FCC Closes 'Final Loopholes' That Keep Prison Phone Prices Exorbitantly High

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission today voted to lower price caps on prison phone calls and closed a loophole that allowed prison telecoms to charge high rates for intrastate calls. Today's vote will cut the price of interstate calls in half and set price caps on intrastate calls for the first time. The FCC said it "voted to end exorbitant phone and video call rates that have burdened incarcerated people and their families for decades. Under the new rules, the cost of a 15-minute phone call will drop to $0.90 from as much as $11.35 in large jails and, in small jails, to $1.35 from $12.10." The new rules are expected to take effect in January 2025 for all prisons and for jails with at least 1,000 incarcerated people. The rate caps would take effect in smaller jails in April 2025. Worth Rises, a nonprofit group advocating for prison reform, said it "estimates that the new rules will impact 83 percent of incarcerated people (about 1.4 million) and save impacted families at least $500 million annually." The nonprofit Prison Policy Institute said that prison phone companies charge ancillary fees for things "like making a deposit to fund an account." The ban on those fees "also effectively blocks a practice that we have been campaigning against for years: companies charging fees to consumers who choose to make single calls rather than fund a calling account, and deliberately steering new consumers to this higher-cost option in order to increase fee revenue," the group said. The ancillary fee ban is a "technical-sounding change," but will help "eliminate some of the industry's dirtiest tricks that shortchange both the families and the facilities," the group said.

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