While Prisoners Struggle to Afford Calls to Their Families, States Are Making a Profit. This Must Stop Now

Incarcerated spaces are, by design, replete with insidious and unethical realities, but one of the most infuriating is how much money people in jail and prison are forced to pay if they want to make a phone call to someone on the outside. This unjust reality, however, could be changing soon for incarcerated people in Connecticut. A new bill making its way through the state’s legislature is seeking to relieve people of having to pay to use the phone while behind bars. If HB No 6714 makes it through the legislature, it would make CT the first state in the country to make phone calls free for people in prison. Connecticut should pass this bill. Every other state in the country should pass bills just like it. And so should the federal government.

For those in federal prison, the cost of prison phone calls has been in a flux. In 2013 the Federal Communications Commission, which then had a Democratic majority, put a cap of 21 cents a minute on interstate calls. In 2015, they extended the caps to apply to in-state calls, which are about 92% of all calls made, and made them as low as 11 cents per minute. Afterward, however, the FCC was immediately sued by the major prison phone companies, and in 2017 the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit struck down the 2015 caps, saying the FCC had exceeded its authority. Since that ruling and the transition of the FCC to being led by Chairman Ajit Pai, there has been little movement on the issue.

[Smith is a doctoral candidate at Harvard University]