FCC votes unanimously to dramatically limit prison telecom rates

I remember when I first went to jail in 2013, every month paying for a $20 phone card and getting to make a 25 minute "long-distance" call. I couldn't believe that this was legal, and even if it was, I was in disbelief that morally, this was allowed to go on. There are so many other similarities in corrections that my family and I would unfortunately go on to discover over the years, things that until you experience them firsthand, either by yourself or a loved one being incarcerated, that you likely wouldn't believe.

This is great news. It’s appalling that the prison system is the only place left in the country that charges more for “long distance” calls (like 3x IIRC).

I’ve helped several families set up Google voice numbers in the region of their loved one’s prison just to save money.

1. The government decides that prisoners can make phone calls, but they can only use a single prison-approved phone operator, and that operator is a private company.

2. The private company realizes it has no competition, raises prices as much as it wants.

3. The government is surprised with the outcome.

I would say the government is at fault here for prohibiting competition, not the companies.

It's the 21st century, you could establish a system where any company, with an appropriate license and government approval, could offer tablets / cell phones for prisoner use, with appropriate limitations and restrictions placed on them of course. Prisoners could then choose which company they want to go with. That would instantly eliminate the problem.

I had a friend who was incarcerated for a time; he sent me a message from the "jail-approved" platform smartjailmail. In order to respond I had to purchase credits - each message I sent was 50 credits and I could include "return postage" (sending them 50 credits to reply) with a max of 2000 characters per message. Pictures cost 100 credits to send. The minimum number of credits that I could purchase was 500, and all transactions included a payment fee of a few bucks. Glad to see this changing as it struck me as a very predatory business model.

Aware that this comment is wading dangerously into U.S. politics - will the recent Supreme Court decisions w/r/t the powers of executive branch agencies like the FCC make it impossible to enforce this?

Edit - this from the article makes me thing that maybe it'll be OK? Sounds like there was some congressional approval involved?

> The regulations adopted today mark the implementation of the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, which established the FCC’s authority to regulate in-state phone and video calls from correctional facilities, in addition to out-of-state phone calls that it had already regulated. The discussion during today's vote will result in only minor changes to the draft rules released on June 27, and be released in the coming days.

I have a friend in a local county jail. He pays $0.21/minute for calls.

I also communicate with a friend in the state prison system in Texas. An "email" (they do have limited use tablets) costs a "stamp", and each photo I attach is 1 stamp (limited to 5). (each "stamp" costs $0.45)

Prisons need to be run by the government and aim for rehabilitation. For-profit prisons shouldn't exist. What's the incentive for a company to rehabilitate prisoners? It'd ruin repeat business and eat into profits. :/

I found this part interesting:

> This comes as the two largest market players, Aventiv and ViaPath, each navigate financial crises. Aventiv recently effectively defaulted on its $1.3 billion debt after a year of failed refinancing efforts. ViaPath was reportedly closing in on a $1.5 billion refinancing deal until news of the regulations killed the deal.

This suggests that either they overestimated how big the kickbacks they can pay to the prisons were, or the whole business model wasn't actually that lucrative, and providing phone services to prisoners is actually expensive (likely primarily due to the surveillance requirements).

This regulation doesn't just remove the exploitation of a captive market, but also makes prisons shoulder the cost of surveillance. Which, for the reasons explained in the article (better connections to society = better chances of rehabilitation) is likely a good idea, but I can see why people would make an argument that this part of the cost of incarceration should be borne by the inmates/families, not the rest of society (the obvious counterargument would be that we don't make inmates pay the full cost of their incarceration either).

Great. This was used to separate people from their families which increases recidivism.

Three things I want to mention:

1. Materialism vs Idealism. Materialism is simply the idea that people affect the physical world and the physical world affects them. Idealism is the idea that essentially some people are inherently good or evil.

Idealism underpins our entire discourse around prisons (and, more generally, politics). It's really damaging. It essentially says that some people are just inherently violent or otherwise criminals. It's far more productive to take a materialist view because an awful lot of crime is simply a response to material conditions. The link between poverty and crime has been observed since Plato.

If simply locking people up worked, the US would be the safest country on Earth since we have 4% of the world's population but 25% of the world's prisoners.

2. We exploit every aspect of prisons and prisoners to the deteriment of those prisoners and our society as a whole. Keeping in contact with family helps reduce recidivism but no, we can't have that. We need to extort prisoners communications. Same with any form of commissary. Then there's prison labour. And of course contracts to build prisons. Every aspect is a profit opportunity.

3. Prisoners are human beings. We should never forget that. Something as simple a prison cats reduce recidivism [1] at such a ridiculously low cost. The US justice system is overly carceral and punitive. We had an era of locking people up for a decade for mere drug possession. Thing is, you can only do this by dehumanizing them, which robs you of your own humanity.

[1]: https://www.indystar.com/story/news/local/indianapolis/2020/...

I think there is a lot of confusion around private prisons in the US. I can't understand why this is such a talking point for people who want prison reform.

For-profit companies operating carceral facilities is just not the main reason things are so bad.

There is an easy way to see this: lots of public, government run jails & prisons are also brutally awful and evil places. For example, Rikers Island is not a private prison. On top of this, private facilities incarcerate only a small percentage.

You could turn all the private prisons over to be operated by government employees and not much would improve.

On the other hand, it is true that many problems in the carceral system are created by profit-seeking companies. Mainly they look like what we see here: contractors operating a single service possibly winning the contract through kickbacks, and then providing a bad service. You see this in food and healthcare too not just telecom.

I guess it is true that private prison operators will want to do the same thing. But it's a problem for all facilities, not just the small number of private facilities. And even if you could solve these issues via regulation or competition, it wouldn't change the many other evils that are inflicted on incarcerated people.

So I can't understand why "the US has private prisons" appears to be everybody's primary talking point about why the US carceral system is so awful.

Why are the rates still so high ? Video calls are 0.16-0.25/min. I can understand that the old system was just a cash grab, but now that FCC is regulating it, why half-ass it? Surely, it doesn't cost anywhere close to that to support a video call.

> The new order more than halves the per-minute rate caps for all prison and jail phone calls across the country

Not good enough. Anyway shouldn't these fees as least go back to cover public court fees or something? Why are we allowing cartels to leach money from prisoners?

What are the economics of this market?

Do the prisons pay less in overhead in exchange for the higher rates?

Or is it just that the market for phone providers isn't competitive?

According to one source (below): some prisons gets a commission on each call, which ultimately would be paid for by the users/convicts. This makes sense as a reason for high prices because you have the entity (prison admin) choosing a provider with an actual incentive to not choose the lowest cost one.

https://www.prisonphonejustice.org/

Is this an example of something which could be affected by the (absence of) Chevron doctrine?

This is long overdue. Maybe didn’t go far enough, but a step in the right direction.

I’m genuinely shocked that there was bipartisan support on this. I can’t remember that happening on any FCC ruling since I started paying attention to the ones that made headlines and that’s since the first net neutrality era (which doesn’t mean it didn’t happen; just that I didn’t notice if it did).

Good call — it would be inconvenient to run a country in 2025 otherwise.

The thing that’s awesome about the US is nondestructive mitigation. Systems can be upgraded in place without killing a huge chunk or percentage of the population

[dupe]

Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40999575

This is excellent. Crush the private prisons to dust.

It's one of the most egregious vestiges of the patronage system. The lack of political accountability has allowed the problem to fester.

I'm happy about it, but agency regulations like this are notoriously flimsy and prone to overturn by administrative changes.

The comments in this thread are terrifying, hard to believe this is happening in the US in 2024.

I thought this had to do with sentencing / prosecution. Doh.

About damn time!

Of course most people have no idea how brutal these systems are simply because they have nobody in the system.

That was me, until someone ended up using this stuff.

Frankly, I was shocked!

I have a major league problem with for profit prison. Big conflict of interest.

And this extortion on top of it.

Good to see reform.

Isn't this, together will all other wins in things like environment protection, bound to be rolled back in the event of a Trump victory?

Now give them minimum wage parity.

Wow what a poorly written headline. I thought it said that the FCC had voted to limit the speed of prison internet.