San Francisco joins New York City as major cities commit to keeping families connected
SAN FRANCISCO, CA — Yesterday, San Francisco announced that it was no longer charging families for phone calls from the City’s jails or generating revenue through commissary markups. First announced in June of 2019, the changes come after over a year of negotiations with service providers to eliminate costs to families.
“San Francisco’s new jail phone contract is an innovative breakthrough for the prison phone justice movement that protects incarcerated people, their families, and all taxpayers from exploitation at the hands of the predatory prison telecom industry,” said Bianca Tylek, Executive Director of Worth Rises. “All prison and jail administrators should consider adopting a similar contract.”
The announcement marks a growing trend towards ending the practice of charging families high rates for phone calls with their incarcerated loved ones. In 2019, New York City became the first major city to make phone calls free for incarcerated people in its jails. Since then, California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York have also begun to consider similar legislation to reduce or eliminate charges for prison phone calls at the state level.
Under the new contract, families will no longer pay to stay connected to their loved ones. Previously, two fifteen-minute phone calls per day would cost San Francisco families $1,500 over the course of a year. In total, families will now save $1.1 million per year in telephone costs, and over $644,000 in commissary spending.
Importantly, the City eliminated the costs of phone calls in large part by negotiating a first-of-its-kind fixed rate contract with its prison telecom vendor, GTL. This contract allows the City to pay a fixed rate per phone line, while previous contracts required people to pay by the minute. This new contract is a win-win for incarcerated people and their families and the City and it's taxpayers. Incarcerated people and their families will be able to access communication for free, while the City can promote unfettered communications at a lower cost. Overall, taxpayers will pay less for communication from the City's jails, and the burden will be shared among all, not just the most economically distressed.
This new structure is expected to have a massive impact and revolutionize the industry, as the Federal Communications Commission will be reviewing it to assess how it might impact the cost analysis on which they base their rate caps. In fact, the agency made a recent request for comment about “marketplace developments to better suit the needs of incarcerated people.”