The FCC Announces It Wants To Lower Those High Prison Phone Charges
Inmates families get hit hard when a loved one makes a call home but what do you think about this decision??
Via CNN
In the age of free phone calls and Skype, one group of people is still paying exorbitant rates for talk time: prisoners. The bill for a typical 15 minute state-to-state call tops $16 in some areas.
That’s because most prisons offer exclusive deals to phone service providers in exchange for astronomical commissions. The Federal Communications Commission labeled interstate inmate calling services (ICS) a government-sponsored “monopoly.”
The FCC wants it broken up. On Friday, the agency opened for public comment its proposed rules to lower interstate prison phone call rates. Its plans include the establishment of an interstate rate benchmark, caps on rates and the end of exclusivity agreements.
The fees providers pay to prisons add 43% on average to the cost of a call, the FCC estimated. As a result, prisoners pay far less for interstate calls in the small handful of states that do not charge commissions. New York, for instance, has banned commissions, and its average per-minute rates are as low as 5 cents per minute — the lowest of all states’ rates. Colorado’s ICS, which does charge commissions to its payphone vendors, is the nation’s most expensive, at 89 cents per minute.
On top of per-minute rates, most ICS operators charge prisoners call-initiation fees, which vary from 50 cents to $3.95 per call.
Prison calling services differ from typical payphones in some crucial ways. They can block inmates from making calls to certain people, including judges or witnesses. They can’t dial 800 or 900 numbers, and phone conversations can be monitored. If a prisoner is repeatedly making a call to the same number, for instance, corrections officers might listen in or record future calls. The systems also periodically notify the recipient that the call is being placed from a jail.
All those features — and the personnel needed to manage the systems — make prison systems more costly to operate than regular payphones. But the wide disparity in ICS rates suggests that some operators are going overboard.
The FCC proposal comes more than a decade after a U.S. District Court dismissed a class action lawsuit initiated by Martha Wright of Washington, who claimed that she paid $1,000 a year to cover the costs of her grandson’s phone calls from various state prisons. The judge in the case referred Wright to the FCC, which she contacted nine years ago.
Thoughts??
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The FCC Announces It Wants To Lower Those High Prison Phone Charges
djtrell
Sat, 29 Dec 2012 04:44:28 GMT
