HELP US END MASS INCARCERATION The Prison Policy Initiative uses research, advocacy, and organizing to dismantle mass incarceration. We’ve been in this movement for 23 years, thanks to individual donors like you.

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Two pie charts showing that 38% of the money spent on a traditional Global Tel*Link account goes to fees, but under the Collect2Card program 88% of the money goes to fees.

Data Source: Please Deposit All of Your Money: Kickbacks, Rates, and Hidden Fees in the Jail Phone Industry and Collect2Card website. (Graph: Peter Wagner, 2015)

This graph originally appeared in Comments re: Second Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking ¶¶ 98-102, single call programs.

Our report, Please Deposit All Your Money found that 38% of every dollar consumers spend with a typical Global Tel*Link account goes to fees for having, funding and closing their account. That’s a $400million/year outrage. But with Global Tel*Link’s Collect2Card™ program, it’s even worse: 88% of the cost of each $14.99 call goes to “fees”. (We’d like to do a similar analysis of Global Tel*Link’s Collect2Phone™ service, but to our knowledge neither Global Tel*Link nor its competitors offer a breakdown of “cost” vs. “fees” for calls charged as premium text messages.)

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