The Epitome of Looting

After 30 years of profiteering, the Martha Wright-Reed Bill has been passed, which gives the FCC authority to regulate the rapacious prison cell phone companies for in-state calls.

Contacts between inmates and their loved ones decrease prison violence, mental illness, and recidivism, but there is a profit to be made, so these phone companies pay kickbacks to the prisons and jails, and rates can exceed $1.00/minute for the inmates of the people that they call.

By comparison, for those carriers who charge domestic long distance rates, it tends to be in the 5¢ a minute.

The prison-industrial complex may be even more corrupt than the military-industrial complex:

A brand-new law (awaiting only the president’s signature) will let the Federal Communications Commission directly regulate rates in the notoriously predatory prison calling industry. Under the threat of having to provide a solid product for a reasonable price, companies may opt to call it a day and open up the market to a more compassionate and forward-thinking generation of providers.

Prison calling systems depend on the state and the prison system, and generally have run the gamut from good enough to shockingly bad. With a literally captive customer base, companies had no real reason to innovate, and financial models involving kickbacks to the prisons and states incentivized income at all costs.

Inmates are routinely charged extortionate rates for simple services like phone calls and video calls (an upsell), and have even had visitation rights rescinded, leaving paid calls the only option. Needless to say, this particular financial burden falls disproportionately on people of color and those with low incomes, and it’s a billion-dollar industry.

It’s been this way for a long time, and former FCC commissioner Mignon Clyburn spent years trying to change it. When I talked with her in 2017, before she left the agency, she called inmate calling “the clearest, most glaring type of market failure I’ve ever seen as a regulator.” It was an issue she spent years working on, but she gave a lot of credit to Martha Wright-Reed, a grandmother who had organized and represented the fight to bring reform to the system right up until she died.

This has been going on for decades, and has been ignored.  It's good that this has changed.