FCC Delays Enforcement of Prison Call Pricing Limits (theverge.com) 65
The FCC will suspend enforcement of rules that would lower prison phone and video call prices until April 1st, 2027. Trump-appointed FCC Chair Brendan Carr said that prisons won't have to comply with the pricing regulations [PDF], reversing plans to implement the caps this year.
The rules would have dropped the price of a 15-minute phone call to 90 cents in larger prisons. Current fees can reach as high as $11.35 for a 15-minute call, which the FCC described in 2024 as "exorbitant." Four states -- Connecticut, California, Minnesota, and Massachusetts -- have made prison calls free. Former President Joe Biden signed the Martha Wright-Reed law in 2023, allowing the FCC to regulate prison call rates. The agency voted to adopt the new rates last year, with rules set to take effect on a staggered basis starting January 1st, 2025.
Carr said the regulations are "leading to negative, unintended consequences" and would make caps "too low" to cover "required safety measures." FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez criticized the delay, stating the Commission "is now stalling, shielding a broken system that inflates costs and rewards kickbacks to correctional facilities."
The rules would have dropped the price of a 15-minute phone call to 90 cents in larger prisons. Current fees can reach as high as $11.35 for a 15-minute call, which the FCC described in 2024 as "exorbitant." Four states -- Connecticut, California, Minnesota, and Massachusetts -- have made prison calls free. Former President Joe Biden signed the Martha Wright-Reed law in 2023, allowing the FCC to regulate prison call rates. The agency voted to adopt the new rates last year, with rules set to take effect on a staggered basis starting January 1st, 2025.
Carr said the regulations are "leading to negative, unintended consequences" and would make caps "too low" to cover "required safety measures." FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez criticized the delay, stating the Commission "is now stalling, shielding a broken system that inflates costs and rewards kickbacks to correctional facilities."
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Clearly, the most effective use of my tax dollars is not to rehabilitate anyone so they can contribute to society, but rather the exact opposite to make sure they end up back in jail ASAP.
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Rehab is a scam.
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My point is that rehab is a scam.
Re:Hint: (Score:4, Insightful)
Just because most prisoners are criminals, doesn't mean we should financially abuse them for profit. If part of the punishment is restrictions on phone calls, or expensive phone calls, it should be part of the sentence, and should not line the pockets of political cronies.
Re: Hint: (Score:2)
Only 1 in 3 people in jail are there because they were convicted of a crime. The rest are there pretrial because they couldn't afford bail.
Monopolies need regulation (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think its' a matter of taking it easy on the prisoners, it's mostly a matter of not highway robbing their loved ones, who haven't done anything wrong.
Re:Monopolies need regulation (Score:4, Insightful)
it's mostly a matter of not highway robbing their loved ones, who haven't done anything wrong.
100% Agreed. These costs are not justifiable for "safety measures".
They are inmates. There is no way a 90 cents a minute - that's $54 an hour is justifiable for safety reasons.
For that price you can pay the wages of two guards who are paid about $17 an hour to personally and individually monitor the inmate every second they were on the phone and listen to every word in that conversation. But you only need one guard to personally monitor them and record their call to $0.02 worth of disk space.
Also, the cost of guarding and monitoring inmates is a state duty not to be placed entirely on the backs of the prisoner and their family.
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You're forgetting the employer-side costs like payroll taxes and medical insurance.
That said, I still agree that it's ridiculous to charge that much to inmates, and that largely the costs should be borne on society. Additionally it should be possible to evaluate which inmates are more likely or less likely to use their telephone privileges for unauthorized purposes and to weight how much in the way of resources are committed to the monitoring of their communications. There's a difference between a trustee
Follow the money (Score:2)
Re: Follow the money (Score:3)
And they will expand more.
The thirteenth amendment still permits slavery as a punishment for commission of a crime. And it doesn't specify which crimes, so they could be any at all.
Who is going to pick crops after we traffic all the people doing it now? Slaves.
Remember... (Score:5, Insightful)
This administration's cruelty is a feature, not a bug.
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It's not 1970 let's actually live in the now on this.
Democrats control the white house and the FCC, they do something about this problem.
Republicans get control back and they delay it and I would bet they kill it entirely in the next 18 months.
It's 2025 and the parties are not the same. You can dislike them both but this bad faith equivocation is giving the current admin cover and it's so so boring and just serves nothing but people's feelings.
Re:Remember... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Remember... (Score:4, Informative)
Remember, this policy was enacted back in the 1970's and supported by every single administration in place since then.
False. If it was "supported by every single administration" the current administration wouldn't be rolling back Biden-administration regulation. Take your "both sides" bullshit and put it back where the sun doesn't shine.
Re:Remember... (Score:5, Informative)
Remember, this policy was enacted back in the 1970's and supported by every single administration in place since then.
Except for Biden. https://www.npr.org/2023/01/01... [npr.org]
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Irrelevant to the fact that Biden signed a bill to reduce the exploitation and Trump is ignoring it.
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I don't find it wrong when a change was proposed and accepted to blame the specific administration that has made a choice to reverse that change.
Of course (Score:3)
Private prisons are big business along with all the supporting industry. We certainly can't stop gouging poor people.
Re:Good deal (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm opposed to for-profit prisons because it adds further incentive to criminalize activities and to increase sentencing. I further take exception to the notion that prisoners can work in a given occupation for basically no real compensation, but once trained would be ineligible to work in that given profession once released from prison. Wildland firefighting immediately comes to mind as an occupation that relies fairly heavily on prison labor but where ex-cons are generally ineligible for hire after being released.
But the entire nature of the criminal justice system is pretty messed up here. Sentencing is uneven, consideration for some kind of reprieve is also uneven, and incarceration conditions are uneven and outright draconian in places. We don't even really know what we want out of it either and so many people think in terms of absolutes that there's no grounds for consensus or negotiated compromise.
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In a just world, they and everyone else involved in that would have watched the prison executives hang immediately before they themselves were hanged.
Re:Good deal (Score:5, Insightful)
#1, The prisoners do not pay the money, their loved ones do.
#2, When someone says it is OK to do X because of unrelated Y, they are almost always wrong. If X is OK, it stands by itself.
#3, they are not getting free housing, free clothing, or free food. Claiming they do is no different than claiming slaves got free stuff.
I am always surprised at how much evil crap people are now stating freely because they think it is 'acceptable' and that everyone else is also evil. Nope. We are better than that, better than you. By better I mean morally, ethically, and mentally. We can out think you all the while getting into Heaven.
Good luck with your evil, god sees into your heart.
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They're doing slave labor including life-threatening shit like firefighting for pennies on the hour.
AND STILL not covering the costs of their prosecutions and incarceration.
Why anyone thinks criminals should get a free pass is beyond me.
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Hold on a minute. Isn't all this funded by tax money? Smells like socialism to me.
Greed is the point (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe some of you are old enough to remember payphones. As a kid, they were a dime. Then a quarter. Then $0.50.
Twenty-one years ago, my soon-to-be late ex was in jail in Brevard Co, FL for terrorism (yes, I married a terrorist).
It's a proven *fact* that the more contact prisoners have with the outside, the lower the recidivism rate. But not only were the calls EXPENSIVE (trying to remember if it was $50/mo, or more). But also, there were only certain numbers - actually, I think it was one number - that they could get calls from, and landlines only.
A lot of prisoners got zip.
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This is a racket run by county sheriffs and prison administrators to steal more funds from the people they are supposed to protect and serve.
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And yet the USA has one of the highest per capita prisoner rates in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] We care more about punishment than rehabilitation. Now some people should never see the light of day but if the prisons are so terrible then why are they always full?
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In the 19th century that evil met and hybridized with another horrifying travesty called end times dispensationalism which was being adopted by Southern plantation owners to justify the monstrous (even by slavery standards) way American slavers treated their slaves.
The
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This is just torturing them for profit.
Anything worth doing is worth doing for money.
Re: Corruption (Score:2)
And that has what to do with torture exactly?
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If you are going to torture someone, it is better to be paid for it than to not be paid for it.
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Depends on your jurisdiction.
The New Hampshire Constitution guarantees that the only purpose of prison is reform.
I know, in some self-proclaimed "Christian" states they love to talk about gay rape as a purpose of prison.
Those are psychopaths, Donnie.
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Sure, but it's not OK for political cronies to profit from financial abuse of prisoners. That's a crime in itself.
you damn fool. (Score:2)
There's no reason, at all, to delay this rule.
Re:you damn fool. (Score:4, Informative)
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If sheriffs and prison administrators are making a lot of money, it's because they're getting kickbacks. The ones sucking up all the money, are the operators of the telcos that provide these services. I have no doubt that the kickbacks are gnerous.
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1) Priority 1 is the transfer of all wealth to the ultra-rich, looting the country and destroying any institution that resists - Russia is considered a model to adopt rather than be mortified by
2) Cruelty to others (as a means of keeping the people divided against each other so they do not resist the thieves together) is a priority so long as it does not conflict with priority 1
MAGA (Score:2)
the scam (Score:2)
About 20 years ago I interviewed at a company that makes the special telephone equipment and software installed in prisons that extracts the money. A recruiter had pointed me at them and they were nearby, but the job description was vague. After a few minutes of discussion I realized what they do. It wasn't complicated, the work would have been a snap, but I didn't pay much attention after that. No way I was going to participate in that scam.
Of course they did (Score:2)
The privatisation of prison slave labor (Score:2)
Mean Spirited (Score:2)
What are resonable charges? (Score:2)
So, if you are wondering "if not this much, then how much?" (which is a very good question), how about we look at the charges for the Canadian Federal system?
Obviously the US can't just say "Do that!", but it should give some ballpark estimates of what is reasonable. Values here are "prisoner paid", not collect.
Local $0.475 per call/message
National $0.045 per minute
United States $0.05 per minute
International $0.06 per minute
Local rates are 48 cents **per call**. Call length usually limited
How much did lobbyists have to pay Trump? (Score:2)
With enough money you could buy yourself a nationwide ban on Play-Doh and unicorn drawings.