If anything at all can be cherished while one is imprisoned,
telephone calls are certainly one of those luxuries. Locked away, unable to
leave the dungeons that shape their experiences, prisoners have very
few if any rights or privileges that are not won through struggle.
Telephones in detention facilities are monitored, and the right to
use the telephone is subject to restriction by the facility where the
prisoner is housed.
Prisoners do not make free telephone calls. Their calls are made
collect—at the expense of the person with whom they communicate.
The prison telephone industry charges high rates for those collect
calls. Anyone who communicates by telephone with prisoners knows this
reality all too well.
A study by Prison Legal News exposes the ugly underside to the prison,
jail and immigration detention facility telephone business. PLN has
revealed that not only are prisoners ripped off by the prisoner
telephone industry but the jails, prisons and detention centers
routinely make super profits off of the calls. In fact, when
incarceration facilities negotiate telephone contracts, a large
number of facilities let it be known that the contracts will probably
be awarded to the company that negotiates the largest kickback to the
detention facility. This legal form of bribery appears to be one of
the foundations of the prisoner telephone industry.
PLN’s Prison Phone Justice website provides a
rare glimpse into the structure of the business. What is glaringly
clear in the report is that incarceration facilities see prisoner
telephone calls as a profit center, and this perspective drives the
process of awarding contracts for prisoner telephone services.
“These contracts are priced not only to
unjustly enrich the telephone companies by charging much higher rates
than those paid by the general public, but are further inflated to
cover the commission payments, which suck over $152 million per year
out of the pockets of prisoners’ families—who are the
overwhelming recipients of prison phone calls.
Averaging a 42 percent
kickback nationwide, this indicates that the phone market in state
prison systems is worth more than an estimated $362 million annually
in gross revenue.’ (Prison Legal News)
“Prison phone
kickbacks takes dollars from families that could go for groceries &
school supplies” is a tweet that appears on the Prison Phone
Justice website.
This tweet goes directly to the essence of the problem.
The situation of telephone pricing abuse at
the hands of the prisoner telephone industry and the detention center
commission kickbacks “has been a major concern for prisoners’
families, who are unfairly exploited by telephone companies
and the government agencies that receive kickbacks from those
companies,” said PLN associate editor Alex Friedmann. “This is an
issue of fundamental fairness.”
According to the report: “PLN found that 42 states accept
kickback commissions from prison phone companies, which include
Unisys, Securus and Global Tel*Link (partly owned by investment
banking firm Goldman Sachs). In some cases the commissions exceed 60
percent of prison phone revenue.”
And further: “Prison phone companies don’t ‘compete’ in
the usual sense. They don’t have to offer lower phone rates to
match those of their competitors, as prison phone contracts typically
are based on the highest commission paid, not the lowest phone rates.
Free market competition is thus largely absent in the prison phone
industry, at least from the perspective of the consumer—mainly
prisoners’ families.”
The report noted that not all states demand commissions from the
prisoner telephone industry. California and New York are states that
previously accepted the payments, but stopped in 2011. Prison
telephone costs were reduced by 61 percent and 69 percent,
respectively. (PLN Press Release, Prison Phone Research, April 12)
This story of prison phone profiteering is
an egregious example of capitalist exploitation and inhumanity. The
capitalist system is guilty of the most vicious crimes against
suffering humanity, yet it creates a criminal justice system in which
the system itself will never be tried as a defendant. Those who are
tried in this system routinely come from the working class, the
oppressed communities and the poor. What right do jails, prisons and
immigrant detention facilities have to profit off the telephone calls
that prisoners make? That is the question that justice demands be
answered.
