A gate opens at Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Alabama on October 22, 2019. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall has joined a lawsuit seeking to overturn limits on phone rates that can be charged to people incarcerated in prison. (File)
I don’t know what constituency supports gouging prisoners’ families.
Is there a well-adjusted person whose vote depends on making prison phone calls as expensive as shame will allow? Or in restricting contact between the incarcerated and their loved ones, making it more likely they’ll re-offend?
But there’s Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall’s name on a petition to the U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, next to 13 other Republican attorneys general outraged that the federal government would try to stop an unnecessary cost.
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Why? Well, they say it’s “arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion,” lacks evidence to support it “and is otherwise contrary to law.”
Prison phone services are infamously predatory. In Alabama in 2021, an average in-state 15-minute phone call from prison cost a little over $3. Make a short phone call every day, and the bills stack up. Nationwide, some people reported paying up to $500 a month in phone bills to keep in touch with loved ones.
A country with fewer cruel, greedy and stupid people pulling the levers wouldn’t need an argument past “this is wrong.” But here’s the data: contact with family members makes it less likely for incarcerated people to re-offend when they’re released from prison. That means less crime, less spending on prisons and more well-being for everyone.
President Joe Biden in early 2023 signed a law giving the FCC the power to regulate these charges. The FCC announced this summer that it would cap rates between 6 cents and 12 cents per minute, depending on the size of the correctional facility.
That’s not “contrary to the law.” The law passed by Congress directed the FCC to do this.
It’s not surprising to see Marshall’s name here. You’ll never lose votes in Alabama demanding more punishment for people in prison. We’re good at hiding the consequences. No matter what horrors occur in those facilities, no matter how often they repeat, they’ll be kept out of sight.
This is our corrections policy. Not rehabilitating the incarcerated. Keeping them in the shadows. And blocking any ray of light that might fall on them.
We have a Board of Pardons and Paroles that’s spent the last several years gleefully keeping people in prison and turning individual prisoners’ efforts at reform into cynical jokes. Speaking on a panel last week, John Woods, who spent 18 years in an Alabama prison, described how he had participated in education and training programs with the goal of getting out, only to be denied twice over the course of 10 years.
“I was destroyed for a year because I had this expectation,” he said. “I had been told from the beginning that if you do these many years, and if you do them right, then you would be released.”
Whatever the merits of Woods’ case, ask yourself: if investing years of your life to get out of prison matters less than the whims of one or two parole board members, what’s the point?
Why should an inmate enroll in education and rehabilitation programs if Alabama’s sacred right to punish people will always prevail?
And why work toward a better future if you make communications with loved ones something like loan sharking?
Steal hope from the imprisoned, and you make the prison far more dangerous. Letting incarcerated people take classes or speak on the phone doesn’t make a correctional facility any less miserable or restrictive. But without anything to work toward, you encourage violence. You foster brutality.
That’s not only dangerous to the incarcerated. That puts people within the prisons — corrections officers and staff — in peril. And it puts us in harm’s way, too. Nearly every person who serves time in prison comes out. In Alabama, at least, they’re more likely to come out in worse shape than they went in.
Fixing that would require a system that actually cared about murder, assault and rape in state-run facilities.
And that’s not our system. Our system works to make you ignore what’s happening in our prisons. Legislators crush bills requiring the parole Board to follow its own standards. The Department of Corrections is notoriously unresponsive to basic public records requests.
Most lawmakers don’t even bother to discuss the crisis. They keep creating felony offenses as if prison beds are infinite resources. Most of those who do see a problem put their faith in the budget-busting men’s prison going up in Elmore County or in tinkering with the salaries of corrections officers. Judging by the shortfalls in staffing, they’re not willing to pay what it would take for corrections employees to go into those prisons each day.
They got one thing right: a new law directing the DOC commissioner to hire a person to work with families of the incarcerated. I assume that person’s first duty will be explaining to moms, dads, wives, husbands, children or other relatives why the state is fighting to increase their phone bills. Or listening to them explain the terror they feel, knowing their loved ones’ lives are at risk every single day.
But that newly minted official may not have much of answer. The policy, after all, is to keep everyone — inmates, their families and concerned citizens — in the dark. And to continue killing the hope that might alleviate the violence.
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