On September 21, 2011, the Lake County, Wisconsin, Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to change the telephone service provider at the Lake County Jail from Public Communications Service (PCS) of Los Angeles to Telemate, LLC of Ontario, Canada. PCS, which provides telephone services at over 200 jails and prisons in the U.S., had been paying the county 47 % of its gross revenue. In exchange for the monopoly in providing prisoner telephone services, Telemate, which counts 190 lockups in 40 states and two Canadian provinces among its customers, will pay 56% without significantly raising rates from those charged by PCS. According to Lake County Police Commander William Patterson, the county should clear about a quarter million dollars a year from the prisoner telephone service payments if the prisoner telephone traffic remains the same.

Another reason for the change is charges of theft of telephone credits under the personal identification number (PIN) system used by PCS. In 2009, about 30 prisoners reported theft of credits. A county police investigation failed to turn up sufficient evidence to charge anyone, but they suspected that other prisoners were involved in the thefts. The problems went away after PCS issued new PINs to the prisoners. ...

In recognition of October as Domestic Violence Awareness Month, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) announced plans to donate thousands of confiscated cell phones to organizations that help victims of domestic violence.

In addition to providing victims of domestic abuse with a means to call 911 in an emergency (thereby serving a valuable and much-needed public service function), the donation plan gives CDCR an opportunity to put a good face on an increasingly embarrassing problem – the proliferation of contraband cell phones in its prisons.

According to a news release by CDCR spokeswoman Terry Thornton, CDCR staff confiscated nearly 1,400 contraband cell phones in 2007, about 2,800 call phones in 2008, almost 7,000 in 2009, and over 7,800 as of October 2010.

From a corrections standpoint, the cell phones pose a serious risk to safety and security, as they provide prisoners a means of circumventing the systems put in place by prison officials to monitor prisoner communications with the outside world. Officials have expressed concerns that the cell phones will be used to plan escapes, conduct drug transactions, and commit other crimes.

From a prisoner perspective, cell phones provide a means of avoiding the exorbitant phone rates charged ...

To comply with Florida law, the state’s Public Service Commission (PSC) amended its rules to remove its jurisdiction in rates of telephone services. For prisoners and their loved ones, that removes what little oversight existed on the rates charged for prisoner collect calls.

The Consumer Choice and Protection Act, which became effective July 1, 2009, amended Section 364.3376 Florida Statutes. That Act eliminated the PSC’s authority to establish maximum rates for all providers of operator services within the state. In removing the statute’s reference to tariffs, it replaced that language with “schedules or published schedules.” The Act now requires operators to charge rates and bill services in accord with the rates in their published schedules.

In comments on the rule amendment proposal, AT&T Florida, Embarq Florida, Evercom Systems, T-Netix Telecommunications Services, Global Tel*Link, Network Communications International, ITI Inmate Telephone Services, and Public Communications Services applauded the change; as it has been something they have been lobbying to obtain for years.

Florida Citizens for the Rehabilitation of Errants and Pay Tel Communications argued that prisoner telephone services are not operator services and from a consumer perspective, are monopolistic. The phone companies argued the bid process utilized by prisons to select service ...

On April 21, 2009, the Supreme Judicial Court of Maine decided that the telephone use rates the Maine Department of Corrections (DOC) charges state prisoners was not subject to regulation by the Maine Public Utilities Commission (PUC).

A complaint was filed with the PUC alleging that the DOC's prisoner telephone rates were unreasonable and unjustly discriminatory. The DOC charges $.30 per minute for prisoner-paid direct calls and $.25 per minute plus a $1.55 connect charge for collect calls. The DOC pays a contractor $.03 per minute to use the Public Switched Telephone Network.

After the complaint was filed, the DOC completed its conversion from a telephone system owned by outside contractors to largely owning its own telephone system. It contested the PUC's regulatory authority, alleging that there was no statute giving the PUC authority over the DOC. The PUC held that the DOC was a "person" and thus subject to its regulation pursuant to 35-A M.R.S. § 102(13). It ordered the DOC to file a rate schedule and petition to operate a telephone system. The DOC appealed to the Supreme Judicial Court.

The court held that the PUC was incorrect in defining the DOC as a "person" and thus subject ...

by Matt Clarke

In January 2013, A $45 million settlement was reached in a long-standing lawsuit that challenged the failure of prison phone service companies to provide rate information to people who accepted calls from prisoners in Washington State.

Previously, on February 23, 2012, a King County superior court had certified the case as a class-action and approved plaintiffs Sandy Judd (the ex-wife of PLN editor Paul Wright), former Human Rights Defense Center board member and attorney Tara Herivel (who co-edited PLN anthologies Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America’s Poor and Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration), and Columbia Legal Services as class representatives for persons who received intrastate collect calls from prisoners at certain Washington state prisons between June 20, 1996 and December 31, 2000.

During that period, rate information mandated by the Washington Utilities & Transportation Commission (WUTC) was not provided by prison phone service companies. The plaintiffs filed suit in state court alleging violations of the Consumer Protection Act, chapter 19.86 RCW.

Similar claims were brought by another plaintiff, Zuraya Wright – Paul Wright’s mother – on behalf of people who accepted interstate (long distance) collect calls from Washington state prisoners during the same time ...

I would like to thank everyone who has donated to the Human Rights Defense Center/Prison Legal News annual fundraiser. As of mid-January 2013 we had raised a little over $29,000 of our $60,000 goal to continue the Campaign for Prison Phone Justice, and still need more support to be able to carry it through the rest of the year. We are making significant progress with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which on January 22, 2013 published a formal Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on interstate prison phone rates.

Our hard-fought efforts are paying off and we need your financial support to continue to keep the campaign going. The FCC has asked specific questions concerning the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, and in the Phone Justice ad on page 37 we list information that you can submit to the FCC. One factor in motivating the FCC to act on this issue, after sitting on it for almost a decade, has been letters and submissions from prisoners and their families plus concerted actions by the Campaign for Prison Phone Justice.

If you can make a tax-deductible donation to support the campaign, please do so. Our opponents in this struggle are the powerful telecom industry ...

Sometime in the early morning of April 26, 2012, in his cell in a remote Pennsylvania prison, a 74-year-old jailhouse lawyer serving a life sentence hung himself. He was a quiet man who avoided taking credit for his work, so many people in and outside of prison don’t know about the debt they owe to Jon E. Yount.

I knew Jon well, although not as well as I’d have liked. We corresponded a few hundred times, with him writing more than me, and I visited him four or five times. Some might recognize Jon’s name from the Prison Policy Initiative advisory board, but very few people know that Jon was the first person to recognize how the Census Bureau’s prison miscount could distort state legislative redistricting.

In the late 1990s, Jon and filmmaker Tracy Huling, working independently, linked the Census Bureau’s practice of counting incarcerated people as residents of the location where they were imprisoned to negative political and economic effects. Tracy and Jon’s efforts started people talking about the issue, and it was this “rumor” that I initially set out to debunk. I was skeptical that the prison system was large enough for census counts of correctional populations to ...

On December 28, 2012, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) took a major step in a process that could lead to “just and reasonable” interstate phone rates for calls made from prisons, jails and other detention centers.

“Today, we officially answer the call from tens of thousands of consumers who have written, emailed and, yes, phoned the Commission, pleading for relief on interstate long distance rates from correctional facilities,” said FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, a supporter of the Campaign for Prison Phone Justice.

Nearly ten years after the “Wright Petition” landed at the FCC – named after petitioner Martha Wright, who had accepted phone calls from her incarcerated grandson – the Commission issued a “Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking” (NPRM), that was published in the Federal Register on January 22, 2013. This opens up a sixty-day period, until March 25, 2013, to submit public comments on the NPRM to make the cost of prison phone calls more affordable to consumers.

Before the FCC Commissioners decide whether and how to lower prison phone rates, they want to hear more about the experiences of prisoners and their families with the prison telephone system, and ideas for changing it.

In the past six months ...

On December 12, 2012, after a “raucous” hearing with four hours of testimony, the Louisiana Public Service Commission (LPSC) voted to lower the cost of telephone calls made from state prisons and local jails. With rates of $.30 per minute and surcharges to set up phone accounts, calls made by Louisiana prisoners were previously around 15 times the cost of freeworld phone calls. The rate cut will be a relief for families of the roughly 40,000 people held in prisons and jails in Louisiana.

The proposal to reduce the phone rates first came before the LPSC for a vote on November 15, 2012. At that hearing, Commissioners Foster L. Campbell and Jimmy Field voted in favor of the proposal while Commissioners Eric Skrmetta and Clyde Holloway voted against. Responding to pleas from sheriffs, Commissioner Lambert C. Boissiere III abstained, wanting to give the sheriffs another month to review the proposal before deciding whether he would vote in favor of cutting prison and jail phone rates. The LPSC then voted 3-2 to defer the vote until December.

Former prisoners, prisoners’ family members, attorneys and advocates took the stand at the LPSC hearings in November and December to testify in support of ...

On December 18, 2012, the Board of Commissioners for Cook County, Illinois voted to lower the outrageous cost of telephone calls made by prisoners at the Cook County Jail.
The county has a contract with Securus Technologies, which operates phone systems in 2,200 jails and prisons across 44 states. The county’s contract with Securus guaranteed a 57.5% kickback commission from gross phone revenue, which translated to around $300,000 per month.

Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle led the charge to lower the jail phone rates. She said she thought it was wrong to view prisoners as a revenue source. For one thing, the people who must pay the high cost of prisoners’ phone calls are often already poor; she noted that many prisoners in the Cook County Jail cannot afford to post bond.

“The county pays $143 a day to keep someone in jail. That’s a high cost for taxpayers to pay because defendants are too poor to make their bond payments,” said Preckwinkle.
Poor and working families in Cook County have been hit hard by the high phone rates, too. Monica Ingram, a nurse who provides homecare, was distraught when she realized, after spending $60 on calls in one ...