FCC votes to limit prison telecom charges

https://worthrises.org/pressreleases/2024/7/18/fcc-votes-unanimously-to-significantly-lower-phone-and-video-communication-costs-after-decades-of-exploitation-by-prison-telecoms

by Avshalom • 2 years ago

982 392 2 years ago

worthrises.org

user3939382• 2 years ago

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

Mashimo2• 2 years ago

Yes, but for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholder.

Sharlin2• 2 years ago

I mean, increased recitivism means more value for the shareholders.

actionfromafar3• 2 years ago

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

bubblethink3• 2 years ago

No. "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."

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/154...

actionfromafar3• 2 years ago

That's somewhat reassuring...

but it would feel much better if you followed up with "and this is <insert reason> why the law is so clear-cut that the decision by the FTC cannot be seen as inventing regulation and so nobody will litigate much less win in court against the FTC".

kbos87• 2 years ago

This was my immediate question. I'm also curious what in terms of services these vendors actually layer on top of any other phone system. There's clearly a payment processing layer where inmates can store credit to make calls, but are these systems otherwise that different from what would be offered by any other telecom vendor?

techdmn• 2 years ago

Those were my thoughts. I view the price cap as overwhelmingly positive, but start the countdown until the courts / SCOTUS invalidate this. Exploiting the downtrodden is the American way.

kevin_thibedeau• 2 years ago

They'll just implement an access fee for cheap calls.

rottencupcakes• 2 years ago

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

ants_everywhere• 2 years ago

Perhaps we could edit the title to reflect that they're limiting the price and not the speed

Avshalom4• 2 years ago

I just changed it to 'charges', the headline was too long so I was chopping words off.

avsteele• 2 years ago

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/

indymike• 2 years ago

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

The prison operator has a (joke not intended) captive market and that is exploited by contractors who often share the proceeds with the prison operator.

Sharlin2• 2 years ago

The economics are simply that prisons are rent-seekers.

kotaKat• 2 years ago

From my global (US) understanding of it: Prison telco providers also often provide their services at zero or negative cost to the prison (i.e. commissions on calls or services). They also provide additional "value-add" services to the prisoners which are also extortionally priced (music downloads, ebook purchases).

The tablets are also often starting to replace physical mail - inmates are being denied physical mail, instead letters and drawings being filtered, scanned, and uploaded remotely from elsewhere. Or they can write letters outbound - just have to pay for "digital stamps" - even for electronic mail. Double points for making people on the outside buy the "digital stamps" to send them inwards, too!

Every single corner is designed to extort the prisoner while making themselves look like the Good Guys for providing access to all this information and capabilities in such a safe and controlled manner and at "no cost to the taxpayer!"

mrguyorama• 2 years ago

Every single corner is designed to extort the prisoner

A packet of Ramen in a prison store will cost several dollars. There's zero acceptable justification for this. Making a prisoner pay more for a snack isn't justice.

Also, it's not a snack, because in most states, prisoners are only required to be given two """Meals""" a day. There are very few nutritional or minimum standard requirements for these """meals""" and in many counties, there is a rule that every dollar of the budget for feeding prisoners that is not spent is given directly to the guy who sets the menu and operates the canteen.

Most prison meals in these systems look like that famous picture of a "sandwhich" from the Fyre festival.

You know, the kind of thing that would be used as an example of "Perverse incentive" in a high school economics textbook.

jerf2• 2 years ago

The one thing that you may not be aware of that will raise costs above what you may expect is that prisoner communications are generally monitored, and not just "this may be monitored for improved customer service in the future" but you know nobody is actually being paid to listen to all the calls, but actually monitored. Whether you agree with this or not, this does mean the service is going to be more expensive than a straight service normally would be. There's also significant vetting on what apps are allowed, which is also not free.

I'm not making a defense here of any particular price or practice, just giving you a partial answer to your question, in that there are costs in these services above and beyond what you would expect for a "normal" service of this type.

bubblethink3• 2 years ago

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.

Mashimo2• 2 years ago

Maybe the pay for the people surveiling the calls is included?

bubblethink3• 2 years ago

Doesn't look like it. "For decades, the cost of an ever-expanding suite of invasive surveillance services has been passed on to incarcerated people and their loved ones. With today’s new rules, prison telecoms will be barred from recovering the cost of the majority of such services from ratepayers."

jasonjayr• 2 years ago

IIRC, calls to and from inmates are recorded and analyzed. It costs more for the storage, retention and processing of this data, than the mere connection and data transfer.

mananaysiempre• 2 years ago

TFA:

The primary factors driving the FCC’s lower rate caps is the exclusion of security and surveillance costs as well as the exclusion of commissions. [...] With today’s new rules, prison telecoms will be barred from recovering the cost of the majority of such services from ratepayers.

wanderingstan2• 2 years ago

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.

qingcharles30• 2 years ago

Most of the jail and prison systems I know have technical checks in place for Google voice and other VOIP systems to avoid you getting around their charges. They will ban the numbers and then often ban you from the phone system and sometimes put you in the Hole for games like that.

I used to use them to try to call the UK instead of paying multiple dollars a minute when my mother was dying of cancer. But it's a game of cat-and-mouse. And if you're in a place that makes you wait 4-8 weeks to get a number added to your call list, then you can't afford your number to get banned.

Every day I help multiple guys inside do "3-way" calls from prison to numbers that aren't approved onto their lists yet. It's a dangerous game, though, as the calls are often detected and blocked.

wanderingstan2• 2 years ago

FWIW, my interactions have been with the federal system over 10+ years. I never heard of any blocking of google voice numbers there. It appears to be common knowledge among the inmates as a way to avoid the long distance charges.

buu700• 2 years ago

That's wild. Google Voice has been my primary phone number since before it was called Google Voice; at this point no one except me even knows my current "real" number. I'd hate to think that someone might get in trouble just for trying to call me from prison.

RockRobotRock• 2 years ago

I worked for a company which offered a bridge between CorrLinks (federal prison email system) and SMS. The inmate would get their own phone number they could receive messages from, and make outgoing texts as well.

My boss's friend operates https://phonedonkey.com, which provides a VOIP relay service such as what you set up.

mosburger• 2 years ago

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.

ghufran_syed• 2 years ago

yeah, “chevron deference” was only really an issue with ambiguously written laws IMO, or agencies taking an overly expansive view of their authority. And they still can, but now those decisions can be challenged in court.

good summary here: https://www.rstreet.org/commentary/chevron-is-out-of-gas-wil...

ceejayoz2• 2 years ago

Which means a denial of service attack on the system is most certainly coming via that jurisdiction in Texas that has the single judge who loves issuing national injunctions.

s1artibartfast11• 2 years ago

I think people misunderstand the deference standard that was actually overturned and explaining looper helps

jvanderbot• 2 years ago

Ultimately I believe it will be enforced, and then potentially challenged in court. This seems to be the path for most regulation in the USA. So the question always is "Who will challenge this?" because as you point out, it has become easier for challenges to regulations to succeed (at least in theory).

kranke155• 2 years ago

Some kind of phone telecom funded pseudo grassroots lobby group.

variant• 2 years ago

Doubtful, but if it isn't authorized by statute, a law should be passed not regulation.

jmyeet3• 2 years ago

You raise a fair point. Here's the Act [1] and 47 USC 276 [2] in full, (b)(1)(A) (emphasis added):

(A)establish a compensation plan to ensure that all payphone service providers are fairly compensated, and all rates and charges are just and reasonable, for completed intrastate and interstate communications using their payphone or other calling device, except that emergency calls and telecommunications relay service calls for hearing disabled individuals shall not be subject to such compensation;

What does "just and reasonable" mean? With Chevron deference, courts would have to defer to the FCC on this. Now they don't.

Now Chevron deference is a bigger issue when laws are written more broadly and vaguely like "the EPA should ensure the air is clean". We had 40 years of Congress over multiple administrations deliberately writing laws to defer to Federal agencies.

But a prison telco could still bring suit arguing the rates are not "just and reasonable".

[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/154...

[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/276

jerf2• 2 years ago

It is important to remember that removing the Chevron defense is not some unknown situation we've never seen before. It is a return to the status quo from before that case, and that was not a situation where every last regulation was instantly tied up in litigation on the theory that when Congress said "set just and reasonable price limits on prisoner comms" they actually meant "do nothing unless every sentence from the regulatory agency has been reviewed by the Supreme Court". The higher courts are all rate-limited by their time and after an initial burst of relitigation on the limits of regulation, we're going to settle into a status quo where federal agencies still have reasonable abilities to implement Congressional dictates, because the higher courts are going to start to refuse to hear cases that are clearly just "industry does not like being regulated in clear compliance with Congressional mandate".

A prison telco can bring any suit they like, but it's not like the removal of the Chevron defense requires the court to accept the case and laboriously work out an exact definition just because the prison telco wants them to. Courts aren't going to want to do this, especially the higher ones.

s1artibartfast11• 2 years ago

I think Chevron is a little different and one level higher. Courts would now rule on if price is a question of justice and reasonability.

qingcharles30• 2 years ago

Trump installed the major prison phone system's ex-lawyer as the head of the FCC last time he got in, just before the prison call price drop was about to be implemented under an Obama-era decision:

https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/in-the-news/2017/hrdc-says-f...

mywittyname3• 2 years ago

will the recent Supreme Court decisions w/r/t the powers of executive branch agencies like the FCC make it impossible to enforce this?

They will rule exactly how everyone expects them to rule. They might provide the flimsiest of justifications for doing so, or they will just say it's within their absolute authority to do so.

relistan• 2 years ago

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

miki1232112• 2 years ago

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.

thuuuomas• 2 years ago

“Instantly” here meaning “potentially, after current contract obligations end & institutions complete the switch to a new provider”.

Avshalom4• 2 years ago

I do not think the government was at all surprised, punitive charges are very much a part of the prison system in this country[1] this is people deciding to lessen the burden slightly.

[1] https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/local-news/i-team-investi...

airza• 2 years ago

"the government" as an entity here really elides the difference between the federal government and state governments; state governments hold the majority of prisoners in the US and the ability of the federal government (via the FCC) to regulate prison phone calls that do not cross state lines is new since 2022.

But even on top of that, what would the dream free market implementation even look like here? An entire licensure and certification system for these tablets which will inevitably be crammed with as many upsells as the law does not prohibit? What is the recourse for someone who is in prison and chooses a company whose products do not work? Are they supposed to call tech support?

qingcharles30• 2 years ago

I can answer this, as the tablets they everywhere are cheap Temu junk. If it's hardware, you have to return the tablet to the prison, and good luck on them satisfying the warranty for you. Easier just to get your family to put another $250-400 on your commissary and just buy a new one.

If it's software -- you're usually shit out of luck. If it's a serious bug and enough people file paperwork every day, then after a few weeks of outage it is often escalated to the operator. Another few weeks after that they will eventually fix it. Things move very, very slowly in jails and prisons, so expect long stretches of downtime.

shuntress• 2 years ago

what would the dream free market implementation even look like here?

Every company's dream: Free labor and captive audiences.

glenstein3• 2 years ago

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.

You're saying "the government" a lot, but AFAIK there's no specific federal mandate of any kind to the effect of requiring a specific company handle calls at all jails and prisons. If anything that is the consequence of an absence of any specific regulation rather than the presence of one, which is completely the opposite of the point you seem to be making.

In reality, a variety of completely separate state and local correctional facilities put the service out to bid. If anything, it is federal level prisons that would most fit the description of "the government" where you have the best regulations, where there is scrutiny of the bidding process, where there are already caps to limit the expenses associated with calls.

At the county and municipal level, companies that tend to win the contracts have special deals in the form of a "site commission" payments, which are a kickback to the prisons, incentivizing them to give a monopoly to whichever company charges the most and kicks back the most to the prison.

Edit: I feel like I (1) spoke directly to what the parent commenter was saying (2) stated uncontroversial facts, (3) echoing a point a chorus of other commenters are making about what "the government" really means, but I'm seeing a bunch of drive-by downvotes. Would appreciate if anyone wants to chime in and help me understand what I'm missing.

WhitneyLand• 2 years ago

You’re technically correct, but try to zoom out for a minute and look at the subtlety of human nature.

This topic has fired every one up because it’s unnecessarily cruel, hurts families who didn’t do anything wrong, enriches companies not providing any value, and shows people trying to be “tough on crime” when very ironically they’re probably creating more crime by eroding support systems.

The parent commenter mostly expresses that outrage, and makes a passing comment about business competition.

By this time anything you said that could be perceived as possibly being near the other side of the argument is going to be taken as supporting the other side.

But they are two separate points that can be independently discussed you say? Technically that’s true, but humans don’t work like that.

Always step back and look at the biggest point being made and realize, there may be little room for nuance depending on the context.

s1artibartfast11• 2 years ago

I think you are taking heat from both sides.

On one hand, you are challenging the dominant narrative, so that gets some reaction.

On the other hand, the logic you are using includes bold and unsubstantiated claims about kickbacks, which alienates your message from the remaining readers.

amanaplanacanal• 2 years ago

In some people’s minds “the government” is a big amorphous mass which includes everything from the local city planner to congress and the post office and their state DMV. Ignore the downvotes.

easyThrowaway• 2 years ago

I can't really wrap my mind around the idea that communications in the prison system should be paid by the inmates going straight through a private company. If somebody told me this was some lore from Bioshock I'd tell them the joke is too on the nose.

Who knows, maybe I'm just too... european to truly understand.

What I'd really like to know instead is the conversation that your representatives and the telco board had on the matter. Also, the golf course where it happened.

Because I'd bet very good money that nobody in the current (or any previous) administration is in any way surprised with the outcome.

tzs• 2 years ago

A bit of Googling turned up stories about the high cost of phone calls for prisoners in France, Germany, and the UK and that their systems are run by private companies.

I couldn't find out of the money goes "straight through" to the phone system provider or if the government collects and forwards it, but does that really make a difference?

alistairSH• 2 years ago

I can't really wrap my mind around the idea that [anything] in the prison system should be [so terribly broken]

It all makes sense when you accept that the American justice system is configured for maximum vengeance, not rehabilitation, and certainly not the best outcomes for society. WE MUST PUNISH THE SINNERS!

whoitwas4• 2 years ago

A significant percentage of prisons in the US are private companies operating for profit who spend lobbying dollars to influence policy. This even happens with the juvenile "justice" system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal.

ryandrake4• 2 years ago

It's helpful to think of American governance as being simply a gigantic money funnel, where taxpayer dollars goes in the top, and the US and State legislators point the small end of the funnel at all their various favored private businesses and individuals. It's just plain old corruption but wearing a suit and tie and a spiffy "business-friendly" mask.

pjc50• 2 years ago

Absolutely key to understanding this is that "government" in (1) is a state-level government which has been bribed by the private phone company.

This sort of thing happens at every level, but it's more often than not the Federal government preventing abuses by the states.

Edit: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2019/02/11/kickbacks-and-c... - it's even more blatant, they're paying a large share of this revenue directly to local governments.

matwood2• 2 years ago

And more generally, this is one of the bad outcomes when pushing decisions back to state and local governments. They are typically easier to bribe and/or control with fewer extreme idea (prison is about maximum punishment at every turn) people.

pavel_lishin• 2 years ago

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

To borrow a slightly old meme, porque no los dos?

If my local government cuts firefighting budgets, and I decide to take advantage of this to become an arsonist, I don't think anyone would say that it's the government at fault for half the town going ablaze.

notaustinpowers7• 2 years ago

It's absolutely grotesque to me.

Florida charges their inmates $50/day as a "bed fee" that they must pay when they are released. If you were found guilty and sentenced to 5 years in prison, but were released after 1 month because your charge was overturned, you still have to pay the fee for the full 5 years you would have been there.

It makes me ashamed to be an American.

frob• 2 years ago

Florida is a special version of horrible when it comes to treatment of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. The citizens of Florida overwhelmingly voted to restore voting rights to people who had completed their sentence. Ron DeSantis and the Republicans modified the law to prevent people from voting if they hadn't paid all of their fees, which there is no central tracking or source of. They then went on to arrest Black citizens who tried to register to vote after their PO had told them they owed no money and were clear to vote.

FpUser• 2 years ago

"If you were found guilty and sentenced to 5 years in prison, but were released after 1 month because your charge was overturned, you still have to pay the fee for the full 5 years you would have been there."

This is totally disgusting. But I guess they need underclass of slaves. Fucking piece of trash.

kyrra• 2 years ago

I have not heard about that one before, and it's gross. It sounds like Illinois and New Hampshire had similar things with their prison system, but outlawed it into 2019.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/amer...

jahnu• 2 years ago

Unbelievable! Is there no constitutional protection against that?

phyzix57615• 2 years ago

It's not just Florida. You pay the bed fees even if found not guilty. Seems like a very cruel and efficient way to ruin someone financially considering that the average wait time before their first court date is one month. So, you're looking at at least $1500 for a crime you didn't even commit.

FireBeyond• 2 years ago

My understanding is that in Florida, even if you are found not guilty or charges are dropped etc., you are still liable for the fees. Their argument is that you were still using a bed.

Noumenon722• 2 years ago

Having to pay if you're released sounds like just an accident of bad law drafting, but I'm stunned that I have watched so many prisoner TikToks, read so many undercover guard articles, and never heard of pay-to-stay laws before. It's like every prison sentence comes with a crippling fine.

SXX• 2 years ago

OMG. I not from US and I never heard of this practice, but it's literally sounds like modern financial slavery.

SkyBelow4• 2 years ago

Paying for the cost you caused society by being a criminal seems just as just as putting someone in prison to begin with. Obviously that means it should only apply to those guilty, not to anyone who has the charges overturned, and it also means the crimes need to be deserving of being crimes. I find it weird that people seem okay with the idea of imprisoning someone for X years, but fining them as well is going too far.

Keeping the fined even after the conviction is overturned is an extra horrible case, comparable to keeping someone in prison even after the conviction is overturned, but that shouldn't be mixed with fines in general just like imprisoning someone after their conviction is overturned shouldn't be mixed with imprisoning someone who has a valid conviction.

ensignavenger5• 2 years ago

Do you have a citation for this? It sounds like a violation of multiple constitutional protections just waiting for a Supreme Court challenge.

ssijak• 2 years ago

wait, what? how does that work? why are you charged at all for being sent to a place you have no choice in not going to?

saomcomrad562• 2 years ago

https://www.yahoo.com/news/pay-stay-florida-inmates-charged-...

saomcomrad562• 2 years ago

Massachusetts has probabation fees. Something like $80 a month.

Gormo2• 2 years ago

Sounds like an eighth amendment violation.

acomjean• 2 years ago

Its hard to imagine that they didn't know this would happen based on the USA recent past history with phone pricing.

There was a time (when I was young) where there was just one phone company in the USA. Prices were high for long distance (My mom is first generation so called out frequently). Then deregulation and competition (MCI/Sprint) lowered those prices dramatically.

In the late 90s I lived with roommates that didn't have long distance. We used phone cards we bought at the local convenience store. Those were actually pretty good price wise.

hermannj314• 2 years ago

These decisions ruin families all so a small group of elites can profit.

I do wish there was an easy way when things like this happen to immediately say, "if you are happy with this FCC decision, here are the politicians responsible, the FCC directors and employees that did nothing for decades, etc." and then we can deny-list those people and their families from polite society.

lyu07282• 2 years ago

so much effort to constantly having to play whack a mole with a malicious industry that pays all your politicians election campaigns. I can't imagine the amount of mental gymnastics you have to engage in just having to justify your neoliberal ideology in your own head all the time.

Wait until you hear how much tax payers pay for school lunches and textbooks, prison libraries and commissaries. I also better not mention the bail bond industry. We just aren't doing neoliberalism hard enough yet, don't you see?

cptskippy• 2 years ago

It's silly that the government allows for service providers to charge excessive rates, when they should have contracted rates. And your solution is equally absurd.

Provide prisoners with tablets or cellphones and let them choose their own service provider?

You know that prison phone calls are monitored right?

JoshTko• 2 years ago

Phone calls should be a human right. The govt should just make these calls free. We want these folks to be able to connect with family and maintain connection to give them the best chance of integrating back. Charging for phone call is unnecessarily punitive.

qingcharles30• 2 years ago

When I was locked up in the county jail (charges dropped later) my mother was dying from cancer. I wanted to call her, but it was so insanely expensive ($1.50/min) I could only call for 5 mins a day until she died.

I scheduled a bail hearing due to my mother's illness, but it took months. It was scheduled for a Monday. My mother died on the Saturday. When we got in front of the judge on Monday the prosecutor snapped on the judge, "Judge, what are we even doing here! This is total waste of my time. His mother died already. This issue is moot."

bmelton• 2 years ago

What strikes me as the likeliest implementation of a fair-market system is what we have in the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) system, which is that the bureaucracy of ensuring fairness is so high that we end up with $400 tablets costing $4,000, as tech companies try to get into the space but find out that they need to hire a team of contract attorneys and compliance officers and DCAA compliant time-reporting software and retraining their employees to use it and be subject to regular audits etc. etc.

cogman10• 2 years ago

The part you are missing is these private phone operators made deals with private prison operators, no government involved.

The government is still to blame for having private prisons. For everything you point out, a prison should not be private because it's a market with a literal set of captives that cannot choose their prison. That incentives the prison to gouge at every turn.

BobaFloutist• 2 years ago

I actually always hold companies accountable for their actions, whether or not other factors allowed those actions.

They're still price-gouging prisoners because they can. That's still abhorrent behavior.

whoitwas4• 2 years ago

Why should the phone be operated by a third party for profit? Why are prisons operated for profit?

bongodongobob• 2 years ago

"because who cares are you really trying to defend murderers and pedophiles!?" <- vast majority of avg US citizens. Talking about prisoners rights in any way will get you questionable looks from most people. "Prison isn't supposed to be fun" "lock em up and throw away the key" etc.

makestuff• 2 years ago

I could be wrong on the interpretation, but I wonder if this will be one of the first cases challenged based on the Chevron ruling. I would think the challenge would be the law does not specify what the price should be so we can set it to whatever until congress passes a law specifying it.

raegis• 2 years ago

I expect the same. The phone prices are astronomical due to political corruption, in part, and right wing judges usually side with the corrupt in cases like this.

grecy• 2 years ago

This is exactly where lobbying and "money is speech" has gotten us.

Now you understand why healthcare, higher education, big infrastructure, prisons and so much more is so completely broken.

Big companies have bought their way into every level of government so they can extract profit at every step.

Note this is not a bug, this is by design.

TylerE3• 2 years ago

No, the companies are absolutely at fault, just like pay day lenders. Absolute leech’s on society.

nativeit• 2 years ago

I’m all for successful businesses operating within the parameters of the law, but is it not also correct to expect some adherence to a minimum ethical standard?

Exploitation is what it is. Legal or not, it’s gross and it’s what these companies have been doing for years without consequences.

The rates aren’t even really accurately reflected in those per-minute tables. There are also a lot of service charges and other fees, blocks of time must be purchased with minimum amounts ($20 minimum is not uncommon), and then fees are taken from the prepaid funds as they are used, causing the balance to decline much faster than one might expect, and allowing the service providers to further conceal their deceptive billing practices.

Actual average rates can easily exceed $0.50/min, and it shouldn’t be surprising that the folks who depend on these services to maintain family and relationships are frequently not the most flush with cash. This has been a brazen redistribution of funds from those who have the least resources, to those who have the least conscience.

Somewhat relevant, video calls have been hailed as improving the ability for incarcerated individuals to keep in touch with their loved ones. This is also a cynical lie. Video calls have been used nearly across the board as an excuse to end in-person visitation. It’s cruel, and should be stopped. Some minimum visitation should be afforded to inmates, particularly since many of them are pre-trial and presumed innocent, and in any case their families and loved ones deserve to maintain contact with them, not to mention it’s a positive reinforcement towards rehabilitation and reducing recidivism.

zeroCalories• 2 years ago

??? So what do you wanna do, make it illegal to be immoral?

saurik• 2 years ago

I’m all for successful businesses operating within the parameters of the law, but is it not also correct to expect some adherence to a minimum ethical standard?

A corporation doesn't have morality and can't exhibit ethics: the individual people who embody it do, can, and should, of course... but, in my experience trying to point that out--such as how software engineers and designers should be held in moral contempt by their friends, family, or even merely coworkers for working on "dark patterns" at big tech companies--you get strong push back with either the excuse of "just doing one's job" or the insistence that "someone else would do it anyway", as if the act of profiting off of your directly-bad actions is so trivially justified; and, worse, once you connect this with the realization that your employer is, by its construction, amoral, you've created a scenario where we are intrinsically absolved of all sin.

_DeadFred_5• 2 years ago

Video calls are also often 'not working right now, sorry' something they couldn't get away with with visitation (though visitation often reaches 'capacity, sorry, you can't come in').

rustcleaner10• 2 years ago

If you can't option for stateless expatriation & deportation & outlawing (within borders) & and re-entry ban, in lieu of years/decades/life in prison, then what is prison actually for? Certainly not human rights respecting public safety.

Only reason I can see is it's sanctioned hunting and torture (through humiliation and deprivation) of a very vulnerable class by the state: criminals.

...

Maybe substitute outlawing for imprisonment generally, and offer imprisonment as the rehabilitation option which protects the guilty from the victims' retributions. If pedo hunters are an example, I'm sure there are lots of grown up school bullies who'll go around making outlaw lives hell out of pure joy alone.

jirf_dev• 2 years ago

The article states that fees and minimum purchase amounts will no longer allowed, so the rates in the tables should be accurate.

alfalfasprout• 2 years ago

How are you supposed to have competition for something like this? Ultimately the prison will only go with one carrier.

MikeTheGreat• 2 years ago

I think you missed step zero:

0. Rent-seeking private company/ies realize that prisoners could be a literal captive audience, and successfully lobbies governments (state and federal) to require prisoners to use only a single, prison-approved phone operator.

Also, step 2 is now redundant, and replace step three with "Profit!!!"

gumby• 2 years ago

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

We should be naming and shaming the companies that choose the immoral path. That does happen sometimes, but over the last 40 years the US seems to have shifted to "if you can get away with it, that's fine", especially for corporations.

That attitude has waxed and waned over the history of the country, but the progressive era (from the late 19th century) was notably one where doing the right thing (or "doing well by doing good") was considered proper.

FredPret• 2 years ago

Capitalism works really great when there's competition.

When there's a government-sanctioned monopoly like this, you get all of the efficiency and speed of a for-profit corporation, but it all goes in the wrong direction.

I once read a game-theory study somewhere that showed you need four or five operators minimum to avoid monopolistic cooperation.

standardUser2• 2 years ago

I would say the government is at fault here

It's always the government that is at fault for either poor/ineffective regulation or lack of enforcement. Unless a company is flagrantly breaking the law, blame the government. Companies are just doing what we know they will always do - engaging in every lawful (or gray area) tactic they can to turn a buck. When we don't like the way a company is turning a buck, we have precisely one recourse - government regulation.

casperb2• 2 years ago

I don’t think this is universally true. At least not here in the Netherlands, but even in visiting the US it does not feel like that everywhere.

I think it is very sad the moral standards are so low. I find that even harder when mixed with “why does the government get involved in everything?” attitude.

I also don’t lead my company of 27 people that way.

jmward01• 2 years ago

Companies are evil when they lobby to change laws in their favor, not when they take advantage, to the maximum extent possible, of the law. Just taking advantage of the law is rational, it is changing it that makes them evil. In this case the companies are pure evil and should be dissolved.

marricks• 2 years ago

We really don’t need innovation in every corner of our lives. It could have just stayed as normal landlines phones with a fix cost paid by the prisons.

I don’t think the free market has a ton to offer for basic services that should be guaranteed.

Look at American internet, plenty of supposed options but terrible rates and performances compared to Europe. Yes we’re more spread out but that doesn’t begin to explain service sucking in a city with limited options.

imroot• 2 years ago

Don't forget, the telecom operators usually send large amounts of money in kickbacks to the prison in exchange for the 'privilege' to run these systems.

While Prisoners have no expectations of privacy, most do not know that all of their calls are listened to, transcribed, and shared with prison officials. There is some speech-to-text sentiment analysis that will prioritize a call that has certain phrases spoken.

It's just...a mess.

When I was a public defender, I had prosecutors and jail staff hint to me about things that were said during the calls. A few years later, they had to drop the charges in a few cases because it was discovered and reported that the calls between attorneys and clients were being monitored and recorded.

mywittyname3• 2 years ago

3. The government is surprised with the outcome.

No, they are not.

We keep giving officials a pass by making their malicious behavior out to be incompetence. The entire goal of the prison system in the USA is to extract as much money out of each prisoner from the tax payers, the prisoners, and the prisoner's families.

Terr_2• 2 years ago

Vendor competition helps, but it might not be enough depending on how the incentives are set up, especially with a literally-captive customer base.

If all costs are passed to the inmates, then the prison doesn't have much of an incentive to pick a cheap vendor, compared to a convenient one or the one that takes prison officials on free golf trips.

Worse, hyphies may be considered a feature if the institution is trying to pressure inmates into to "work" programs which are profitable for the institution.

mrkeen• 2 years ago

with an appropriate license and government approval

What exactly would the prisons have to comply with here...

Not overcharging for phone calls?

tssva• 2 years ago

The government is not a single entity. In this case the federal government is limiting what the state and local governments can do. The federal government can limit what federal prisons and those servicing federal prisons can do directly but not state and local governments directly, so they place the limits on the companies because that is what they have the power to do.

The state and local governments are partners with these phone companies and the outrageous rates are not a surprise outcome but an intentional one. In exchange for allowing such rates the prisons get free surveillance services and some combination of a fixed and percentage of revenue payment from the companies. In other words a legal kickback.

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

[dupe]

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

hiddencost• 2 years ago

Now give them minimum wage parity.

tgsovlerkhgsel• 2 years ago

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).

matwood2• 2 years ago

Without more information it's hard to know if those companies are just poorly run or if the service really costs that much.

I think society should shoulder to entire cost of prison, and hopefully we think better about who we want in prison and for how long.

Workaccount2• 2 years ago

Easy startup idea to provide prison phone service via a cheap VoIP provider and use a light weight LLM to flag suspicious transcripts.

qingcharles30• 2 years ago

They already do. After I left prison I was hired to tidy up the transcripts of the calls as the AI they used wasn't great on prison slang. All the calls were flagged by the prosecutor's office for illegal activity, but they were all the opposite when I listened to them. It was sad.

They already are cheap VOIP services too, you can hear the high level of digital compression on all the calls.

There is a high cost probably in maintaining all the handsets inside the facilities.

dpkirchner• 2 years ago

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).

Another option: those in charge extracted too much money from the business too fast, perhaps believing their days are numbered (or perhaps just out of run of the mill greed).

jmyeet3• 2 years ago

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/...

rustcleaner10• 2 years ago

It's so gigantic you can't even pay ex prisoners the hundreds of thousands, minimum, it would take to return some equity without causing a currency crisis printing the money! So many wasted man-years, the unconceived children, etc.

lr4444lr• 2 years ago

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

atemerev• 2 years ago

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

alsetmusic• 2 years ago

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).

dvektor• 2 years ago

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.

qingcharles30• 2 years ago

Amen, brother. I was an advocate for prison reform before getting locked up, but once you're inside and you find out how truly insane everything is, you realize that jails and prisons are where decency and kindness go to die.

I'm in a Zoom conference with the federal court in 45 mins trying to get two constitutional violations at the biggest jail in the country fixed, but obviously the government's lawyers are maintaining that this jail is too big to fix the problems. The judge's line is that if the smallest jails in the country can not violate the rights of the detainees, why can't the biggest? The government is adamant that their size protects them from having to say, provide a working mail system.

qingcharles30• 2 years ago

It is Teams, not Zoom. I'm in the conference with the federal judge and the government lawyers right now. Currently they are maintaining their stance that they are unwilling to fix constitutional violations. They'd rather go to trial and lose and pay my lawyer the 7 figure sum in fees he's owed, than agree to fix the conditions.

This is the sort of people that run our jails and prisons -- and spend your tax dollars.

mywittyname3• 2 years ago

You're fighting the good fight.

_DeadFred_5• 2 years ago

'It looks like your client Bob is no longer housed in this facility and therefore no longer has standing. Case dismissed. If you can find someone else willing to initiate a case, you can start the year long process that got you here again. Of course, if they happen to get transferred to a new institution should their case make it this far in the process that case will also be dismissed for lack of standing.' -- The US Justice System

diob• 2 years ago

This is why I believe felons / prisoners should be able to vote. Not allowing a significant portion of the population to vote leads to them being treated poorly.

AnthonyMouse• 2 years ago

It's worse than that. It allows politicians to disenfranchise the people they want to treat poorly.

War on Drugs is the case in point. The entire system is abusive and corrupt, but most of the people with first-hand experience are automatically disenfranchised, so it has persisted for generations against all reason.

LocalH• 2 years ago

Considering what this country was founded on, perhaps people without voting rights should also have zero tax liability in any way.

batch12• 2 years ago

I wonder what the requirements are for a prison telcom? Are their storage requirements so high as to require the fees or is there an opportunity to disrupt a business model for the right reasons for once?

7thaccount• 2 years ago

That John Oliver special on this blew my mind. It's just a moneymaking scam.

tyingq• 2 years ago

I'm guessing most of this is graft and kickbacks for city, county, and state officials at various levels. It will be interesting to watch how they react to this legislation trying to get their revenue streams back. They, of course, still have their other avenues, like commissary, mail, "e-messages", etc.

ThomW• 2 years ago

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. :/

jagged-chisel• 2 years ago

I’m all for government-run rehabilitation focus. I had an entire message about a capitalist stopgap, but every idea I have creates some perverse incentives.

Avshalom4• 2 years ago

To be clear these fees are just as bad at government run prisons and jails.

pandemicsoul• 2 years ago

I wonder how many people in this thread generally vote for Republicans, who are disproportionally the recipients of for-profit prison company money? https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus?ind=G7000

rootusrootus3• 2 years ago

Not all states have private prisons. Oregon, or example, prohibits them (and prohibits sending Oregon inmates to a private prison in another state). But we still have 9 cents a minute for phone calls. I think it's paid by the outside caller, though, not the inmate.

I generally support prison being a less-than-lavish experience, but charging for phone calls seems over the top. Inhumane, if it prevents inmates from talking with their loved ones. They're still humans, and most of them will get out of prison someday, we should keep that in mind.

qingcharles30• 2 years ago

You're not thinking big enough. Why do we even need so many people in prison?

The staff in prisons are never motivated to run any kind of real rehabilitation programs, and worthwhile ones are incredibly rare. They get the press when you see a prisoner learning AutoCAD or something, but there are so few slots for something like that, while everyone else does bullshit classes where they ask you what you should do when you find a wallet in the street and then make you color some pages with crayons (really).

rootusrootus3• 2 years ago

Why do we even need so many people in prison?

A question I keep thinking about. My position at this point is that prison should be considerably less used than it is today. I am certain we can devise non-prison punishments for most crimes. I would like to see prison reserved strictly for people who need to be separated from society.

Even if we do use prison as punishment, I don't know that there is all that much difference in most cases between a few months and a few years. I'd guess it takes less than a day to decide this is the worst thing to happen to you, and it quickly reaches a point where it can't really get a lot more convincing. Maybe I'm wrong. But it seems kinda meaningless to differentiate between 1 year, 10 years, 25 years.

We cannot really expect to send someone away for a few years and have them just slip back into society and continue to be successful. Not with all the non-judicial punishments we inflict on convicts. That is another thing I keep thinking we need to figure out a better answer for. A criminal record is a huge hinderance to gainful employment, maybe we should be a lot more circumspect about who is allowed to see it, or require it for employment or housing.

_DeadFred_5• 2 years ago

FYI McDonalds uses the Federal slave labor corporation (aka UNICOR https://www.unicor.gov/ ) to do the CAD work for McDonalds remodels. Now it makes more sense why McDonald's all feel miserable now.

eszed2• 2 years ago

The staff in prisons are never motivated to run any kind of real rehabilitation programs

We used to. I have an ancestor who worked for the prison system in Southern California, ~1920s - 1950s. I don't know what they called his role, but for most of his career he was in charge of the re-integration wing, a set of low-security barracks that prisoners moved to for the last six months of their sentences. During that time they did job interviews (maybe even had work release?), lined up housing, received what sounds like "life coaching", and otherwise prepared for their release. Visiting rules were much relaxed.

I never met the man, but have been told by my relatives who knew him that he was intensely proud of his work, and protective of the men for whom he cared. He was regularly stopped on the street to be thanked by former inmates; he was godfather to some of their children. I am proud to have been named for him.

I've become interested in reading about the Progressive Era of American history. We've lost a lot of what was built (physically and socially) ~100 years ago. I'd like to get it back.

(Personal note: Qingcharles, I really appreciate your comments on this site. Thank you for being here.)

Interesco• 2 years ago

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.

qingcharles30• 2 years ago

Yeah, it's still like this at most places. I use this system every day to communicate with a lot of inmates in prison, trying to get them information from the Internet, mostly legal topics, but also MCU news :)

whoitwas4• 2 years ago

This is excellent. Crush the private prisons to dust.

currymj2• 2 years ago

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.

Nasrudith• 2 years ago

The uncomfortable resemblance to slavery and other obviously problematic aspects (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal) of it probably has a lot to do with it getting such disproportionate attention. (The vast majority of prisons are still public.) That and it offers an easy, feel-good solution that unfortunately doesn't address systematic problems: just ban private prisons.

currymj2• 2 years ago

even if one is concerned with remarkable similarity of prison labor to slavery, implications of 13th amendment clause, etc., most of the prison labor is for wholly-government-owned enterprises, frequently manufacturing things for other government departments.

As another example, Louisiana is phasing out private prisons. That should be great! Meanwhile Angola (state-run) continues to have prisoners picking cotton.

I know people know about this because they always bring up prisoners picking cotton in these conversations, but then the talking point remains "private prisons" somehow. So I still don't get why this idea is so sticky.

gverrilla• 2 years ago

I think it has to do with the fact that this is not only about prisons. Those private prisons, doesn't matter their number, also represent a risk to other aspects of society. You are only measuring effects on prisons themselves.

wnc3141• 2 years ago

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

bdcravens• 2 years ago

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)

notfed• 2 years ago

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?

bjoli• 2 years ago

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?

ada1981• 2 years ago

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

iftheshoefitss• 2 years ago

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

totallywrong• 2 years ago

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

ddingus• 2 years ago

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.

FCC votes to limit prison telecom charges

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