Your Call Could Not Be Completed

This article is a copublication with Truthout.

Jamee Miller was stunned when she first realized just how much it would cost to stay connected to her son during his incarceration. She made weekly prison visits to avoid the high cost of calls. Then, without notice, he was transferred. For weeks, she did not even know where he was. The silence was unbearable.

Eventually, Miller learned that he had been transferred from a state prison in their home state of Hawai‘i to a private prison facility in Arizona. Hawai‘i is one of a few states that contracts with out-of-state private prisons to house its incarcerated population (though many states routinely engage in more limited swaps and transfers to send individuals to prisons in other states). Suddenly, visiting became nearly impossible. After all, she would have to spend hundreds, even thousands of dollars on flights and hotels, not to mention the time she would have to take off from work. It just was not feasible.

Phone calls would be their only way to stay connected and maintain what she called a strong “pilina,” the Indigenous Hawaiian word for relationship. “We talked every single day,” Miller recalled, “but it was expensive—five, ten, sometimes fifteen dollars a day.” Looking for ways to make calls cheaper, she registered for an Arizona phone number that would qualify for local rates and had those calls forwarded to her cell phone. But even with these efforts, her family spent over $500 each month on calls. They had to cut back on other spending to afford the one thing that mattered most: keeping their son from loneliness and despair.

Miller’s experience is a common one. Across the United States, millions of families of incarcerated people are forced to make impossible financial decisions and, ultimately, sacrifices. One in three families with an incarcerated member end up going into debt just to maintain a relationship with their loved ones behind bars. For many, this financial burden becomes unmanageable and eventually results in loss of connection with spouses, parents, children, and siblings from one another.

Importantly, however, when families cannot afford to stay connected, the impact extends far beyond their own financial strain. Research shows that regular communication between incarcerated people and their loved ones supports rehabilitation during incarceration and reentry success upon release. Communication also promotes mental and emotional health for both parties. This is particularly true for children, who benefit deeply from staying connected with their parents. And maintaining strong family connections helps incarcerated people plan for release, reducing the likelihood of recidivism.

For Miller’s son, staying connected with his family during incarceration was essential to his successful reentry. With their unwavering support, he quickly secured a job, built a family, and established a stable life just a few years after his release. Reflecting on her family’s experience, Miller emphasized, “We were fortunate to have the resources to prioritize our son’s well-being, but many families are forced to make heartbreaking sacrifices just to stay in touch.”

Families impacted by incarceration, like Miller’s, have spent years advocating to reduce or even eliminate the extortionary cost of prison and jail phone calls. In 2024 they landed a major victory when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) under the Biden administration passed regulations that would provide much-needed relief. The regulatory body adopted a slate of new rules, including caps on the cost of prison phone calls, that began taking effect in late 2024.

Now, under the Trump administration, the survival of these regulations is in jeopardy. Tomorrow (Tuesday, October 28) Trump’s FCC is expected to vote on a revised set of regulations that would unravel much of what the 2024 regulations aimed to accomplish.

For decades, call rates from prisons and jails could run more than a dollar a minute. Even today, a fifteen-minute phone call can cost over ten dollars, which can add up to hundreds of dollars over the course of a month. These high fees are the result of corporate greed, monopoly contracts, and public–private profit-sharing arrangements. Corrections agencies award exclusive contracts to niche telecom providers, many of which are owned by private equity firms that have promised investors high returns. Many agencies base their award decision on how much they will receive in commissions from call revenue, which can be as much as 95 percent—funds they have come to rely on and that are obscured from the public budgeting process. Together, these dynamics have made prison and jail call rates completely unaffordable.

After years of advocacy by families and their allies, the tide finally turned in the last decade. Pushed by then-commissioner Mignon Clyburn, the FCC opened a regulatory rulemaking proceeding for prison and jail communication services in 2012. In 2015 the FCC issued its first set of regulations on the matter. But just two years later, under the first Trump administration, the regulations were partially reversed when the agency abandoned its defense of the Obama-era rules. In a legal challenge brought by one of the two leading correctional telecom providers, ViaPath (then Global Tel Link), a federal court ruled that the federal agency had overstepped into state matters when it sought to regulate local calls, which make up 80 percent of all prison and jail calls.

For the next five years, advocates fought hard to pass federal legislation that would ensure the FCC had the authority, in no uncertain terms, to regulate all prison and jail calls. This led to the passage of the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, signed into law by President Biden in 2023, which mandated that the FCC issue regulations for phone and video calls within twenty-four months.

Then in July 2024, it happened: the FCC announced the most significant regulations to the correctional telecom industry to date, explained in over 430 pages. The new regulations banned ancillary fees (like deposit fees), barred agency commissions, prohibited the passing of surveillance costs onto callers, and more than halved rate caps, which now ranged from six to twelve cents per minute, depending on the facility type and size. The new regulations also set rate caps for video calls for the first time.

For phone calls alone, Worth Rises estimated that the new rules would impact 83 percent of incarcerated people and save impacted families at least $500 million annually—a significant move toward fairness and rehabilitation. Families and advocates celebrated, but not everyone was happy.

Despite these anticipated benefits, the correctional telecom industry and corrections agencies stood to lose big. Telecom providers feared revenue losses and shrinking margins, with some already facing serious financial struggles stemming from irresponsible debt borrowing. And correctional agencies that had come to rely on these funds were going to have to defend bigger budget asks before scrupulous lawmakers.

These benefactors of the old system launched a coordinated, multifront opposition campaign to delay and eventually dismantle the new regulations. Correctional telecom providers, Republican state attorneys general, and the National Sheriffs Association joined forces on lawsuits against the FCC. To offer support for their argument, county sheriffs amplified unsubstantiated claims that increased communication increases violence and some even stopped offering communication services to their custodial populations.

In Bristol County, Massachusetts, for example, the sheriff alleged that free phone calls increased crime in the county jail, as measured by new charges for people incarcerated there. But the data he cited failed to support this claim, and instead showed ordinary volatility in a stat measured in single digits. In fact, research shows the opposite to be true: facilities that increased access to communication report 32 percent fewer incidents of violence and 27 percent fewer misconduct violations.

In Baxter County, Arkansas, the sheriff went further and announced that he would shut down phone access entirely rather than comply with the new FCC rules. For years, the county collected 52 percent of phone revenue from its contract with Securus. When the FCC capped rates at 21 cents per minute in 2021, Baxter’s kickback dropped to 25 percent. Under the new regulations, commissions would be eliminated entirely.

By June of 2025, these coordinated efforts had begun to have returns: In a unilateral action that violated congressional intent and the unanimous vote of the prior commission, the FCC, now led by Trump appointee Brendan Carr, announced it was delaying the implementation of the new rules to address some of the concerns—what it called the “unintended consequences”—presented by the industry and law enforcement. Nearly 15,000 impacted people and their allies, as well as nearly a hundred civil rights and advocacy organizations from across the country, submitted letters to the FCC demanding they stop delaying and implement the rules.

But just a few months later, the agency went further and announced new regulations that reversed much of the 2024 regulations and reopened the rulemaking process. The revised regulations increase the rate caps dramatically, to a new range of eleven to eighteen cents per minute, primarily by reversing the exclusion of the majority of security and surveillance costs, meaning that incarcerated people and their families will once again be charged for their own surveillance.

Based on initial estimates from Worth Rises, 30 percent fewer incarcerated people (about 446,000 fewer individuals) will experience relief under the revised regulations than would have under the 2024 regulations. Families will have to pay $215 million more to stay connected than anticipated last year, and there’s expected to be two-thirds fewer call minutes between families and their incarcerated loved ones due to the higher rates. All in all, the toll is devastating for incarcerated people and their families.

This rollback makes efforts to make correctional communication free across the country even more important. In addition to these regulatory efforts, advocates have been working, with some success, to pass policies to make phone calls and other forms of communication in prisons and jails free. Since just 2018, California, Connecticut, Colorado, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and New York—as well as the Federal Bureau of Prisons and more than two dozen county jails—have moved toward providing phone calls for free.

But these advocacy wins have also revealed the insincerity of the claims made by the prison telecom industry and law enforcement. Not only are these above-mentioned prisons and jails managing large increases in call volume without major issues, but they’re also paying far less for communication services than the 2024 or 2025 regulations propose as rate caps. For example, California currently pays 1.6 cents per minute to provide fully free phone calls to its incarcerated population and Securus even litigated to win the contract. Moreover, in 2021, the California Public Utilities Commission capped call rates for all jails in the state at 7 cents per minute.

When the FCC votes tomorrow to revise its regulations, it will reopen, for the eighth time in roughly fifteen years, the debate on rate caps on prison and jail calls. Incarcerated people, their families, and advocates will continue to show up and file comments ad nauseum, arguing the importance of supporting rehabilitation, connecting families, and improving reentry success while the industry and their government partners challenge any and all suggestions that cut into their unjust, unreasonable profits.

The industry, for its part, is already looking to unregulated revenue sources to make up for losses. Entertainment services on tablets in prisons show promise since they fall outside the reach of regulators. But early data shows that these services fail to make up for decreasing call revenue, underscoring the importance and veracity of its current fight before federal regulators. Correctional telecom providers have too much debt and too many investors, often due to their private equity ownership, to function as the public utilities they are. Between that and the political goals of partisan commissioners, finding a solution to this perpetual debate seems unlikely.

Perhaps, it is time we shift gears altogether and begin to build alternatives that can end our reliance on predatory correctional telecom providers for communication services in prisons and jails. Even Tom Gores, CEO of Platinum Equity, which owns Securus, has said, “Ultimately, I think this industry really should be led probably not by private folks. I think it probably should be—I’ll get killed for saying this—but the nonprofit business, honestly.” Consider it one of those “do as I say, not as I do” moments.

_{Image: Jason Farrar (licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)}

Contributors

Bianca Tylek Bianca Tylek is the founder and executive director of Worth Rises and coauthor (with Worth Rises) of The Prison Industry: How It Works and Who Profits.

Topics

• Law & Policy

Tags

• conditions of confinement
• corporate power
• families
• fines and fees