Julie Jacobson/AP Photo
An inmate talks on the phone at the Albany County Correctional Facility in Albany, New York. Phone calls made from prison are a source of revenue for telecom companies and corrections departments.
In December 2019, before the pandemic turned the world upside down, advocate Ulandis Forte traveled to Chicago for a roundtable discussion with Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL). The topic was prison phones—a consolidated, largely unregulated, price-gouging industry that hurts some of the most vulnerable families in America. Duckworth had introduced a bill earlier that year that would have allowed greater regulation of the prison phone industry.
Forte, who was formerly incarcerated in several prisons around the country, is a leading voice for regulating the prison phone industry. He’s filling the shoes of his late grandmother, retired nurse Martha Wright-Reed, who, while he was incarcerated, regularly called him. She was nearly blind and struggled to travel, so phone calls were her best connection to her grandson—and they were an emotional lifeline for him.
But the calls were cripplingly expensive. In some states, calls could cost up to $24 for a 15-minute phone call. Wright-Reed was paying nearly $100 a month to call Forte, who was then incarcerated in Arizona. So Wright-Reed set out to change the industry and sued. “She was just so frustrated with how we were being taken advantage of and she said, ‘What are we going to do about this?’” her grandson Forte says.
After more than a decade of advocacy and litigation, in which Wright-Reed was the plaintiff, the Federal Communications Commission announced in 2013 that it was setting new rules that capped the rates telecom companies could charge for interstate calls to prisons. In 2015, the FCC acted to address in-state calling rates.
In response, the telecom companies sued. Arguments were heard in 2017 and, under the Trump administration, the government changed its litigating position during the case. “It is very unusual for the government to do this, even when an administration changes hands,” says Cheryl Leanza, managing director of media justice at the United Church of Christ, a ministry whose goal is to make media accountable and affordable for everyone. “The FCC stopped defending its own authority to regulate.” The judges ultimately decided that the FCC did not have the power to regulate in-state prison calls.
So advocates went to bat, and legislation that would restore the FCC’s ability to regulate these calls was included in the HEROES bill that passed the House in May. The original bill, named for Martha Wright-Reed, introduced at the beginning of the COVID pandemic by Congressman Bobby Rush (D-IL), does three things: It allows the FCC to set rates for in-state calls; it sets an immediate interim cap on in-state calls while the FCC decides its official rate; and it prohibits profit-sharing (sometimes known as kickbacks) between sheriffs and the phone companies.
Although Duckworth’s bill restores authority to the FCC to regulate in-state calls, the interim rate is especially essential during the COVID crisis, advocates say.
The centerpiece of the House legislation is its requirement of regulation by the FCC, says Leanza. Right now, police officials have an incentive for companies to make their prices as high as possible. “There’s a direct financial incentive to pick a company that charges more money, because the more money the company charges, the more money goes to the sheriff,” Leanza says. Market consolidation makes the problem worse: 90 percent of the market is controlled by two companies, which constantly design new products like tablets and video calls for incarcerating institutions to buy. “All of these products, unfortunately, are designed to be a profit center, not a communication tool.”
Incarcerated people and their families pay for their calls by the minute, and in many cases, families must create an account—for a fee—to connect with their incarcerated loved one. Adding money or taking money out of that account incurs still another fee. There’s even a “first-minute fee” in some cases, Leanza adds. Although most telecom companies have moved away from a pay-by-the-minute system for cellphones, the prison phone industry has not. “We’re still in an archaic pricing structure because the industry can make money this way,” Leanza explains.
ALTHOUGH NEW FEDERAL legislation is required to regulate an industry set on gouging mostly poor families, even local phone calls are hardly cheap, says Bianca Tylek, executive director of Worth Rises, an organization dedicated to dismantling the prison-industrial complex.
“In the last few years, however, things have taken a turn for the positive,” Tylek says. In 2018, prison phone industry advocates made progress at the state and local levels: New York City passed a law making phone calls free from city jails, the first law of its kind. The new law affects roughly 8,000 jail inmates and their families, Tylek says, and directly saves communities $10 million a year. The day after the law took effect (on May 1, 2019), call volume jumped 40 percent.
Taking its lead from New York, San Francisco soon passed a similar law, making phone calls from jail free. Tylek says that San Francisco will become the first city to rebid a contract with the telecom company GTL solely as an expense-based contract, meaning the city foots the bill, rather than a revenue-based contract where families pay.
With in-person visits largely halted across the country due to the pandemic, phone calls have become even more essential to incarcerated people.
Similarly, in Connecticut, where rates at the prison level are the second-highest in the country, Tylek is pushing for a statewide bill. Last year, The Intercept ran a story showing how Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, a Democrat, was “stonewalling” a bill that would have made the state’s prison phone calls free. The article, Tylek says, and positive local news coverage of the bill helped push the governor toward advocates’ position.
The bill was then added to an omnibus bill in 2019 that was set to pass before it blew up for unrelated reasons. Nonetheless, the legislature’s majority leader said that the prison phone bill would be a priority in 2020.
WITH IN-PERSON visits largely halted across the country due to the pandemic, phone calls have become even more essential to incarcerated people. Critics have complained that the HEROES bill in the House is full of measures unrelated to COVID-19—and they lump the Martha Wright-Reed bill in that category. But, advocates maintain, although the issue has been a decades-long fight, prison phone industry regulation is directly related to COVID. Rush introduced the Martha Wright-Reed bill at the outset of the pandemic, and the HEROES Act’s establishment of interim rates that would take effect immediately was a pandemic-engendered necessity, advocates say. If the bill is enacted by the Senate and signed into law, the FCC would have 18 months to decide on its final regulations, but in the meantime, incarcerated people need to connect with their families now—especially as prisons and jails have become hotbeds for COVID-19.
Tylek maintains that the pause on in-person visits should not be the main rationale for the bill. Phone calls are still essential even when visits are reinstated—many loved ones and family members, like Martha Wright-Reed, can’t visit their loved ones incarcerated thousands of miles away.
“Phone calls are always a lifeline,” Tylek says. “At times of crisis, communication is just elevated regardless of whether visits are available.”
Duckworth’s bill has won some bipartisan backing with Sens. Rob Portman (R-OH) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) co-sponsoring the legislation alongside Democrats Cory Booker (NJ), Brian Schatz (HI), Ed Markey (MA), and independent Angus King of Maine. But in Congress and statehouses, Republican partisanship often poses a major obstacle for such efforts.
“I really want people to understand that this issue is not a partisan issue,” Tylek says.
“The issue of prison phone calls is something supported by members of the public across the board. It becomes a partisan issue only in capitol buildings.”
Martha Wright-Reed, who died on her grandson’s birthday in 2015, would be “elated” to know that reforms she pushed for over decades were passed by the House, Forte says.
Leanza is also optimistic. “I’m feeling very hopeful,” she says. “This is a no-nonsense thing that can be done for people who are suffering right now, [that will] increase the safety of all our communities, keep families intact, and provide the groundwork for incarcerated people to come out and fully thrive.”
