In most states, said Steven Renderos of the Center for Media Justice, “these are pretty high commission rates . . . they have to pay back into county or state budget.”
Renderos calls commissions the “No. 1 leading cause for high phone-call rates.”
After almost a decade, FCC has yet to rule on high cost of prison phone calls
Tracy A. Woodward/The Washington Post - Martha Wright-Reed, 86, her grandson Ulandis Forte, and other families of inmates sued the Dept. of Corrections, saying that the price of phone calls from prison was burdensome. The calls usually go through a carrier contracted thru Department of Corrections. Their petition is now before the FCC.
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The FCC can’t ban commissions. But after Martha Wright et. al. v. Correction Corporations of America et. al. was filed in 2000, a federal district judge ruled that the agency would have to decide on a reasonable rate for prison phone calls. Since 2003, the request has gone unanswered.
Eight states have banned commissions and have seen rates drop. In Michigan, for example, rates fell from $3.99 plus 89 cents per minute to a flat rate of about 15 cents per minute after commissions were banned in 2008, according to data from Prison Legal News.
Where commissions exist, the cost gets passed to inmates, their attorneys and their families.
Grandmother’s experience
Martha Wright-Reed became the named plaintiff in the class-action protest over the cost of prison phone calls because she never gave up on her grandson, Ulandis Forte.
When Forte went to prison for manslaughter in 1994, she visited him once a week at the D.C. prison in Lorton, now closed. They spoke by phone about twice a week.
When Forte was transferred to an Arizona private prison in 1998 and the federal Bureau of Prisons in 2001, she visited him in distant places she can’t always remember, usually twice a year.
And she took Forte’s collect calls. From Lorton, a few calls a week cost Wright-Reed about $50 per month. When Forte left Lorton, the bills got higher: closer to $200 a month, for example, when he was in Arizona. Wright-Reed estimates that she spent almost $1,000 per year on phone calls limited to 15 minutes or less.
“You get tired of writing,” Wright-Reed said. “There’s nothing like hearing their voice.”
The only good news for her in the length of time it has taken the FCC to weigh in on the class-action suit is that her grandson was paroled in June.
After almost 19 years in prison, Forte lives in a halfway house on Eighth Street NW, working at a nearby construction site Monday through Friday, and stays with Wright-Reed on the weekends.
While Forte was locked up, he said, the phone was his lifeline — even if his grandmother couldn’t always accept his collect calls and couldn’t always afford to put money on his phone debit card.
He estimates that about 20 monthly phone calls of no more than 15 minutes each cost thousands of dollars over the years.
“Sometimes I’d call so she could hear my voice — hear that I’m alive and safe,” Forte said, drinking cocoa on a chilly October day before reporting to work at 6:45 a.m. “She couldn’t afford to pick up.”
‘Middle of Nowhere’
This fall, Clyburn helped arrange a screening of “Middle of Nowhere” at the FCC. It is a fictional film about a family who struggles when a father is sent to jail. “Middle of Nowhere” was produced by Participant Media, which also produced Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and promotes causes while promoting movies.
“We believe that a story well told can change the world,” said Chad Boettcher, Participant’s vice president of social action and advocacy. “We look for issues we call ‘tippable.’ Is there something that film can push to move the issue forward? I think we found it.”
“We have grandparents raising their children’s children [and] literally having to make a choice between medicine and staying in touch with their parent,” said Clyburn. The daughter of Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), she worked to eliminate commissions in South Carolina, her home state. “Studies show what these phone calls can mean for morale and recidivism rate if that individual is able to speak with their family members,” she said.
Although the FCC screening of “Middle of Nowhere” on Sept. 24 was closed to the news media, Wright-Reed and Forte attended and spoke to the audience.
“The most important thing I told them was what my grandma means to me,” Forte said. “I explained how hard it was for me to keep contact — that it hurts her not to be able to accept my calls.”
Clyburn declined to speculate on when the Wright petition would be decided, but she announced that the commission’s chairman circulated a “notice of proposed rulemaking” — a draft of a proposal the commission can vote on — at a protest outside the FCC on Nov. 15.
Renderos, of the Center for Media Justice, said that in March, the petition will celebrate its 10th anniversary. “We don’t want to see this go past the 10-year mark,” he said.
Wright-Reed said that she doesn’t expect any financial gain from the lawsuit.
“As far as I know, there’s no money,” she said. “I want to fix it so it’s easier for the boys to talk on the phone.”
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