FCC slashes cost of phone calls for inmates, capping decades-long effort
Martha Wright-Reed sits in her Washington, D.C., home near a photo of her grandson Ulandis Forte, who spent 18 years in prison. She, Forte and other families of inmates fought to lower the cost of phone calls from prison. (Photo by Tracy A. Woodward/The Washington Post)
The cost of phone calls will drop dramatically for incarcerated people under new rules that federal regulators approved Thursday, concluding a decades-long effort to provide relief to the nation’s 2 million inmates and their families.
A 15-minute call to or from large jails, which now costs as much as $11.35, will cost 90 cents beginning next year. In small jails, the cost will fall from as high as $12.10 to $1.35. Video call rates will decrease to less than one-quarter of current prices, according to rules passed unanimously by the Federal Communications Commission.
An FCC draft order estimated the caps would save incarcerated people and their families, friends and legal teams about $386 million.
“It is no secret that the market for communication services for incarcerated people has long been plagued by predatory fees and practices,” FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks said in a statement Thursday. “Today’s actions put an end to these abuses.”
Advocates for incarcerated people and their families praised the decision, saying it was ending a “cruel” practice.
“The FCC’s order is a massive victory for incarcerated people, their families, and their allies who have spent decades fighting the exploitative prison telecom industry,” the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit organization that opposes mass incarceration, wrote in a published briefing.
Opponents expressed concern that the rate cuts could prove costly for telecommunications companies serving smaller jails and stress state budgets. FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, who approved the decision, wrote in a statement that he nevertheless worried that the caps weren’t high enough to offset some security costs for the companies and feared some companies might stop serving smaller facilities as a result.
The push for lower rates began about two decades ago, when a retired nurse in D.C. filed a petition asking the FCC to address the expense. Martha Wright-Reed, who died in 2015, wrote that she had to spend hundreds of dollars each month to call her incarcerated grandson, Ulandis Forte. She thought it was wrong that Forte had to pay more than non-incarcerated people to keep in touch with family, she told the Washington Post in 2012.
“She was right,” FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement celebrating the decision Thursday. “For those who are incarcerated and their loved ones, talk does not come cheap.”
Rosenworcel added that the price of one call could cost as much as an unlimited monthly plan for people who are not incarcerated. She also noted that regular contact with relatives can also reduce recidivism among inmates, a conclusion that several studies corroborate.
Correctional facilities often have an exclusive agreement with one company, meaning incarcerated people and their relatives must use that provider regardless of how much it charges. Those companies then share a portion of the revenue with the facilities, known as “site commissions,” which some local officials say helps fund staff to monitor the calls. Thursday’s FCC vote also prohibited most of those payments.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit had reversed similar rate caps in 2017, finding that the FCC had exceeded its authority in implementing them. But the bipartisan Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, signed by President Biden last year, broadened the FCC’s authority to cap call rates, and set the stage for this week’s vote.
In statements backing the decision, FCC commissioners recounted stories they had heard from family members of incarcerated people. One father had said he couldn’t afford to call his young children during his first two years in a Colorado correctional facility, a commissioner wrote. An incarcerated mother in Illinois recounted taking a job cleaning bathrooms so she could collect bits of soap to save money on hygiene and use more of her funds to call her children, according to another commissioner.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), who championed the Martha Wright-Reed Act, applauded the FCC’s decision as one that would “end the predatory status quo.”
“For far too long, too many families were forced to spend outrageous amounts of money simply to speak on the phone with their incarcerated loved ones, denying children the comfort of hearing their parents’ voices and preventing spouses from being able to say a simple ‘I’m here for you’ to their partners,” Duckworth said in a statement Thursday.
The federal-level change follows the implementation of several state laws slashing the cost of talking to incarcerated family members and friends, including in Connecticut, California and Colorado.
In Denver, Colorado state Rep. Mandy Lindsay (D) told a state House committee last year that she learned about the high cost of prison phone calls when one of her relatives became incarcerated. Because of the rates, Lindsay testified, “the amount of time that we talked was based on money.”
