[telecom] from Connecting Families New York: incarcerated New Yorkers need our support.

Charges for phone calls from prisoners in state jails and prisons are excessively high. In order to promote reintegration of prisoners into society, and in recognition of the fact that most prisoners and their families are poor, those calls ought to be free. Connecting Families New York

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is an advocacy group that opposes high charges for calls from prisoners.

Excepts from the

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website:

As a coalition we fight to connect families by making phone calls free for incarcerated people and their loved ones.

We're fighting to end a million-dollar industry. Phone calls are a lifeline for incarcerated people and their families. We are fighting for legislation that would end the extraction of wealth from families - disproportionately Black, Brown, and Indigenous and low income - by making phone calls free for all incarcerated people in New York.

1 in 3 families go into debt to stay connected to their incarcerated loved one.

Over 50 percent of families struggle to meet their own household needs while a loved one is incarcerated. This often means that families are required to make unfathomable choices about whether to answer the phone to speak to an incarcerated loved one or buy groceries.

Women bear 87 percent of the costs related to staying in touch with incarcerated family members.

The stress of limited phone calls and exploitation of families is felt most acutely by Black and Latinx communities, who are disproportionately impacted by targeted over-policing, racist sentencing matrices, and mass criminalization.

  1. The high cost of phone calls in prisons generates .4 billion a year, disproportionately driving women and people of color into debt, Rosalie Chan and Belle Lin, June 30, 2021, Business Insider

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  1. It's all about the incentives: Why a call home from a jail in New York State can cost 7 times more than the same call from the state's prisons, Katie Rose Quandt and Andrea Fenster, March 23, 2021, Prison Policy Institute

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Nigel Allen
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