State seeks more profit from inmate calls
Even as lawmakers consider making inmate phone calls free, some state agencies are seeking greater profit from prison telecommunications, records obtained by Hearst Connecticut Media reveal.
The records provide new insight into the controversy over how much families are forced to pay to stay in contact with their incarcerated loved ones.
About two-thirds of the cost of in-state calls – a total of $7.5 million a year is going back into state coffers with at least one agency now vying for a larger chunk of the revenue and seeking any new money that could be generated when JPay, a subsidiary of Securus Technologies, provides inmates with “free” tablets by early next year.
Advocates and families statewide are backing a bill before the state legislature that would make phone calls for inmates free. But one of the co-chairs of the state’s Appropriations Committee said last week that it’s unlikely that the proposal will move forward unless money to replace the $7.5 million could be found somewhere else.
“Until that money situation is figured out that bill won’t make it all the way,” said state Sen. Cathy Osten, D-Columbia, co-chair of the Appropriations Committee.
But the current system of charging inmates for the service and the commission which goes to the state is a “perverse disincentive for the organization (DOC) to negotiate poorly on behalf of the state,” said Rep. Josh Elliot, D-Hamden, who was a staunch supporter of the free prison call bill.
State Department of Correction Commissioner Rollin Cook is sensitive to the issue, said agency spokeswoman, Karen Martucci.
Cook has started the conversation with the state Department of Administrative Services, which administers the contract, on possibly renegotiating with Securus, which manages the inmate phone system, to lower costs, she said.
“It’s the right thing to do,” Cook said. “We shouldn’t be making it more difficult for families to stay connected with an incarcerated loved one.”
Under the prior contract with Global Tel*Link, inmates paid $1.66 for a prepaid 15-minute local call and 18 cents a minute for pre-paid long distance in-state calls, with a per call fee of $1.31.
The out-of-state rate was
66 cents a minute, with a
$2.96 per call fee. During that contract, which ran from 2007 to 2012, the state made about $4 to $5 million a year off of inmate phone calls.
Information supplied by the agency indicates that DAS received four bids for the inmate phone service in
2011. The agency chose Securus, the bid that offered the highest commission to the state — 68 percent of all calls — and offered the highest per minute rates for local calls, resulting in a fee of $3.65 for a 15-minute local call.
In-state long distance calls and out-of-state calls were cheaper under the Securus contract. But the projected cost to inmates for the plan based on 2010 call minutes was only about $200,000 less than the prior contract, according to comparison figures provided by DAS.
The commission the state received, however, was about 23 percent higher.
In 2013, the Federal Communications Commission began a move to cap out-ofstate rates on calls from prisons.
As part of a 2013 ruling tied to the rate cap, the FCC was considering whether or not companies could include commission to client costs as a basis for calculating the rates.
The FCC never banned commissions on out-ofstate calls and ultimately upheld the practice in a 2016 ruling, according to an agency spokesman.
Securus officials interpreted the 2013 ruling to mean that they could not provide the state with a commission on out-of-state calls, according to 2014 documents provided by DAS.
Since then the company has charged the FCC rates on out-of-state calls but has not provided the state with a commission on those calls — allowing Securus to nearly double its projected fee of $2.7 million per year in the years following, according to documents obtained by Hearst Connecticut Media.
Based on the 2013 order and discussions with the FCC, the company felt they couldn’t pay the commissions without being in violation, said Joanna Acocella, vice president of corporate affairs for Securus.
“In order to avoid exposing its customers or itself to legal jeopardy, financial penalties, or further adverse regulatory action, Securus terminated those commission payments,” Acocella said in a statement.
Prior to 2011, the state Department of Information Technology used the commission generated by the prison calls for technology upgrades.
In 2011, legislators passed a law taking the money from DOIT by stipulating that any revenue garnered from prison phone calls must be given to the correction department, the Judicial Branch and the state’s Criminal Justice Information System.
Since 2011, the correction department has received about $350,000 a year from the calls to pay for inmate programs.
Judicial Branch gets about $6 million a year from the calls to pay probation officers. The money is currently funding 32 probation officers — a little less than 10 percent of the 388 probation officers working for the Judicial Branch, according to officials in that agency.
For the past several years, CJIS, the state’s massive technology system that is supposed to link police, prosecutors, the judicial system and probation and parole to share information on crimes and defendants, has derived about 50 percent of its $5 million operating budget — about $2 million to $2.5 million a year — from the prison phone calls.
The agency is now seeking to cull another $2 million from the prison call revenue as the information sharing project is fully rolled out in the coming months, CJIS Executive Director Humayun Beg said.
The CJIS Governing Board has also discussed seeking any state revenue generated when the DOC rolls out a program to give inmates tablets “free of charge” which would require a fee to be used, Beg said.