Phone Calls Could Get Really Expensive for Nearly 2 Million People Soon

The Federal Communications Commission voted Tuesday to significantly increase the price limit that prisons are allowed to charge for phone and video calls.

Under the new rules, costs in large prisons are expected to increase to 10 cents per minute, and to 18 cents per minute in prisons with fewer than 50 people. But at the last minute, the FCC also added a 2-cent-per-minute fee “to account for correctional facility expenses.”

The FCC is rolling back rules adopted last year, which capped rates between $0.06 and $0.12 per minute. Overall, rates are expected to increase by up to 83% for the nearly 2 million people currently incarcerated.

According to an analysis by advocacy group Worth Rises, this will cost families and inmates an additional $215 million each year and result in 2.1 billion additional call minutes per year under the 2024 rules, to 714 million under the 2025 rules.

The downstream effects of change are alarming. The benefits of phone calls from incarcerated people are well documented: they reduce the likelihood that a person will commit a crime upon release, promote relationships with children, and improve prison safety.

“That means children who won’t be able to hear ‘I love you’ from their parents. It means spouses who won’t be able to communicate about parenthood. This means people will not be able to prepare for release,” Bianca Tylek, executive director of Worth Rises, told CNET. “This has enormous implications for individuals, families, communities and public safety.”

In 2022, Congress passed the Martha Wright-Reed Act, which gave the FCC the authority to regulate prison phone calls. The FCC voted last year to implement the lower caps and set January 1, 2025 as the date when prisons will begin compliance on a phased basis. Then, in July 2025, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr pushed the date back to April 1, 2027, due to “negative and unintended consequences.”

Hours before the FCC meeting, Senate Democrats sent a letter to Carr, calling the delay “unlawful,” writing that it “took away relief from incarcerated people and their families from foreclosure rates just as they were beginning to take effect.”

Carr, who voted to partially approve the 2024 rate caps, called the rate cut a course correction, saying “some prisons have been forced to reduce or even stop offering call services altogether” since the lower rates were adopted.

“The FCC has not provided any evidence of these unintended consequences,” Wanda Bertram, communications strategist for the Prison Policy Initiative, told CNET. “They do it out of a desire not to make enemies of sheriffs and businesses.”

Americans spend more than $1 billion a year on phone calls to incarcerated people, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. One in three families of incarcerated people end up going into debt to pay for these calls.

“It’s not incarcerated people paying for these calls,” Bertram said. “90% of the time, it’s their friends, their family members, their loved ones outside of prison. »