WASHINGTON, D.C. — Twelve-year-old Kevin Reese III is one of the 2.7 million children in the U.S. with a parent in prison. On Thursday, he traveled across the country to see the Federal Communications Commission vote on a new rule that would make it much more affordable for him to call his father, who has been locked up in the Lino Lakes Correctional Facility in Minnesota since he was an infant.
“The only way I know my dad is over the phone,” he told ThinkProgress. “We talk about sports, music, school, girls — things me and my mom can’t talk about. It doesn’t feel good when he can’t call.”
Just before the Commission voted on the new rules — which would lower the price of phone calls to prisons and jails to between 11 and 22 cents per minute — Commissioner Mignon Clyburn told Reese to stand up and told the packed meeting room: “I came to hear about his plight a couple of weeks ago. We need to make sure that line of communication [with his father] that he needs so much for his development is affordable.”
Addressing Reese directly, her voice breaking with emotions, Clyburn said, “Our statutory obligations apply to you. They don’t just apply to big business. We care about your future. You deserve relief. You deserve this.”
Minutes later, after agreeing with Clyburn and calling the current phone rates “absurdly usurious,” FCC Chair Tom Wheeler called for a vote, which came down 2 to 3. Cheers erupted in the room, including from 19-year-old Illinois resident Wandjell Harvey-Robinson, whose parents have been in and out of prison since she was in the 3rd grade.
Who are the phone companies to tell a child that they don’t have enough funds to talk to their parent?
“Growing up without them physically there was one issue, but not having enough funds to even communicate with my parents took that feeling of love and security away,” she told ThinkProgress. “Many times we didn’t have the funds to answer the phone because the rates were so high. Me and my little brother would sit and stare at the phone, thinking of all the things we would say if we could only talk to them. So who are the phone companies to tell a child that they don’t have enough funds to talk to their parent?”
Now, under the new rules, a 15-minute prison phone call that used to cost up to $17 will be just $1.65.
That change will be life-altering for mothers like Virginia resident Lillie Branch-Kennedy, whose son Donald was arrested in his junior year of high school for accessory to a robbery and sentences to more than 100 years in prison. “I have spent close to $25,000 dollars, maybe closer to 30,000 over the past 14 years, just trying to stay in touch with my son,” she told ThinkProgress. “There is no reason prison agencies and phone companies should be profiting off phone companies like mine, forcing us to choose between putting food on the table and keeping in touch.”
Because her son is incarcerated about eight hours away from where she leaves, Branch-Kennedy can only afford the time and cost of visiting in person about once a month, with support from a local church group. She says this makes the phone calls even more important “for families already dealing with economic hardships.”
A new study finds that more than one in three families with a member in prison go into debt due to the cost of phone calls and visits.
But Global Tel Link, Securus, and other prison phone companies are threatening to sue over the new rules, saying their businesses will suffer “irreparable, immediate harm.” One major sticking point is a provision discouraging companies from giving commissions — or kickbacks — to the jails that give them exclusive contracts, a cost that is passed on to the prisoners and their families in the price of the phone call while the phone companies make hundreds of millions of dollars every year.
Some states have already banned such kickback schemes, including New Jersey, Ohio, and West Virginia, and the cost of prison phone calls has subsequently gone drastically down.
I have spent close to $25,000, maybe closer to $30,000 over the past 14 years, just trying to stay in touch with my son.
Others who profit from the current system are also vowing to fight the new rules. Sheriffs who currently depends on the kickbacks for their budgets are even threatening to eliminate phone access entirely for their inmates. The FCC emphasized Thursday that some forms of “commissions” will still be allowed under the new regime, as long as they doesn’t push the cost of the call above the new cap. The FCC will demand annual reports from the phone companies to monitor compliance.
Citing studies showing that regular phone communication drastically reduces a prisoner’s risk of recidivism, Commissioner Clyburn said Thursday’s vote was a key part of the criminal justice reform conversations currently happening on Capitol Hill and around the country. She added that in efforts to do what is best for prisoners and society, it is crucial to protect their loved ones from “usurious” corporations.
“The greatest impact of an inmate’s sentence is on the family members who are left behind,” she said. “For too long we have remained idle as families, friends, activists, and clergies have pleaded for relief. No more excuses. No more justifications for inaction.”