Families bristle at new prices to call prisoners
Spokeswoman: Florida officials were ‘looking to maximize value’ for inmates
For the last few years, Amy McCourt and her partner have spoken on the phone about three times a day. It’s a lifeline for their long-distance relationship, with about seven hours between her south Florida home and the Panhandle prison where he’s incarcerated — even more so since the coronavirus pandemic left visits suspended or highly restricted.
To make the calls affordable, McCourt purchased a Jackson County phone line so she could pay the local call rate from Apalachee Correctional Institu
tion, reducing the cost to less than a third of the price she would otherwise pay, a significant savings even with paying the extra phone line’s $20 monthly bill.
But last week, the Florida Department of Corrections announced a new phone contract that eliminates the cheaper local call option, and adds a flat-rate 99 cent fee for any prepaid deposit for inmate calls — two changes that have left many families and prisoner advocates upset.
Corrections agency officials tout the change as an improvement, because it reduces the per-minute call rate by half a cent, to 13.5 cents, and also offers longer call times and the option to leave inmates voicemails. Even at the slightly lower rate, Florida prisoners face call charges several times higher than those in some other states.
But for McCourt and many others like her, the elimination of a local call price and the added deposit fee will become another challenge for their families trying to support loved ones in prison.
“I’m worried about it,” McCourt said. “The phone conversations are all we have right now . ... I don’t want to tell the person who I share my life with, and I already can’t visit, that I also can’t talk as much.”
Florida Department of Corrections spokeswoman Michelle Glady said state officials were “looking to maximize value” for the majority of prison callers, who were not using the local call price.
She said less than 25% of prison calls were local, as the majority of the agency’s prisons are in rural north Florida, while the majority of prisoners come from Central or South Florida. The new contract, which she said will also streamline the calling process and update technology, decreases the price-per-minute of a call by half a cent, making an average 15-minute call cost $2.02, a savings of about 8 cents a call for most callers.
Glady also noted the contract procurement process occurred almost entirely before the pandemic, though the final contract was signed in December.
The new system, which will allow for 30-minute calls instead of a 15-minute cap, is also providing inmates two free, five-minute calls a month, though Glady said that is a current promotion from Global Tel*Link Corporation (GTL) and not guaranteed in the contract.
She said she doesn’t know how long the promotion will last.
While it’s not uncommon for phone calls to prisons and jails to cost money — usually at rates much higher than market value — many jurisdictions across the nation have taken steps to reduce or eliminate fees, backed by research that shows family and community connections are key to success both inside a prison and upon release.
Denise Rock, the executive director of prisoner advocacy group Florida Cares, said she would like to see FDC take that approach, rather than seek to make money off already-struggling families with incarcerated loved ones. Rock was disappointed with this new phone contract, which she said blindsided families.
“Most of the population that is in prison are the poor, and then you put this extra burden on this family?” Rock said. “... It’s really hard for families to swallow that would be done to them, in this economic climate.”
Rock helped organize a social media campaign to call on FDC to amend the new phone contract, to again provide a cheaper local-call price and eliminate the new 99 cent deposit fee. Rock said she hasn’t heard back from agency officials. Glady did not directly respond to questions from the Sentinel about the group’s requests.
Rock also pointed out that other states have recently entered prison phone contracts with GTL, the same provider in Florida, but at much lower rates: California recently announced calls from its prisons now cost 2.5 cents a minute to any U.S. location, about a seventh of the rate charged in Florida, and Ohio’s corrections department has a contract in which calls cost 5 cents a minute, less than half of Florida’s rate.
FDC’s website touts its new half-cent cheaper call price as “slightly lower than the old one and... a benefit for most inmate family and friends.” It also describes the 99 cent deposit fee “a small fee per transaction,” noting there is no fee for collect calls, though few service providers still allow those.
“While DOC is trying to tout this is a savings, it’s complicated,” Rock said.
Families also will only save if they can deposit the maximum $50 onto an inmate’s account at one time — otherwise the 99 cent deposit fee quickly adds up. She said its not uncommon for families to deposit whatever cash they have on hand, often less than $10, which quickly eliminates any cost savings from the half-cent rate reduction.
Making it sting more, Rock said, is that the Florida Department of Corrections is being paid $5 million yearly by GTL under the new contract, profiting off phone calls that families of prisoners struggle to afford.
Glady pointed out that the $5 million goes into the state’s general fund, and part of it will be returned to FDC for inmate programming through the new Inmate Welfare Trust Fund. The fund, established last year, returns $2.5 million of revenue from inmate communications, including phone calls, or in-prison purchases, to the department to benefit education, recreation or other prison programs.
Sen. Randolph Bracy, D-Orlando, recently asked FDC Secretary Mark Inch in a committee hearing about the revenue from such phone calls and other prisoner costs. Inch had said those revenues greatly exceed $5 million.
“I think more should go into that Inmate Welfare Trust Fund,” Bracy said at the hearing. “I hope it’s something we can consider.”
According to a recent report by the Prison Phone Justice campaign, which advocates against costly prison phone calls and “kickbacks” to corrections agencies from call providers, Florida was one of only eight states that collected $5 million or more from inmates’ calls with loved ones. The group found at least 12 states received no “kickbacks” from such phone services, and ranked Florida as the 31st most affordable for prison calls. The new rate would not change that ranking.
When asked about the findings, Glady said it’s hard to make “apples to apples” comparisons between different corrections systems.
Even though McCourt considers herself financially stable, she said she will have to cut back on something with the price of phone calls from her partner set to more than triple.
Under the prior local call option of 4 cents a minute, a 15-minute phone call cost about 60 cents; the new 13.5 cents a minute rare will make such a call cost about $2. If she continues talking with her partner three times a day, it will now cost her more than $40 a week, opposed to about $12.
“Tripling the rate, ... they’re pushing people into a corner,” McCourt said.