NATIONWIDE — Yesterday, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai joined the growing chorus of voices calling for urgent relief for families with incarcerated loved ones. Worth Rises applauds Chairman Pai’s statement and the FCC’s proposal to lower rate caps for interstate calls. However, countless families will continue to suffer from exploitative call rates until Congress restores the FCC’s authority to regulate all prison phone calls by passing the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act.
On July 16, 2020, the FCC announced a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that will provide immediate relief to incarcerated people and their families who want to stay connected. The FCC’s action proposes lowering the current per minute rate caps for interstate calls from $0.21 (prepaid) and $0.25 (collect) to $0.14 for calls from prisons and $0.16 for calls from jails. The FCC further announced that next month the Commissioners will vote to cap ancillary service charges, including deposit fees, resolving a legal question that had remained disputed after the 2017 federal appeals court decision in GTL v. FCC.
The FCC’s rulemaking will make it easier for families to stay connected, but Congress needs to act also, and fast.
The Commission's new regulations will lower the rate families pay for interstate calls. But interstate calls make up only 20% of all prison phone calls in the U.S. Without federal regulation or instate calls, prison telecom corporations have charged families more than a dollar a minute for instate calls, up to $25 for a 15-minute instate call. As Chairman Pai acknowledged in an accompanying blog post, the Commission cannot even begin to address the entirety of the problem unless Congress passes legislation restoring its authority over instate calls, which make up the vast majority of prison and jail phone calls.
Additionally, the FCC’s new rate caps will not go into effect until the Commission completes its lengthy rulemaking process, leaving families to continue paying exorbitant call rates while they already struggle with the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic. Accordingly, Congress must not just restore the FCC authority to regulate instate call rates, but also include interim rate caps to provide immediate relief to these families while the FCC completes this and any future rulemaking process.
“The FCC’s action only highlights the need for urgent action from Congress. Even before the current pandemic, families of incarcerated people struggled to pay the exorbitant call rates charged by predatory prison telecom corporations, leaving children unable to stay connected to their incarcerated parents,” said Connor McCleskey, Legal Associate at Worth Rises. “As COVID-19 spreads throughout the country and many prisons and jails suspend visits, the critical importance of phone communication has been magnified. These families, which include many essential workers on the front lines of the pandemic response in hospitals, grocery stores, and transportation, deserve relief too. The Senate must include the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act in its next COVID-19 relief package to provide families immediate relief and restore the FCC’s power to keep incarcerated people and their families connected.”