Should Prisoners Pay $1 a Minute for Phone Calls?

You can find a state's commitment to safe prisons and successful integration in the little details - including the rates prisoners pay for phone calls. For years, collect calls from prisoners to people on the outside have been notoriously overpriced, with states and private companies drawing wide profit margins off the families of the incarcerated.

Things have improved in recent years, but there's still an enormous disparity between states. Prisoners in at least 10 states still pay more than $1 a minute for out of state calls. Charging unmanageable rates for prison phone calls simply increases the distance between a prisoner and his support system on the outside and, therefore, reduces his chances at building a life outside of prison after release. I often argue in this space that improving the rights of incarcerated Americans is critical to making our society safer and more productive. Building barriers to contact with the outside world - and profiting from these barriers - is exactly the kind of counterproductive policy that gave us two million prisoners and no end in sight.

Ronald Fraser wrote recently in the Kalamazoo Gazette that Michigan and only five other states passed up commissions from phone companies and he called on the other 44 to follow their lead.

Only five other states -- Missouri, Nebraska, New York, Oklahoma and Rhode Island -- do not accept such commissions from phone companies and pass the savings on to inmates. While competition among phone companies in the U.S. market drives long-distance calling rates down, competition in the prison telephone market, with help from greedy phone companies and uncaring prison operators, actually drives rates up for inmates and their families.

It's not that no one has noticed the prison telephone rip-off. The 2006 Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons reported that inmate phone rates are "extraordinarily high" and that lower rates will "support family and community bonds." The American Bar Association has formally called for inmate calls to be set at the "lowest possible rates," and the American Correctional Association says sound correctional management includes reasonably priced phone services.

And fellow criminal justice blogger William Newmiller pointed out the other day in a response to my Friday Tweets post that these exorbitant rates are one reason prison officials are seeing so many cell phones smuggled into prisons. He wrote:

The cost of prison calls is a scandal. Typically, the tariff runs 5-10 times what we pay for phone calls on the outside. The effect of such costs is to further isolate prisoners from family and loved ones, thereby diminishing the level of support available to them when they're set free.

The high costs essentially are a kickback to departments of corrections in exchange for the monopoly granted to the communications companies that provide inmate phone service. And an onerous tax for many who can ill afford it.

If you live in one of the 44 states that accept commissions on prison phone calls (anywhere but Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, Oklahoma and Rhode Island), please call your representatives and urge them to stop this destructive policy immediately.