There are more people incarcerated in America than another other country in the world. The US prison population is also rapidly increasing according to recent statistics from the Department of Justice which recently reported a rise in the inmate population of more than 2.8 per cent at 62,000 inmates comprising nearly 2.25 million inmates, all of whom make phone calls worth over US$1 billion per year --– who says crime doesn’t pay!
Guilty or innocent, prisoners pay phone bills described by the American Bar Association as “exorbitant”. Grossly inflated phones rates of up to 636 per cent more than the average consumer voice rates are common; a cost usually born by the low-income relatives and single mother spouses of inmates.
The Kansas Department of Corrections (KDOC) in a recent statement announced that Embarq Payphone Services Inc. would be its new provider of inmate telephone services in an effort to address the problem with what it calls “significantly reduced rates.”
A local call from a Kansas prison currently costs a US$2.84 “surcharge” plus a mind-boggling $0.66 per minute for a local collect call. The proposed rate reduction for the same call will be a surcharge $1.70 and $0.40 per minute. EMBARQ provides inmate phone services in South Carolina, Michigan and Wisconsin in addition to numerous county facilities around the US.
Paul Cooper, Director & General Manager of EMBARQ said that he and his company are “are very excited to serve KDOC.” (Hmm, I can’t imagine why.)
Almost as bad off are the inmates in the New York state prison system administered by US carrier Verizon/MCI who over the past ten years have raked in hundreds of millions. A study of the New York Department of Corrections (NY DOC) case revealed that customers who received collect calls from prisoners were charged an average per call initiation fee of $3.00 plus $.19 cents per minute.
By contrast, a long distance call using Verizon’s International Choice Plan from Los Angeles to London costs $.08 cents per minute.
The average prison phone call is also lengthy, at 19 minutes per call, due to steep call initiation fees adding up to about $6.61 per call. There are 66,000 prisoners in the New York State correction system at any given time using 3,335 collect call-only telephones making about 500,000 calls totaling than 9.5 million minutes and revenues in the millions of dollars a month for Verizon.
A paper by the legal advocacy group the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) does not mince words calling inmate phone rates “corporate exploitation” and now “illegal” having successfully sued to State of New York and MCI/Verizon to end exploitative practices that have unduly slapped prison family members with surcharges and inflated per-minute rates. The suit also addressed MCI/Verizon kickbacks to New York State to the tune of $200 million over the last ten years.
Evidence presented at trial revealed that prisoners’ families phone bills were commonly larded with “various extra surcharges” and excessive per minute charges often totaling in “the hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month,” according to court documents. This hardship was further compounded by arbitrary service interruption justified by carriers who “reserved the right to cut off service without notice if they see extra activity on an account and decide those accepting the charges may not be able to
pay.”
Carriers usually cite that security as the reason for increased inmate phone rates. Restrictions placed on inmate lines includes blocked numbers, outgoing calls or collect only calls as well as various conversation control and monitoring techniques. Calls are instantly terminated when, for example a second extension is off-hook or a call waiting notification tone is detected.
The CCR argues that the security explanation for astronomically high inmate phone rates is simply not a defensible argument.
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