The Federal Communications Commission voted unanimously Thursday to make phone calls more affordable for people in prisons or jails by approving a plan to reduce out-of-state call rates by at least one-third.
The FCC capped at 12 cents per minute the rate for prison calls and 14 cents per minute the rates in larger jails. Interstate rate caps were previously set at 21 cents per minute for debit and prepaid calls from prisons and jails with more than 1,000 inmates, according to an FCC proposal.
Before I worked in the prison-phone industry, if I heard a news story about high phone call costs from prisons, I would think to myself "Don't do the crime if you can't do the time - and everything that comes with it!"
I suppose my attitude was in the middle range for a working-class guy: having followed the rules myself, I was scornful of those who were trying to get lower costs for criminals, and I suggested to those who brought the subject up that the inmates could be provided with pencils and paper to write letters home, just like I used when I served in Vietnam.
However, I took a job installing and fixing phones in prisons, and after finding out a bit of the "inside story" (pun intended), I realized that it's nowhere near as simple a problem as I had imagined.
There are a lot of things that affect the costs of prison calls: here are just a few of the ones I learned about.
It is VERY expensive to send a technician into a prison. There are metal detectors, identity checks, tools lists and counts, plus occasional personal searches. It typically took me twenty to thirty minutes to get past the guardhouse, AND another twenty to thirty minutes to get back out.
No matter what the problem was, if I encountered unexpected conditions and needed a part that I hadn't brought in with me, the whole checkout/checkin process had to happen again.
Prison phones have to be specially manufactured, with attack-resistant handsets, touch-tone pads, and wiring. The average install time for a single-line set, functionally identical to a Western Electric "2554" wall set, was over three hours, because of the need to run wires in conduits, site it so as to prevent access by passersby, and drill mounting holes in concrete walls.
Those are some of the reasons that the costs have been high. On the other hand, there are valid reasons for the government's interest in making calls from prisons less expensive:
Inmate demand that their wives, children, or parents pay for collect calls through "independent" operator-service companies. The combination of higher-than-normal "collect" rates, tied to the "independent" service company fees - which could range into double-digits for a collect call - imposed an unneeded and unjustified toll (pun intended) on inmate's families.
I never saw a single prison where inmates could receive calls. Although I don't claim to be an expert in confinement planning, ISTM that having incoming lines in excercise years or other semi-public areas would dramatically reduce costs.
Petite Bourgeois prejudices to the contrary, keeping in touch with family does improve morale in inmate populations, and that means fewer disruptions and fewer offenses that might extend an inmate's sentence. The less time an inmate spends incarcerated, the less likely he is to recidivate.
Suffice to say, and I'll admit that this applis to me as well as many others, in public discussions about how to best and most effectively reduce crime, common sense is all too uncommon.
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