Expensive calls force families to choose between paying bills and staying connected to loved ones.
For many years, families of incarcerated people have sacrificed basic necessities to cover the escalating cost of prison calls.
Those burdens were expected to end soon. Some jails and prisons had implemented the new, lower rates last year; the rest of them were scheduled to reduce rates this year.
The reductions were prompted by a Federal Communication Commission decision last year that cut prison phone rates by more than 50%. In some lockups, the new rates slashed prices by more than 90%, dropping from as much as $11.35 to 90 cents for a 15-minute call in large jails and from $12.10 to $1.35 in small jails. Prison-phone companies like Securus and SmartComm were also prohibited from paying commissions or kickbacks to correctional facilities.
“Today marks a major milestone on the long road to right a market dysfunction that has wronged incarcerated persons and their loved ones for decades,” said Mignon Clyburn, a former FCC acting chairwoman, as the reductions were announced in July 2024.
A few months later, in October, unhappy telecom companies sued to block the commission from implementing the new rules, contending that some jails would no longer be able to provide any phone calls under the proposed fee structure.
While advocates did calculations and analysis refuting the lawsuit’s contentions, the FCC chairman echoed the concerns in late June, as he abruptly announced that it would postpone reforms until 2027.
Soon, the Orleans Justice Center tripled its phone rates, through a new contract between SmartComm and the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office that changed rates from six to 16 cents a minute, with eight cents of that going to the budget-strapped jail as commission. Video calls went up to 25 cents a minute, with 10 cents of that paid as commission. OPSO also continued a routine begun during the COVID epidemic: every incarcerated person receives one free, 15-minute call per day, and one free 20-minute video visit per week, a sheriff’s spokesman said.
To comply with the FCC’s order, the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections had also lowered its phone rates to six cents a minute, from 14 cents, but did not increase the rates or add commissions after the FCC’s delay, a DOC spokeswoman said.
“There was a tremendous moment of progress, and now it is being walked back for no good reason,” said Wanda Bertram, communications specialist for the Prison Policy Initiative, which did groundbreaking analysis about the issue that laid the groundwork for the 2024 change.
The FCC’s postponement puts millions of families back where they had been: financially unable to maintain consistent communication with loved ones on the inside.
Phone calls: ‘the thread holding the relationship together’
“For children and loved ones of incarcerated people, a phone call isn’t just small talk. It’s often the only thread holding the relationship together,” said Dominque Jones-Johnson, 42, who founded Daughters Beyond Incarceration, or DBI, in the spring of 2018 to help girls and young women with incarcerated parents.
For her entire life, Jones-Johnson has communicated by phone with her dad, Charles Brown Jr., who was sentenced in 1982 and sent to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.
His voice on the phone has been part of every step of her life. After receiving her master’s in organizational leadership from Louisiana State University, she decided to form DBI – using research, her work experience as a mentor, and guidance from her father. “Nobody can motivate or encourage me the way my dad did,” she said. “I’m not saying that I didn’t receive that from my mother and stepdad, but it always was a different connection between me and my dad.”
He set the tone, even from Angola, Jones-Johnson said. “For years, when my dad calls me, he says, ‘Hi, strong beautiful black woman.’ That was something that I was raised on.”
When she talks about phone calls with her DBI girls, this point is one of the hardest. No matter what is going on, “You cannot pick up the phone and call your dad.” Prison phones do not take incoming calls.
Meanwhile, outgoing calls from prison phones are expensive. If her dad didn’t have the money on his books, she often relied on his parents, her grandparents, for phone money. “Money was always tight,” she said. “My grandmother had a sweetshop and my grandfather worked at HANO for years but even still they were taking care of not just me and my cousins as well.”
“On an emotional level, it feels dehumanizing,” she said. “Families are put in the position of choosing between groceries, rent, and staying connected with a loved one.”
For some children growing up in households with an incarcerated parent, the money is stretched too thin for calls. Sometimes, then, relationships fall apart because of a lack of communication, Johnson-Jones said.
From his end of the phone, her father sees how the current six-cent rate – 90 cents for a 15-minute call – leaves thousands of other incarcerated men without the ability to make regular calls to their loved ones. “Out of the 5,000 offenders here, about 2,000 can’t even afford the six-cent per minute fee,” said Brown, who now takes money out of his modest monthly work pay to call Domnique, whom he calls Neeky. “The rates still feel like they’re fixed on a system that leaves us behind.”
‘If calls had been more affordable, my childhood would been different’
“As a child, I had no one to pay for calls to talk to my mom from jail,” said Destiny Shanell Williams, 16, now a member of DBI.
Destiny desperately wanted that connection with her mom. So she struggled to scrape together the money whenever she could to take the calls, which were more expensive at the time, sometimes as much as $8 each. The strain, she said, left her feeling “lonely, abandoned, and isolated.”
She regularly missed birthdays, milestones, and everyday conversations with her mom, she said. That emptiness set her back all through her childhood, she said. “If phone calls would have been more affordable, it would have made my transition to adulthood much easier.”
Without money, phone calls are impossible
The recent FCC setbacks affect low-income households the most.
In many states, including Louisiana, most prisons are located in rural areas, far from the urban courts that sentence many state prisoners. Given the lack of public transportation to travel that distance, visiting is difficult. The main lifelines are phone calls, which help incarcerated parents stay connected with their children and elderly loved ones and allow spouses to maintain contact.
But when the calls are sporadic, it’s hard to form ties. At times, when children finally get a rare in-person visit with their parents, they may not feel at ease, if they had inconsistent phone contact.
“When my daughter visited, she told me she didn’t feel comfortable talking about boys and life because she really didn’t know me. That hurt me. That was all part of lack of communication,” said Ali Washington, 47, who spent 21 years incarcerated with only a few visits and rare phone calls from his daughter. He can still recall the painful visit with his daughter, who was 14 years old when she came to visit him at Elayn Hunt Correctional Center, which is located an hour’s drive from New Orleans.
Working to change FCC rules
In 2013, the Prison Policy Initiative published its first major report on phone rates, called “Please Deposit All of Your Money,” which revealed that corrections officials typically awarded contracts to companies not based on low rates for calls, but on the proportion of call revenue that the companies paid to prison systems.
Even now, activists recall this report’s importance, because it traced high phone rates to the commissions paid to prisons and jails.
More than a decade later, in 2024, families who had waited for reasonable phone rates were finally able to celebrate, as the FCC implemented the new phone regulations. “There was a tremendous moment of progress,” said Bertram, who describes the delay as “a political choice and one that impacts millions of people.”
