wagner, December 28, 2015

In August, I gave the keynote address at the Iowa-Nebraska NAACP’s
Iowa Summit on Justice & Disparities and a major topic was the need for prison phone justice. At that meeting, Governor Brandstad announced a Governor’s Working Group On Justice Policy to address several problems, including the need for phone justice.

In September, I testified by phone to the Working Group about steps Iowa could take.

In November, Governor Brandstad announced the Working Group’s recommendations (summary | details ) which he wanted introduced in the next legislative session. The proposed phone reforms include:

  • Renegotiate contracts with the Iowa Communications Network and seek bids from other vendors with the goal of reducing rates paid by prison inmates and their families.
  • Transition to a per minute calculation for call costs rather than a flat fee.
  • Enable and encourage counties to partner with one another or the Department of Corrections to negotiate more favorable rates with phone vendors.

On Friday, the FCC's latest order was published in the Federal Register.

by Aleks Kajstura, December 21, 2015

FCC Order

On Friday, the FCC’s latest order was published in the federal register.

The new fee limits and rate cap of 11¢ per minute for prepaid calls from prison is effective March 17, 2016 and the fee limits and tiered rates (14¢-22¢) for calls from jail go into effect on June 20, 2016.

(For a detailed summary of the new fee and rate caps, check out the FCC’s October 22 press release.)

FCC Seeks Comment

The FCC also published a call for comments on “ways to promote competition for Inmate Calling Services (ICS), video visitation, rates for international calls, and considers an array of solutions to further address areas of concern in the (ICS) industry.”

Comments can be submitted online for docket number 12-375; comments are due January 19, 2016, followed by reply comments two weeks later.

Comments (7)

How do the campaign contributions of the prison phone industry compare to those of the private prison industry?

by Peter Wagner, November 25, 2015

The Voice of OC has revealed that $85,000 in campaign contributions to two Orange County, California county supervisors by Global Tel*Link flipped the two supervisors from being opponents of charging families high phone rates into supporters.

The Voice of OC articles are a must-read (first article, second article), and they have a video showing the dramatic change in positions:

We’re thrilled to see more investigation of the phone companies using campaign contributions to purchase influence. We broke the first story of this type in August, with our exposé that found that Securus was one of the largest contributors to the sheriff’s reelection campaign in Sacramento, California. Notably, this is a county where Securus did not have the contract, but clearly wanted to be the winning bidder when the contract was next put out for bid.

How big is $85,000 in campaign contributions, exactly? To be sure, it pales in comparison to the $4 million/year in kickbacks that the contract would give to the Orange County slush fund called the “Inmate Welfare Fund”. (Despite the name, the funds can be used for almost anything, and as the Voice of OC article says, most of it is spent on staff salaries.)

On the other hand, $85,000 was apparently enough to change these two votes in this one county. And it’s a massive sum when you compare it to the outrage that was aimed at Hillary Clinton after The Intercept reported that bundlers associated with the private prison industry were supporting her presidential campaign with similar amounts of money. (ColorOfChange says that the total received by the Clinton campaign from the industry was $133,000.)

It’s stories like this that illustrate two points we’ve been making a lot lately:

  • Jails matter. Their policies might be set by 3,000 local governments, which can make them hard to follow and understand. But we need to look at jails, which are literally mass incarceration’s front door.
  • Private prisons get all the attention, but other kinds of prison profiteers like the prison phone industry and the California guard union are just as successful — if not more so — at buying the outcomes they want.

The Federal Communications Commission today approved a new order regulating the prison and jail telephone industry and reducing the cost of calling home from prisons and jails

by Peter Wagner, October 22, 2015

The Federal Communications Commission today approved a new order regulating the prison and jail telephone industry and reducing the cost of calling home from prisons and jails.

You can read the FCC’s press release and summary of the decision and see our October 1 analysis of the FCC’s “fact sheet” that compares the proposed order to the exploitative status quo.

We’ll have a detailed analysis after the full text of the FCC’s order is publicly available, but for now we note only one possible change from our October 1 post: The FCC is proposing to give the industry an additional 3 months to bring their contracts in jails into compliance with the new rules. That means that people with loved ones in state prisons should see the impact in about February, and with those in jails in about May 2016.

Thank you Commissioner Clyburn, Chairman Wheeler, and Commissioner Rosenworcel for taking such strong action to protect the most vulnerable families in this country from this exploitative industry.

Comments (2)

We have two ideas for state legislative strategies to further reduce the cost of calling home from prisons and jails.

by Peter Wagner and Aleks Kajstura, October 21, 2015

On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission is scheduled to vote on a proposal to cap the cost of all calls home from prisons and jails and to curtail or ban the abusive fees charged by the industry.

By capping the cost of calls and the fees, the FCC will have established a ceiling on what can be charged. But states and individual counties should — and many will — go even further. There are at least two types of state legislation that could be passed.

Idea 1: Simple fix that the facilities might not like but is really the best way to go.

Ban commissions and require all contracts to be negotiated on the basis of the lowest price to the consumer. New York Corrections Law § 623 is a great model, although an even better version would apply to contracts with local jails as well as state prisons.

Idea 2: Long-term market re-alignment.

Create a statutory ceiling on commission payments on a per minute basis in order to re-align incentives for facilities to effectively negotiate with the vendors for the lowest rates for consumers.

Currently, commissions are typically negotiated on a percentage basis, so facilities have an incentive to tolerate high customer costs, so changing to a fixed per-minute commission would change the incentives, to give the facilities an incentive to favor low-cost higher-volume calls home.

Let me explain.

The FCC’s order caps the maximum that can be charged at 11cents a minute in prisons and, depending on the size of the facility, 14-22 cents a minute in jails. For the sake of this illustration, let’s talk about jails in the 14 cents a minute category.

First, capping the cost at 14 cents will constitute a tremendous and long-needed rate reduction across the country. But how can a state easily ensure that rates continue to move downwards, even in facilities that will not waive their commission?

Under the status quo in the states that allow commissions, the facilities have an incentive to set the rates at the maximum and then demand that the vendors pay the maximum commission. So rates are likely to be at 14 cents forever. As the cost of providing service declines with further advances in technology, the cost might stay at 14 cents while the facilities demand 13.9999 cent commissions.

But if a state were to set a maximum commissions at, say, 3 cents a minute, it would give facilities an incentive to push the rates down in order to increase usage. With such a maximum per minute commission, the rates wouldn’t ever go below the commission level of 3 cents, but the facilities would have an incentive to push the rates down as close to that 3 cents as they can. (We don’t have a position on what the commission amount per minute should be, and we used 3 cents just to illustrate the math.)

As we’ve seen in New York and nationwide, lowering the total price to the families increases the call volumes.

This structure would also give the facilities an incentive to ensure that the vendor doesn’t charge unnecessary fees. Prior to the FCC’s October 2015 ruling, the companies charge hidden fees as a way to recoup lost profits from paying unsustainably high commissions. (The business model is called fee harvesting and shortchanges both the families and the facilities; but since the facilities are already receiving windfalls on the call rates, they often don’t object to the extra fees.)

The new FCC ruling will ban most of the fees that were previously charged by the industry and caps all fees that remain. But as fees eat into the money that families can spend on the actual calls, this proposal gives the facilities a financial incentive to insist on even lower fees as that would further increase the number of minutes used.

Are you are a writer, actor or video person who cares about justice? We need to talk.

by Peter Wagner, October 16, 2015

Next Thursday, October 22, the Federal Communications Commission is scheduled to vote on historic regulation of the prison and jail telephone industry. Previous reforms have applied to some calls, but this reform will lower the cost of receiving calls home from prisons and jails for all families of incarcerated people in this country.

I expect that some of the companies and the greedier sheriffs might again sue the government for enacting this important reform. Most of the companies (except for one) are privately held and hard to influence; but sheriffs are elected by all of us.

The sheriffs will have elections coming up. I’d like to make a video addressed to voters faced with re-electing a sheriff who is suing the federal government for regulating the prison and jail telephone industry, setting the decade-long movement for phone justice back even further.

We’ll be looking for writers, actors, editors, camera people, graphic designers, etc. In February, some amazing comedians produced a series of videos that successfully shamed the video visitation industry into dropping its ban on in-person visits. We think we can convince the public of the harm that will come from re-electing sheriffs who want to charge the poorest families in their communities $1 a minute for simple phone calls, but we need your help.

Many of these Sheriffs are outside of the major media markets, but from our work on prison gerrymandering, we know how to get press coverage in rural parts of the country. We need your help to make the video exciting and to make sure it reaches a national audience.

If you or your team can help, please contact us directly or join our Young Professionals Network. (And, please, share this casting call with your networks.)

Their proposal would give families the telephone justice they have been asking for.

by Peter Wagner, October 1, 2015

For more than a decade, families have been calling on the Federal Communications Commission to provide relief from the exploitative prison and jail telephone industry that charges rates as high as $1/minute. We are excited to share that phone justice is now closer than ever.

Yesterday, FCC Chairman Wheeler and Commissioner Clyburn released a summary of their proposal for comprehensive regulation of the broken prison and jail telephone industry. The Federal Communications Commission will be voting on the proposal at their October 22 meeting.

The new proposal:

  • Applies to all calls be they local, intra-state, or inter-state. (Previous regulations only applied to inter-state calls.)
  • Lowers the maximum rate that can be charged to 11 cents a minute for state prisons, and 14 to 22 cents a minute for jails, depending on the size of the jail. (Most incarcerated people are in prisons and most people in jails are in the larger facilities that will have the lower rates.)
  • Caps and bans the abusive hidden fees documented in our report Please Deposit All of Your Money: Kickbacks, Rates, and Hidden Fees in the Jail Phone Industry, that can easily double the price of a call. The proposed new fee caps are:
    • Payment by phone or website: $3 (currently up to $10)
    • Payment via live operator: $5.95 (currently up to $10)
    • Paper bills: $2 (currently up to $3.49)
    • Markups and hidden fees embedded within WesternUnion and MoneyGram payments: $0 (currently up to $6.95)
    • Markups and hidden profits on mandatory taxes and regulatory fees: $0 (We’ve seen these markups and hidden profits on “mandatory” taxes be 25% of the cost of the call)
    • All other ancillary fees: $0. (There are many of these charges. Some of the most egregious ones are $10 fees for refunds, $2.50/month for “network infrastructure” and a 4% charge for “validation”.)

The proposal also:

  • Discourages but does not directly ban commissions (kickbacks of vendor profits to the correctional facilities).
  • Bans flat-rate calling. (Currently some vendors insist on charging a fixed-price for calls of any length, so that a person who only needs a 1 minute conversation must still pay for a 15 minute call.)
  • Takes effect very quickly; the new regulations will likely be effective by early 2016. (90 days after they are published in the Federal Register.)
  • Seeks further comment on the video visitation industry and other advanced communications services.

Now that the FCC is finally prioritizing the families of incarcerated people, we need to keep the pressure on and make sure their final order reflects the strong protections provided in this proposal. No family should have to choose between putting food on the table and keeping in touch.

Please reach out to the FCC to urge them to pass this proposal, and ask your elected officials to do the same.

Comments (3)

Travis County, Texas will bring back in-person visits that were replaced with video visits in 2013

by Bernadette Rabuy, September 30, 2015

We are excited to share another victory in the struggle to protect traditional in-person visits from the exploitative video visitation industry. Yesterday, thanks to the hard work of families of incarcerated people, Grassroots Leadership, and other allies, Travis County, Texas legislators voted to bring back in-person visits that were completely eliminated from Austin jails in 2013.

Our January 2015 report, Screening Out Family Time: The for-profit video visitation industry in prisons and jails, found that not only did visits decrease by 28% after the sheriff banned in-person visits, but also that most families could not afford the high cost of remote video chats:

Graph showing that when Travis County offered remote video chats at a lower price, usage went upThrough an open records request, we collected the video visitation usage data of Travis County, Texas from September 2013 to September 2014, finding that when Securus and the county charged the typical rate of $1 per minute, families barely used remote video visits. When promotional rates were offered, usage went up. But overall video visitation remained unpopular even when offered at approximately $0.20 per minute.

Our research found that Texas is one of the states with the greatest use of video visitation in the country, but fortunately families and advocates have been quick to stand up for the right of families to keep in touch and support their incarcerated loved ones. Last fall, thanks to community pressure, Dallas County, Texas rejected a Securus video visitation contract that would have required the elimination of in-person visits. And just last month a statewide law went into effect that protects in-person family visits by clarifying that the Texas Commission on Jail Standard’s requirement of at least two visits per week refers to in-person visits, not computer chats.

While the Texas law is a major step forward in rejecting the use of video as a replacement to in-person visits, more than 30 counties have applied to be exempted. We hope that these counties will follow in the footsteps of Travis County and listen to families who have long been saying video chats are simply not the same as in-person visits.

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