by Chuck Sharman

Backtracking from new rules passed just a year ago that would have lowered phone call rates in prisons and jails to $0.06 to $0.12 per minute, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted on October 28, 2025, to hike those rate caps to $0.10 to $0.18 per minute. The FCC had voted in August 2025 to table imposition of the former rate caps for two years, but its latest action means that they will not take effect at all.

As PLN reported, the FCC voted in August 2024 to slash rate caps for prison phone calls to $0.06 per minute and no more than $0.12 per minute in jails. Video call rates were also lowered to a maximum of $0.16 per minute in prisons and $0.11 to $0.25 per minute in jails. The order further eliminated “site commissions”—kickbacks paid to lockups by telecom providers awarded their contracts—which many lockups had come to rely on for part of their operating budget. Charges were also banned for “ancillary services,” like adding money to an account. [See: PLN, Oct. 2024, p.1.]

The FCC’s new order maintains the bans on site commissions and ancillary service charges. But the new rates include a $0.02-per-minute fee “to account for correctional facilities’ expenses.” The amount was cribbed from a 2021 order, which also found its way into the details of the 2024 order, at the upper bounds of the “zone of reasonableness” for “used and useful correctional facility costs” associated with providing call services. Significantly, the underlying basis for the add-on included estimates from a 2015 survey of its members by the National Sheriffs Association. Beyond the lack of rigor involved in that process is the fact that technology has leapfrogged over the past decade; fewer prisons and jails need guards to escort prisoners and detainees to make calls that they now make themselves on tablets without leaving their cells.

As the FCC admitted, this add-on for facility costs might look like a decision to “effectively reintroduce site commissions by a different name.” However, the commissioners insisted that was not the case because the fee is capped—albeit at an effective rate of 11-20%. The news was welcomed by telecom providers, of course. It will no doubt also cheer thousands of lockups across the country that have come to rely on kickbacks from firms like Securus and GTL to defray their costs; they will get to keep that source of revenue. It is far less rosy news for those they detain and their loved ones, who will pony up an extra 11-20% for each call for the privilege of staying in contact with one another.

As for the underlying call rates themselves, how did the FCC decide to claw back a significant portion of the savings promised to prisoners and their loved ones, even before the savings took effect? The new order makes it clear that telecom providers mounted massive and ultimately successful resistance to the rate caps in the 2024 order.

Telecom Arguments
Drive FCC Action

NCIC, for example, decried the 2024 order for calculating its per-minute costs using both minutes billed to prisoners and their loved ones as well as minutes that went unbilled because they were negotiated away for nothing to get the contract—often in localities that have made all prison calls free, like California, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and New York, but also in the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), which has a program that offers prisoners free calls to incentivize good conduct. Dividing each $1 of costs over the larger number of both billed and unbilled minutes “better reflect[ed] the cost of actual minutes,” according to the 2024 order. But the new order walks that back, agreeing with telecoms that the calculation led to a per-minute cost that was too low. Using the higher per-minute cost calculated using billed minutes partially explains the new rate caps.

For another part, an example was provided by Paytel, which walked away from contracts at “four small jails in Arizona and New Mexico that would no longer be financially viable,” the FCC reported. That left those lockups “no other choice but to revert to 1980s-style supervised public pay telephones.” It wasn’t explained how that is bad for the detainees; a 15-minute local call on most payphones runs far less than the new $0.25-per-minute rate cap for “extremely small jails.” Moreover, even if the loved one must accept high reverse charges for a long-distance call from a public payphone, he or she at least has a state public service commission to hear complaints about the service and fees.

For still another part of the rate increase, Securus and Paytel provided the example, jointly telling the FCC that contracts had to be renegotiated with some lockups which “lack[ed] sufficient financial resources to pay for the suite of safety and security tools they previously relied upon to provide IPCS [incarcerated person calling services] safely to their populations.” This suite of tools presumably did not include costs associated with meeting requirements of the Commission on Accreditation of Law Enforcement Agencies or providing “communication security services,” both of which were provided for in the 2024 order. But it did include costs of monitoring and recording calls, as well as providing “biometric services” to verify the identities of prisoners and detainees making calls. Again, it wasn’t explained how it was bad for them to forego this, or not to have their calls monitored or recorded, if their prison or jail refused to pay for the service. But the telecoms reported grimly that those cash-strapped lockups “elected to move forward with a substantially reduced set of those tools, thus endangering facility and public safety.”

Combining both a Report and Order on these alleged shortcomings in the 2024 rules with an Order for Reconsideration of them, the FCC adopted a set of revised rate caps that included $0.11 per minute for calls and $0.23 per minute for video calls from prisons. For large jails with an average daily population (ADP) of 1,000 or more, the rates were capped at $0.10 and $0.18, respectively; $0.11 and $0.18 in medium jails with an ADP of 350-999; $0.12 and $0.19 in small jails with an ADP of 100-349; $0.14 and $0.24 in very small jails with an ADP of 50-99; and $0.18 and $0.41 in “extremely small jails” with an ADP under 50. See: Incarcerated People’s Communications Services; Implementation of the Martha Wright-Reed Act; Rates for Interstate Inmate Calling Services Report and Order, Order on Reconsideration, and Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking; WC Docket Nos. 23-62 and 12-375, FCC (Oct. 2025).