Families of Inmates Pay For Their Loved One's Crimes
Written by Bill George, Jr.
Published December 03, 2007
When someone commits a crime, they are adjudicated. Depending on the severity of their crime, they are sent to State or Federal Prison to pay their debt to society. They are not the only ones who pay, however. The family and friends of the incarcerated, desperate to maintain family ties, pay for their loved one's crimes as well through the exorbitant rates charged by the companies that operate the inmate telephone systems.
Inmates are only allowed to make collect calls. Companies that specialize in correctional phone systems obtain exclusive contracts with the correctional institution. They set up secure phone lines that include voice recognition software as well as digital monitoring and recording capabilities.
When a family member or friend receives a call from an inmate, the first thing they hear is a recording stating that they are receiving a call from a correctional institution. The recording goes on to state the charges for the call: $3.25 for the first minute and, depending on the time of year, 30-40 cents for each additional minute. The system automatically terminates the call after fifteen minutes.
T Netix is the largest provider of prison phone systems. They service over 1,200 correctional facilities and are the largest beneficiary of the booming inmate phone service industry
I have a friend who is incarcerated at the Davis Correctional Facility in Holdenville, Oklahoma, owned by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). CCA owns over 60 prisons in 20 states and is the largest prison corporation in the United States. In 2006, CCA generated revenue of over $1.3 billion dollars with profits of $105 million. CCA has an exclusive contract with T Netix.
In order to talk to my buddy by phone, he put me on his phone list. I received a call from T Netix and was required to set up an account — including giving my Social Security Number — in order to receive calls. T Netix assigns an arbitrary credit account. If you exceed your limit for the month, they block calls until the bill is paid. They work in concert with major phone carriers — in my case AT&T — and the T Netix bill is attached to your monthly phone bill.
The system is far from perfect. On several occasions, in the middle of a conversation, a recorded voices interrupts the call, saying, "Custom calling features are not allowed," and disconnects the call. These glitches work in T Netix's favor. If my friend calls me back, I start over with $3.25 for the first minute.
On another occasion, T Netix placed a block on my number for no apparent reason. While the error was theirs, it took almost two weeks to straighten it out.
Then there is the phone bill. Looking at my phone bill for November, I see that I spoke to my friend for a total of two hours and forty-five minutes at a cost of $106.54. It is expensive, but worth the cost to know that my buddy is all right. I can afford it, but what about the families who can't?
The majority of inmates in federal and state custody come from low-income households. Their family members already struggle to send their loved ones money for clothes, radios, and toiletry items that help them maintain a sense of self-worth in an extremely dehumanizing environment. The inflated rates charged by T Netix and other phone service providers force some families to make some heartbreaking choices.
The case of Janie Canino was used to illustrate this point in ad hoc committee meeting held before the FCC. Canino, a single parent supporting two elderly parents on her small salary, pays between $75.00-$100.00 per month to maintain contact with her son who is incarcerated in a Louisiana prison.
When asked about the high cost of collect calls from prison, Matt Davis, spokesman for the Michigan Department of Corrections responded, "We're talking about murderers and rapists. They took from society, and now it's time they gave something back." When it was pointed out that it is not the inmates who pay but their family and friends, he went on to say that if the inmates don't want to cost their families money they should just write letters.
The sad fact is that a large portion of the prison population never graduated high school. Writing is difficult for them. It is also true that most inmates don't want their loved ones to worry about them so the letters they write are typically pretty sterile. One is able to garner much more information from the sound of an inmate's voice than from a few words scratched on a legal pad.
According to the Department of Corrections, 93 per cent of those currently incarcerated in state and federal prisons will be released at some point. Studies indicate that close familial ties are an indicator of an inmate's success in transitioning to life on the outside. Why would prison systems make maintaining family ties so burdensome? The answer is easy: money.
Prisons take bids from companies offering to implement phone systems. Unlike most bidding processes, they typically enter into exclusive, long-term contracts with the company that charges the highest rates. The company agrees to pay the prison a commission, usually between 40-60 per cent of revenue. These commissions (read: kickbacks) guarantee the prison an additional revenue stream. In some states it amounts to over $25 million dollars a year.
Prison officials argue that these funds are necessary to provide prisoners with much needed services including recreational facilities, books for prison libraries, and AIDS prevention programs. There is no argument that these services are important. Those of us with loved ones in prison are already paying for their support through our state and federal taxes. If the prison deems these services necessary, the cost should be shared by society at large, not through a hidden tax in the guise of a phone bill levied on a population that is least able to afford it.
Efforts are under way to revise prison phone billing systems. In October of 2001, relatives of inmates housed in Oklahoma DOC prisons filed a class action lawsuit against T Netix, AT&T, Evercom, and the Oklahoma Department of Corrections. They filed claims in anti-trust, under due process and equal protection. The case was dismissed in 2002.
In 2006, Representative Bobby Rush, Democrat of Illinois, sponsored a bill that would completely overhaul prison phone systems. Most notably, the bill would do away with the commissions paid to prisons, would require prisons to use both collect-call and debit-calling systems, and would require each prison system to allow more than one phone company to enter the market. Opposition to the Rush bill is fierce. It will amount to a Herculean task to get this bill past the huge Telecommunications and Prison lobbies.
It is unlikely that any real reform of prison phone systems will take place in the near future. There is simply too much money to be made in that market. American Capital, a heavy investor in T Netix, gives a vivid illustration of their growth potential in a 2004 press release. It reads, "In 2002, more that 2 million inmates were incarcerated in 4,000 correctional facilities in the U.S. In recent years, the inmate population has been growing between 2% and 6% annually and analysts estimate that a similar growth rate is probable for the foreseeable future. Prisoners are served by some 200,00 phone lines linked to correctional facilities, and the retail market for correctional facility telecommunications is an estimated $2.2 billion."
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/12/03/122448.php
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