People incarcerated at the Orleans Parish Justice Center line up during a mock evacuation drill on June 15, 2023. (Nigell Moses/Verite)
The Louisiana Public Service Commission on Wednesday reviewed the rates that prisons and jails charge inmates to make phone calls, following a directive from the Federal Communications Commission earlier this year mandating lower fees than are currently charged at Louisiana state prisons and most jails.
At the meeting, held in Baton Rouge, commissioners heard testimony from both prison and jail telecommunications companies and advocates pushing for free calls.
Wednesday’s discussion was strictly informational. The commission — which regulates utilities, including telecommunications companies, around the state — took no vote on whether to mandate lower rates, and commissioners have not said if or when such a vote will happen. Meanwhile, the new fee caps are facing legal challenges, including from Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, who filed a federal lawsuit, along with Texas and Mississippi, seeking to overturn the FCC decision.
District 5 Commissioner Foster Campbell, who called for the hearing, said the FCC mandate, which is set to take effect on Jan. 1, was a “great Christmas present.” Campbell, one of two Democrats elected to the Public Service Commission, has long criticized the high phone rates being charged to people incarcerated in the state’s prisons and jails.
“Hallelujah,” Campbell said. “”This is a great relief for thousands of people in Louisiana.”
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The new rule caps audio calls in prisons and large jails at 6 cents per minute — well below the state average of about 14 cents per minute for prisons and 20 cents for local jails — and limits the fees that providers share with jail and prison operators to 2 cents per minute. (Rates for small and medium-sized jails will be capped at between 7 and 12 cents per minute, depending on their average detainee populations. Those rates will take effect in April 2025.)
The rule is also getting pushback from the prison telecommunications industry.
Commissioners on Wednesday heard a presentation from Securus Technologies, the contractor that provides audio call services to the state prison system.
In October, the FCC denied a petition from Securus, the country’s largest provider of telecommunications services to jails and prisons, to stay the commission’s order regarding the lowered rates.
At Wednesday’s meeting, Michael Lozich, associate general counsel for Securus, said the company took issue with how the FCC decided on the new rates. To determine a reasonable rate, the commission divided the cost of providing telecommunications services by the total number of phone minutes used, including minutes that companies did not bill for. Securus maintains that the new rate should have been determined with only billed minutes, which would have led to a higher per-minute rate.
Securus argued that the new rate limits did not comply with a congressional requirement for prison telecommunications companies to be “fairly compensated,” claiming the company would be subjected to “irreparable harm in lost revenue and compliance costs.” Securus argued it was “impossible” for providers to meet the January 1 compliance deadline.
Under the current contract, people incarcerated in Louisiana state corrections facilities pay 14 cents per minute for audio calls, with the department taking 2 cents per minute from each call.
Campbell asked about video call rates, which were also covered by the new FCC rule. (It’s not clear whether the Public Service Commission has jurisdiction over those under state law, District 3 Commissioner Davante Lewis told Verite News after the meeting.)
The new FCC rule will cap video call rates at 16 cents per minute for prisons and 11 cents per minute for large jails. Rates for small and medium-sized jails will be capped at between 12 and 25 cents per minute, depending on their average detainee populations. The federal agency was only recently given the authority to regulate video call fees.
Video call rates are often much higher. According to the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office website, the parish — which contracts with Securus — offers jail detainees one free “video visit” per week. Further video calls cost $12.99 for a 20-minute session, or about 65 cents per minute.
Campbell asked Lozich why telecommunications companies cannot provide video calls at the same rate as audio calls.
“The underlying technology and the infrastructure is very different,” Lozich said. “When it comes to telephone technology, that’s a pretty well-established technology that’s pretty much off the shelf.”
Lozich said communications companies have had to develop special security features for video calls from jails and prisons. Campbell said the same argument has been used for why audio call rates should remain higher.
Commissioners also heard from representatives from two other prison and jail phone providers – ViaPath and NCIC Inmate Communications.
NCIC President and co-owner Bill Pope said the company did not support the FCC’s new rule because, he said, the agency did not work with telecommunications providers to develop it.
When questioned about his lack of support for the new regulations, Pope said, “that rule is gonna get appealed.”
Pelicia Hall of ViaPath, however, said the company is prepared to implement the new rates.
“We have worked directly with the FCC. We are not appealing this order,” Hall said. “We’re following their mission.”
‘A human right’
Representatives from two Louisiana criminal justice reform organizations — the Promise of Justice Initiative and Voice of the Experienced, or VOTE — and national nonprofit Worth Rises also appeared at the meeting, recommending that commissioners reduce the costs of calls with people in prisons and jails to zero.
Ivana Cortez, a policy associate at Worth Rises, said the FCC’s ruling “represents the bare minimum” of what regulators can do to ensure people behind bars and their loved ones are not strapped with the burden of high call rates.
Cortez shared rates for Illinois prisons as well as local jails in Austin and Dallas. Those ranged from about 1 to 2 cents per minute. Illinois state prisons and Dallas County contract with Securus.
Nziki Wiltz, a political coordinator at VOTE, said her middle-class lifestyle as a teacher changed drastically when her son was incarcerated.
“I no longer was able to eat lunch with my friends. I started carpooling,” she said. “I made a lot of financial changes because I wanted to budget and be able to communicate with my son. It was a huge burden.”
Lewis, the other Democratic commissioner, who, like Campbell, has been a vocal critic of prison telecommunications fees, thanked Wiltz for adding a personal touch to the discussion.
“We look at these as spreadsheets, we look at these as numbers. We forget that there are people behind everything that we do,” said Lewis, who represents New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
Lewis reiterated his support for reducing call rates for incarcerated people to zero, calling human interaction “a human right.”
The Louisiana Sheriffs’ Association, the powerful lobbying group that represents local sheriffs around the state, has come out against the FCC’s rate reductions, joining Murrill in the federal suit. Michael Cahoon, an organizer at Promise of Justice Initiative, said that telecommunications’ cost-sharing structure — where sheriffs are given a percentage of the fees charged to detainees — explains their opposition to the caps.
“Right now the incentive by the sheriffs is for the rates to be higher because the commissions are higher because that cost is actually borne exclusively by the families,” Cahoon said. “If you can’t afford that rate, it’s not like you can go to Mint Mobile or anywhere else. … They have your loved one behind bars, and that’s the only way you can talk to them. So that’s a heck of a bargaining chip.”
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This article first appeared on Verite News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.