Court strikes down FCC caps on in-state prison phone rates

The DC Circuit Court of Appeals has partially struck down a Federal Communications Commission rule that capped the rates for inmate phone calls. The court said in a 2-1 decision that the FCC overstepped its authority by trying to set limits on intrastate phone call rates. The court, though, found that an FCC rule capping interstate rates is permissible.

The FCC’s order was “legally infirm” because it was based on a “just, reasonable and fair test” that conflated the FCC’s different authorities to regulate interstate versus intrastate communications, and that misinterpreted court precedent and the FCC’s own previous orders, Judge Harry Edwards wrote in the majority opinion. DC Circuit Judge Laurence Silberman joined Edwards’ opinion. The majority also found that the FCC used flawed methodology in calculating the rate caps, but did uphold the FCC’s caps on other fees for interstate calls.
The rule was passed in 2015, when Democrats held the majority at the FCC. Prison phone service providers later sued to block the rule from going into place, and after Republican Ajit Pai took over as chairman in 2017, the agency mostly dropped its defense against the lawsuit.

“We lost badly. This will hurt a lot of family and loved ones, not to mention the prisoners themselves,” said Andrew Schwartzman, a lawyer at the Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute for Public Representation, who argued for the prisoner rights groups. DC Circuit Judge Cornelia Pillard dissented from the majority’s decision, writing that the court should have found that federal law gave the FCC authority “not only to raise inadequate rates but also to reduce excessive, monopoly-driven rates.”

“The record shows that these high prices impair the ability of inmates, by definition isolated physically from the outside world, to sustain fragile filaments of connection to families and communities that they might hope to rejoin,” Pillard wrote. “The majority’s decision scuttles a long-term effort to rein in calling costs that are not meaningfully subject to competition and that profit off of inmates’ desperation for connection.”