Week ahead: FCC to vote on prison phone call reforms

by Mario Trujillo and David McCabe - 10/19/15 6:00 AM ET

The Federal Communications Commission will vote to cap the price that phone companies can charge inmates to make a call.

The order, which is expected to be approved, will likely lead to a decrease in phone charges for prison and jail inmates, whose calling costs tend to far exceed the rates paid by the general public.

Democratic FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn has worn the mantle of lowering prison call rates in recent years. She received a boost from more than a dozen Democratic senators on Thursday who endorsed the order, which includes a plan to discourage what senators characterized as “kickbacks,” money phone companies usually pay prisons to win exclusive phone service contracts.

{mosads}”Unfortunately, in many cases state prisons can receive a commission or ‘kick-back’ from contracts with phone service providers, thus incentivizing a regime in which prisons profit from charging inmates higher rates,” the senators wrote in a letter to the commission.

Under the order, the majority of prison inmates would not be charged more than 11 cents per minute for any call, a more than 50 percent cut from the current cap on interstate calls. Other service charges would be capped as well.

The commission is also setting its sights on the commissions that prison phone companies generally fork over to prisons upfront. The order would not ban that practice but “strongly discourages” it, according to a fact sheet.

Phone companies have been required to ensure that their rates for inmate call services are just, reasonable and fair. One way they have justified higher-than-normal prices in the past is by factoring in those upfront commissions and passing that cost to inmates. But the new order would exclude those commissions from phone rate calculations.

Other items on the agenda concern spectrum, foreign ownership and the compensation rates for video relay services used by deaf people.

On Capitol Hill, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Rep. Steny Hoyer (Md.), the Democratic whip, are hosting a “Congressional Hackathon” on Friday, where members and staffers will be encouraged to highlight tech problems at the Capitol that private developers could help solve.