New video explains jail telephone industry’s hidden fees

One company produces a video explaining to Sheriffs how the status quo is bad for them.

by Peter Wagner, November 25, 2014

NCIC, one of the smaller companies in the prison and jail telephone industry, has made a two minute video that explains how some players in the industry cheat families, the jails, and state regulators by charging the families hidden fees and then quietly pocketing that money.

The perspective of the video is different than a lot of what we post on this blog; it comes from a more-ethical company speaking directly to jails about how the the current system isn’t as good for the jails as they have been led to believe.

For more on hidden fees and other nasty tricks that hurt families without bringing in a dime for the facilities (like Text-To-Collect and other “single-call” programs) see our 2013 report Please Deposit All of Your Money: Kickbacks, Rates and Hidden Fees in the Jail Phone Industry.

Scholar and writer James Kilgore to remain at Univ. of Illinois

We applaud the University for doing the right thing and retaining a valuable member of the academic community.

by Leah Sakala, November 14, 2014

It’s a good day for the University of Illinois: the University will continue to benefit from our colleague James Kilgore’s accomplished scholarship and acclaimed teaching.

The university had originally decided not to renew Mr. Kilgore’s contract after the local newspaper published a series of attack pieces about his decades-old criminal record from the 1970s. The University of Illinois was fully aware of Mr. Kilgore’s history during the hiring process, and Mr. Kilgore received overwhelmingly positive performance reviews throughout the years that he has been on faculty.

The university’s decision sparked a groundswell of support for Mr. Kilgore, both from the University of Illinois faculty, staff, and students, and from the national community of scholars and advocates who have benefited from his work. We submitted a letter back in May urging the university Chancellor to not allow journalistic fear-mongering to lead the university to dismiss an accomplished faculty member.

Today, the University of Illinois Trustees announced that they would follow a special committee’s recommendation to keep Mr. Kilgore on staff. We applaud the University for doing the right thing and retaining a valuable member of the academic community.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio phases out in-person visits in Maricopa

Infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio replaces in-person visits with video visitation

by Bernadette Rabuy, November 10, 2014

Video visitation at Maricopa County, AZ jails has seemed fishy from the beginning. At first, Sheriff Joe Arpaio cut back visitation last December, just in time for the holiday season. The sheriff’s spokeswoman told the Phoenix New Times that the cut from three 30-minute visits per week to one 30-minute visit per week was necessary in order to “update/improve MCSO’s video visitation program.” What she didn’t mention was that, one week later, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office would announce its plan to get rid of the remaining face-to-face visits in Maricopa that still existed in half of Maricopa’s six jails.

As of last Monday, Sheriff Joe has completely phased out in-person visits in all Maricopa jails. Families and friends now have two options: travel to the jail and visit their incarcerated loved one via a video screen or schedule a remote visit (using a personal computer) for a fee. The confusion doesn’t stop there. While Securus, the provider of video visitation services in Maricopa, is currently offering promotional pricing for remote video visits at 25 cents a minute, this price will only last until the end of the year. So by January, those visits are going to cost 65 cents a minute.

New FCC prison phone regulation proposal play-by-play

Will the FCC ban commissions, cap all calling rates, and eliminate fees?

by Leah Sakala, October 27, 2014

Last week, the Federal Communications Commission proposed several new regulations to protect the families of incarcerated people from the predatory prison telephone industry. These rules would fill major gaps in the current regulations and help ensure that no child who wants to talk to his or her incarcerated parent will fall through the cracks.

As we promised, here’s an overview of the FCC’s 77-page notice:

The FCC is calling for feedback on its new proposal to…

• Ban kickbacks altogether. The FCC’s previous order said that companies aren’t allowed to treat the kickbacks as part of the cost of doing business, but the FCC is now seeking comment on getting rid of this perverse incentive that drives up the cost of calls.
• Cap in-state and out-of-state calling rates. The previous FCC regulation capped only the rates for calls between states, which tend to be more expensive but also only make up about 20% of all calls from incarcerated people. This new proposal would make sure that a family wouldn’t have to pay more to talk to an incarcerated loved one just because that person was in the same state.
• Cap, limit, or flat-out prohibit “ancillary fees.” Our research found that fees drive up the phone bills families have to pay, so this step would make a huge difference for the more than 2 million kids with an incarcerated parent.

The FCC also requests more feedback on…

• How to address additional communication services, such as video visitation, that suffer from many of the same market failures as phone services.
• Strategies to make the prison phone market more competitive, and increase access for individuals with disabilities.
• Applying the new regulations to existing contracts.
• Coordinating with state regulatory efforts.
• The costs and requirements for phone systems among different kinds of facilities.
• The actual cost of providing communications services in correctional facilities, and cost/benefit analyses of the regulatory proposals.

Here at PPI, we were pleased to see that the FCC cited our research, presentations, petition submissions, and technical comments throughout their proposal to take a huge step forward. We’ll certainly continue to weigh in as soon as the comment period opens up (when notice is published in the Federal Register, which should be any day now). The comment period will run for 45 days, and we hope that you will share your thoughts with the FCC too. We’ll be sure to keep you all posted as soon as the comment period opens.

FCC considers next steps to protect families from predatory prison and jail telephone industry.

We need your help now to counter the powerful prison phone lobby.

by Peter Wagner, October 17, 2014

We need your help now to counter the powerful prison phone lobby.

Today, by a 3 to 2 vote, the Federal Communications Commission agreed to take the next steps to regulate the prison and jail telephone industry. In the Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking the FCC is actively considering, among other things:

• Extending the existing regulation and price caps on interstate calls to all calls, including calls within the same state.
• Further restricting the ability of the industry to make kickback payments to the prison and jail facilities, which currently drives up the call rates.
• Fully addressing the ancillary charges for opening, maintaining, funding and closing accounts that consume an estimated 400 million dollars per year.

The actual notice is not yet public, and we’ll have a more detailed analysis of the new order when it’s out, but it’s clear that we have a lot of work to do in a short period of time — and we need your support to get the work done.

The notice is likely to ask hundreds of detailed questions about how the current system works. We’ll need to provide those answers — and rebut the telephone industry’s recent proposal that would stunt reform — in a short amount of time. We won’t know the exact date until the notice is published in the Federal Register, but we estimate that the first round of comments will be due in early December.

The Prison Policy Initiative’s track record is clear. But we need your financial support to gather all of this information and organize the stories of the millions of people being exploited by this industry all in the next few months. Can you help us affect change once again with a gift today?

Right now, a group of donors will match the first $19,000 we raise. Please help us reach this goal as soon as possible so we can get back to the work of protecting the nation’s poorest families from the predatory prison and jail industry. Please contribute generously today.

Can you help us fuel the movement for justice reform?

Can you make a gift today and join the Individual donors who are fueling the movement for justice reform?

by Peter Wagner, October 6, 2014

As we wrote in our brand new annual report, this has been an especially prolific year for the Prison Policy Initiative. For example, in addition to our ongoing campaign work, we were frustrated that major data gaps were holding back the movement for justice reform. So, we stepped up to the plate by creating our first National Incarceration Briefing Series: four ambitious reports (and 50 state incarceration profiles) that reveal the current state of the U.S. carceral crisis.

These publications — funded entirely by individual donor support — were so popular that they overwhelmed our server and sparked more media attention than we could keep track of.

We’re just getting started. We’re primed to start working on a follow up Briefing Series, on top of keeping up the momentum on our major campaigns, but we need your help. Can you take a minute today to propel the movement for justice forward by making a gift to support our work?

Your generous gift will be doubled thanks to a matching challenge sponsored by other donors. Thank you for your partnership in this movement for justice.

Prison bankers cash in on captive customers

Center for Public Integrity releases first part of a series on web of prison bankers, private vendors, and corrections agencies profiting off families of the incarcerated.

by Bernadette Rabuy, September 30, 2014

Daniel Wagner and Eleanor Bell of the nonprofit investigative news organization, the Center for Public Integrity, have recently released “Prison bankers cash in on captive customers” and the video Time is Money, part one of a two-part series on the growing web of prison bankers, private vendors, and corrections agencies that profit off the backs of families of the incarcerated.

The Center for Public Integrity’s six-month investigation found plenty of families making necessary sacrifices in order to support and maintain contact with their incarcerated loved one. In order to send money to their incarcerated loved one, family members would sometimes be forced to forego medical care, skip utility bills, and even limit visits with their loved one. Meanwhile, corporations such as JPay, which handles deposits into incarcerated individuals’ accounts, generated well over $50 million in revenue in 2013. Vincent Townsend, president of prison phone company, Pay-Tel Communications, agrees that there’s something wrong with this, telling the Center for Public Integrity, “My industry has abused the public and I’m willing to admit that.” And beyond prison vendors’ profits, there is still the share of profits that gets returned to corrections agencies, often called commissions or kickbacks.

Stay tuned for part two, which will run this Thursday!

2013-2014 was a landmark year for the Prison Policy Initiative!

by Peter Wagner, September 29, 2014

We just released our 2013-2014 Prison Policy Initiative Annual Report, which I’m thrilled to say details greater progress on more fronts than ever before. A combination of new and ongoing partnerships has allowed us to win solid victories on our ongoing campaigns, step up to the plate on new issues, and also work on strengthening the reform movement by filling in some major national data gaps.

Here are just a few campaign highlights:

• We made headway towards a national solution to prison gerrymandering, joined with our allies in a lawsuit to protect the voting rights of the citizens of Cranston, RI, supported the new Massachusetts resolution urging the Census Bureau to count incarcerated people at home, and continued to build momentum in state-based campaigns around the country.
• Our research and advocacy urging the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to protect the families of incarcerated people from the predatory prison and jail phone industry helped to win historic FCC regulation. We’ve continued to generate public support for further reform, including a petition with our partners at SumOfUs that collected 23,585 signatures.
• We expanded our research on overreaching geography-based penalties to release an in-depth report on sentencing enhancement zones in Connecticut, which helped rally support for reform in the state’s legislature.
• We took on additional issues, including releasing the first-ever report to document the problem of driver’s license suspensions for drug offenses unrelated to driving, and helping Massachusetts to become the 21st state to ban practice of unnecessarily shackling women who are giving birth while incarcerated.

Generous individual donors’ support also allowed us to bring in new allies to the criminal justice reform movement and fill major data gaps that had been holding the movement back. For example:

• We published four innovative reports and a national profile series to provide the movement for criminal justice reform with critical data that was previously — and surprisingly — unavailable. Our reports show the whole pie of mass incarceration, state by state racial disparity and incarceration over time rates, and how individual U.S. states’ use of incarceration measures up in the international context.
• We worked with YouTube celebrity Hank Green on a video about mass incarceration that has nearly 1,150,000 views, and worked with media outlets around the country to illustrate why the U.S. must stop using incarceration as a one-size-fits-all response to social problems

Other highlights from the past year include hiring our new Policy & Communications Associate Bernadette Rabuy and bringing several accomplished new board members on board.

While the most recent national statistics on prison population increases were sobering, our accomplishments over the past year are a testament to the collective strength of the national movement for criminal justice reform. I’m so grateful to the partners and supporters who make our work possible. If you are able to join them in making a tax-deductible contribution to our work, your support will go twice as far thanks to a match commitment from a small group of other donors like you.

Thank you! We can’t wait to see what this coming year will bring!

Governor Brown signs prison anti-sterilization bill

Governor Brown signs California prison anti-sterilization bill into law.

by Bernadette Rabuy, September 26, 2014

Yesterday, Governor Jerry Brown signed SB 1135 (Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson), putting an end to sterilization abuse in California prisons. This is a well-earned victory for our friends at Justice Now, whose hard work allowed the bill to pass unanimously out of both the Senate and Assembly.

“This bill not only affects those still inside prisons and the thousands of women who will go through prisons and jails in the near future; but most importantly it protects generations of children to come who otherwise might not have had an opportunity to exist” says Kelli Dillon who was sterilized in her early 20’s while incarcerated at Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla. Kelli, however, goes on to say “we still need an apology and acknowledgement of what was done to us.” While this bill comes a long way in addressing the abusive and coercive conditions under which sterilizations were happening it is a reminder that work still needs to be done to properly address those who had their ability to have children so callously and egregiously taken away.

We are glad that Governor Brown has taken a step toward reversing California’s shameful legacy of eugenics, and we are hopeful that this bill will support California prisons in more effectively protecting the human rights of the incarcerated.

Thank you CharitySub!

In March, we were honored to be one of the three charities chosen by CharitySub as one of three organizations addressing the prison epidemic. We report back.

by Peter Wagner, September 19, 2014

In March, we were honored to be one of the three charities chosen by CharitySub as one of three organizations addressing the prison epidemic.

CharitySub is an innovative new approach to online giving. CharitySub members pledge $5 a month, and each month CharitySub picks a new cause and identifies three non-profits making a difference on that cause. Each month, CharitySub members get to pick which of the three organizations receives their $5. Most recently, Charity Sub members have supported organizations addressing STEM education, wildlife welfare, beach conservation, drug free youth, and — this month’s topic — body image.

You can join today to support this month’s organizations and learn about other organizations doing great work in the future.

Thank you, Charity Sub members, for supporting our work. With your help, we won a big victory two weeks ago, convincing Dallas County Texas to reject a video visitation contract that was going to replace the usual visiting hours for families with expensive video visitation. This is the first time the public was able to stop one of these anti-family contracts, so we expect it will have a national effect. Thank you for making this victory for families possible.