Children pay the price for costly jail calls
It’s one thing to make people pay for their crimes. But it’s quite another to make crimes — or alleged crimes — pay off for others.
Yet that’s exactly what’s happening in Shelby County.
Commercial Appeal reporter Sarah Macaraeg recently reported that the county government receives around $1 million a year in commissions from Global Tel, which charges inmates and their families 10 cents a minute for telephone calls. That’s two to three times more than the commercial rate.
And it’s a cost that people like Randy Letcher struggle to pay after footing other commissary costs for his 25-year-old daughter, Aleisha, who has been held at the county’s Jail East facility for women since August awaiting trial on drug possession charges.
Letcher is not alone. Paying for phone calls is a struggle for most of the 5,000 or so people being held in Shelby County’s four detention facilities. Three of those facilities house people who haven’t been convicted of a crime.
And the fact that a corporation like Global Tel — which is one of the nation’s biggest prison profiteers — is enriching itself in the nation’s poorest large metro area raises questions as to whether the county could become more vested in profiting from incarceration than in curtailing it. That wouldn’t bode well for the future. According to the census’ Opportunity Atlas, which maps the communities in which children are being reared throughout the nation, low-income parents have an incarceration rate of 4.1 percent — which falls into the highest incarceration category. Also, a Kids Count study showed that in Tennessee, one in 10 children have a parent who is behind bars.
Yet numerous studies, such as one out of Rutgers University in 2014, show that when parents are locked up, children are traumatized and humiliated — and the separation takes a toll on their emotional health.
So, imagine how the expense of phone calls, along with other commissary costs, can deepen that trauma for children who have a parent incarcerated in Shelby County.
Imagine how that — piled onto all the other separation and emotional issues that impoverished children grapple with here — sows more seeds of community dysfunction.
Mercifully, Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris and Commissioner Tami Sawyer are focusing on correcting that injustice. As they should.
But what stands out as especially egregious is that Shelby County is a place where crime and dysfunction are driven in large part by poverty and desperation. Many people wind up jailed because when they prey on others — or are accused of preying on others by, say, stealing or selling drugs — they wind up in jail.
Yet when Global Tel turns around and preys on their desperation, they get rewarded for it. As do hedge fund managers in New York. As does Shelby County’s government. And that’s wrong. “All of this is outside of the scope of the punishment fitting the crime,” said Ayesha Bell Hardaway, assistant professor of law at Case Western Reserve University, who has studied incarceration as a growth industry.
“A lot of people who haven’t been found guilty of any crime bear the cost of that … a predatory incentive exists, and if I’m a state that owns a complex and I have access to those site commissions, I make a windfall.”
Of course, there are those who believe that people who are incarcerated — even those who are awaiting trial — deserve their fate. And many do. But corporations and stockholders don’t deserve to enrich themselves from it. County governments don’t deserve to profit from it.
And the children of those who are incarcerated, those who tend to be Shelby County’s poorest, don’t deserved to be punished along with them.