Wives See Wrong Numbers on Phone Bills for Inmates

As the dozen women in her support group nodded their heads in silent agreement, Wanda Best-Deveaux, 49, spoke of how often she and her fellow spouses of New York inmates complained about the high cost of their special telephone bills for prison calls.With their husbands incarcerated along with 64,000 other people in New York, many of the women in her group were living as single mothers and relying heavily on infrequent phone calls to meet the challenges of keeping their fractured families together. But they all struggled to keep up with the burdensome telephone bills.“I felt taken advantage of,” Mrs. Best-Deveaux said. Her weekly half-hour phone calls with her husband, throughout his 25-year incarceration, left her with $150 monthly phone bills. “But without the phone calls, the distance between us seemed to grow.”Since officials at the state Department of Corrections chose, in the mid-1980s, to switch to a single-carrier telephone contract for the Inmate Call Home Program, it has eliminated the multiple contracts and confusing rate structure that plagued the previous arrangement. Families of New York inmates said, however, that it has also taken a toll on their fragile relationships. They said that under the exclusive contract now held by MCI, absent competition, the long-distance carrier can charge exorbitant fees, which fall heavily on those who are least able to foot the bill.For security reasons, many prisons across the country, including those in New York, allow inmates to call only a set of pre-approved telephone numbers, which the prisoner may update monthly. Those calls can only be made collect, which transfers the entire cost to the recipients. Under the single-carrier contract in use in New York, advocacy groups said, rates for inmate-generated calls run as much as 630% higher than for regular long-distance calls.In New York, MCI charges prison-call recipients a $3 connection fee and 16 cents per minute thereafter. At those rates, the average inmate’s collect call, which lasts 19 minutes, will cost more than $6, an umbrella group called the New York Campaign for Telephone Justice estimated.The other bidder for the state prison telephone contract, AT&T, declined to comment on its proposed rates for the 3,335 collect-call-only telephones in the state’s prisons. AT&T lost its 1996 bid for the contract to MCI.State corrections authorities tallied a monthly average of 500,000 completed calls and 9.5 million minutes of phone time, at the current MCI rates. According to figures from the Department of Corrections, an additional 2 million inmate-generated calls per month are not completed – and some of those calls can still be subject to the connection fee.The additional cost is necessary to pay for extra security measures, a department spokesman, James Flateau, said. According to a spokeswoman for MCI, Natasha Haubold, the higher rates are charged to offset the costs of additional staff to monitor and record calls, multilingual operators, and technology to block inmates from contacting victims or witnesses of their crimes.The inmates are each given a PIN through which they can get through to the pre-approved family members or friends on their lists. In a time-consuming process, the numbers must be individually screened and MCI must place a blocking mechanism on them to prevent call forwarding, which could allow inmates to circumvent the security features.MCI is the nation’s largest carrier of inmate phone programs and the second largest long-distance provider. Ms. Haubold said the costs of an inmate-initiated call and a normal call cannot fairly be compared. But the high cost of the inmate calls is unwarranted, the statewide coordinator for the New York Campaign for Telephone Justice, Annette Dickerson, said. Federal prison systems impose many of the same security measures on their inmate-generated calls, but charge recipients of inmates’ calls as little as 7 cents per minute. The cost of New York’s prison calls could be reduced if the state would forgo the millions it receives in a profit-sharing arrangement written into its contract with MCI, according to Ms. Dickerson.Under the current arrangement, MCI gives New York 57.5% of the gross profit from the Inmate Call Home Program, putting about $20 million a year in state coffers. Though the industry standard is to provide compensation for housing pay phones, the question, Mr. Flateau said, is really a matter of balancing inmate privileges and private tax dollars. During the first five years of the Inmate Call Home Program contract with MCI that began in 1996, the state had brought in $109.1 million, according to a 2002 audit of the program by the office of the state comptroller. The majority of the money, the audit concluded, was spent on inmate health-care programs.In 2001, for example, more than 56 percent of the program’s revenue went toward the purchase of AIDS pharmaceuticals for inmates. And in 2003, according to Ms. Dickerson, $18 million from the phone-call revenues was spent on inmate medical care. She said, however, that since health care for inmates is constitutionally guaranteed, the state’s receipts from the program amount to an “unlegislated tax to pay for something that is supposed to be shared as a burden by the entire state.”“Most people, if they don’t have anyone in prison, they don’t care if an inmate can’t talk to their family,” Ms. Best-Deveaux said in her honey-dipped Southern drawl. “But they are not aware that this is a public-safety issue.” Her reason for saying that: Corrections officials and prisoner advocates agree that studies have proven that recidivism declines when prisoners are able to maintain close family connections.So far, according to the executive director of a nonprofit prison-affairs group, Robert Gangi, the New York prison system has largely dismissed such concerns, but he said inmate family issues should be a matter for public concern.“People who are being, in effect, treated unjustly by this are a vulnerable group of people without a lot of political power,” Mr. Gangi, of the Correctional Association of New York, said.Complaints from around the country have already sparked other states to revisit their policies. California, North Carolina, Nebraska, Indiana, and Missouri have reduced or eliminated the state commissions for inmate phone service.In addition, the Federal Communications Commission has begun to investigate the issue, in response to complaints. “There is a process going on that is asking a lot of questions about the best practices,” an agency spokesman, Mark Wakefield, said. “But it’s still very much a work in progress.”

Wives See Wrong Numbers on Phone Bills for Inmates

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