Here’s an alternative to the corrupt system of charging for prison phone calls | Opinion
When I wrote a series of stories this summer about opioids, I spoke with two women incarcerated in two Idaho jails.
I was shocked and dismayed at the difficulty and the costs of trying to communicate with them via phone and video.
Phone calls at one jail cost 21 cents per minute, or more than $5 just to talk for 25 minutes. A video interview at another jail cost $7.50 for a 30-minute session, or 25 cents per minute.
One interview was cut off inexplicably after 12 minutes, a common occurrence, I was told. We finished our conversation via phone, for which I was charged $6.72 for 27 minutes, or 25 cents per minute.
The people who really bear the burden are the family members.
Tina Thompson, 69, a retired mom of one of the women in jail, tries to set aside $100 each month from her Social Security check just so she can talk to her daughter. If she wants to add money to her account, that costs, too: Adding $10 to her account requires a fee of $3.30.
It’s immoral.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
A nonprofit company launched at the beginning of the pandemic offers an alternative to the practice of allowing private companies to charge people in prison and their families exorbitant fees just to talk to a family member via phone or video.
Ameelio builds software that allows incarcerated people to communicate with loved ones for free so they can maintain bonds with friends and family when they’re released.
“One of the important values to us is we don’t charge the families for their phone calls,” Ben Porter, head of engineering for Ameelio, told me in a phone interview. “So from the family’s perspective, it’s free.”
Ameelio is based in Connecticut, but Porter works from Idaho Falls.
Ameelio, which has seed money from former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, is slowly but surely working its way into prison systems across the country, now in Colorado, Maine, Illinois and Iowa.
After what I’ve seen, I’d love to see Ameelio make its way into Idaho.
But it’s an uphill climb.
System of kickbacks
The system is rigged in many places, including Idaho, where government agencies get kickbacks from the for-profit companies that run the phone and video services, in a corrupt system of profit-sharing that actually incentivizes higher costs.
Canyon County received about $130,000 last year from its contract with TelMate. Ada County received $540,000 last year from TelMate. The Idaho Department of Correction received $1.5 million from its provider, ICSolutions.
And it’s all on the backs of people like Tina Thompson.
“The kickback system is a real problem with trying to lower the cost for incarcerated people and their loved ones,” Porter said. “The incentive structure they put in place, it’s better for everyone — everyone except the incarcerated people, that is — to have that price high. It’s more revenue for the company. It’s more revenue for the facility. So there’s a reverse incentive there.”
Ameelio so far has worked with states that don’t have these kickbacks, but Porter said the company is trying to make inroads in states like Idaho.
“We have seen an amazingly positive response from many people in the correction industries that really do recognize the inequities and the system of reverse incentives that we’ve built,” Porter said. “And they do see a huge value (in free communications).”
Teaming up with Ameelio means that not only would these agencies lose that revenue stream, the county or state would have to pay Ameelio a fee.
So instead of getting a $1.5 million kickback from ICSolutions, the state of Idaho would have to pay a fee to Ameelio.
Porter said that fee could be anywhere from $700,000 to $2.5 million a year, depending on storage requirements (storage costs are the highest part of the cost; phone and video calls by themselves are relatively cheap, Porter said).
“That’s why it’s such a tough sell for the states that allow kickbacks, because we’re basically asking them, ‘Most of you already feel budget restricted; we’d like for you to cut it more,’” Porter said. “But it’s the right thing to do.”
Reasons to eliminate fees
Here’s why the state should make the switch:
It’s the right thing to do. It’s just downright immoral to allow for-profit companies to soak these families who usually are the least able to pay these exorbitant fees. If some legislators want to inject their Christian beliefs into the government, this would actually be a good place to do it.
The high cost of maintaining contact with incarcerated family members caused more than one in three families (34%) into debt to pay for phone calls and visits alone, according to a 2015 report conducted by the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Forward Together and Research Action Design.
Idaho is a state that believes in family values. That’s what this is all about: keeping families together. By charging so much for a phone call, prisoners and inmates don’t call as often or at all. That keeps families apart.
It could actually save Idaho money in the long run. Studies have shown that inmates who keep in contact with family members while incarcerated have a lower recidivism rate. That means reducing the cost of housing reoffenders.
A Minnesota Department of Corrections study found that even a single visit reduced recidivism by 13% for felony reconviction and 25% for technical violations.
As it is, at 62%, Idaho has the highest percentage of people incarcerated on parole and probation violations in the country, according to a recent study by the Council of State Governments.
So if you’re not persuaded by doing what’s morally right, you should be persuaded by what’s cost-effective.
My hope is that some county commissioner somewhere or a state legislator reads this and recognizes how harmful and immoral these fees are and is willing to consider something like Ameelio.
It’s just the right thing to do.
