The High Cost of Phoning Home

When activists complained to the Los Angeles County Supervisors that the collect calls that inmates are allowed to make from the county’s various jail facilities were too expensive, the Sups agreed on Wednesday to take the incredibly lucrative contract to provide phone service for the enormous LA jail system and open it up for competitive bidding.

This meant that the Sups would not extend Global Tel*Link’s contract — which expires in 2010 — to provide the service through 2013. The Board of Sups made the decision at the recommendation of county CEO William Fujioka, a man who generally has his head screwed on straight.

It is unclear, however, if the competitive bidding will actually lower the price of the calls for inmates and their families.

So how lucrative is the jails phone contract? Let’s just say that, when GTL was trying to talk the Sups into extending the contract, it offered the county $3.5 million as a kick back to sweeten the deal.

We are now living in a world where few of us pay by the minute for phone calls and, even if you don’t use Skype, calling China or Estonia costs far less than you once used to pay to call your mother in Portland. But calling collect from jail costs $3.54 for the first minute, !0 cents for each minute thereafter. Or at least that’s what it used to cost in 2004 when ATT had the contract. Now it’s even higher under under GTL.

Oh, and—just so we’re clear— the phone company isn’t the only one making big profits on the calls. The county also takes a healthy cut on every call too.

Sheriff Baca, who is usually far more sensible about such things, bridled when the subject of expensive jail calls came up.

`The key to all of this is that if you don’t like what’s going on in the world of being in jail, don’t commit the crime to go there,” he said.

Yes, dear Sheriff, but not everybody in jail has committed a crime. A large percentage of the inmates are simply waiting for trial, meaning they are supposedly innocent until proven guilty and all that good stuff.

Furthermore, the people paying for these expensive calls aren’t the inmates. They are the families of the inmates, the wives, husbands, parents, children—who have not committed any crimes.

I wrote about this issue extensively in 2001, for the LA Weekly and found that, in the city’s very poorest quarters, communities like the housing projects of East Los Angeles and South LA, one meets a disproportionate number of parents with sons or daughters who are incarcerated. As one community activist told me, “I know more mothers than I can count who are accepting those high-priced calls.”

But the cost of calls add up, so when lower income mothers can no longer afford the price of the calls they often have no choice but to put a block on their phone.”

“I constantly have mothers say to me, ‘I couldn’t bear to hear his voice and not accept the call,'” county jail chaplain Father George Horan told me back in 2001. “So they put a collect-call block on the phone because they don’t know what else to do. They can’t afford the calls. And they can’t stand not to talk to their sons.”

One more thing: according to studies on recidivism dating from 1954 to the present the amount of contact an inmate has with his or her family and community is among the top predictors determining a parolee’s success. Inmates who remain in contact with family and loved ones are less likely to pose a threat to prison staff or to re-offend once they’re released.

The jail and prison collect call system in California is a problem that has long needed reform. But frankly, no one involved in these mega-bucks contracts wants to give up the profit. In 2001, over the three year life of the LA County jail phone contract, the county made $70 million in collect call fees.

Seven years later, we can assume that the county’s take is much, much higher.