Prisons

Don't phone home

by Mike Miliard

Inmates in the Bay State cannot use credit cards, calling cards, or 800 numbers to make phone calls from prison. Any time they wish to contact a family member or legal counsel, they must place a collect call. And collect calls from prison are exorbitantly expensive, much more so than those made between private citizens. Who foots the bill? Prisoners' families.

The Massachusetts Department of Corrections, which contracts with Bell Atlantic for its phone service, claims that the mark-up stems from the security features that are required in its phone systems. In fact, a spokesman contends, the DOC has one of the lowest rates in the country for local calls, and its rates for long-distance calls are "competitive." But according to Peter Costanza, executive director of Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, an organization that provides civil and legal assistance to Massachusetts prisons and is funded through the Supreme Judicial Court, the rates are "outrageous . . . many times the collect-call rate that you or I would pay." They "do not bear any reasonable relationship to the service provided," he adds.

Indeed, according to the Web site of the Massachusetts chapter of Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Errants (www.masscure.org), "The rate for a phone call from a Massachusetts prison . . . [is] more than 10 times current market rates of 5 to 9 cents per minute. . . . 42 percent of the prisoner calling phone revenue, which now tops $2 million a year, is kicked back to the DOC and deposited into the state's general fund."

Now prisoners' families are getting the chance to fight back. Through its national eTc (equitable telephone charges) campaign, CURE is urging people to refuse collect calls from imprisoned loved ones during the month of August. The idea is to send a message to prisons and phone companies that families won't stand for this unfair practice. (Obviously some calls are important and need to go through, so it's been suggested that prisoners use their full name or call twice in a row to convey a call's urgency to their families or lawyers.) Will the campaign work? No one knows. But the issue seems to be reaching critical mass. Michigan has already seen litigation about these predatory charges. Now Massachusetts appears to be joining the fray. "This is outrageous in an era where phone rates are falling weekly because of competition and technology," says civil-liberties attorney and Phoenix contributor Harvey Silverglate. "It's especially outrageous when most of these prisoners' families are very poor and cannot afford the phone bills."

Costanza echoes his point: "This can't be justified in any way, shape, or form."