We’ve been talking a lot with many friends we have, in prisons all around the country – and wow! It costs so much money, just to talk for a few minutes. Through creating this site, and through our experience of connecting with inmate families, we understood that the best way to save on prison phone calls is to get a number local to the facility where the inmate is.

So, we started using local numbers, and we did reduce the cost of the phone calls, from long distance to local, but still we see that the rates vary a lot from prison to prison, except for the inmates we call in federal prisons. And there are so many fees and taxes that come up, unexpectedly, for state prison phone calls and country jail calls.

State prisons have the “commission system,” which means they receive part of the profit the licensed phone provider makes from inmate phone calls. The amount or percentage of the commission is different in every state, and varies widely between states (between 15% and 60%). Because the commission system reduces the potential for corporate profit, the companies turn fees that should be no more than supplemental income into a central source of profit. We saw so many different fees and supposedly required taxes, but the truth is that most of them are actually not required by the government.

What kind of fees and taxes surprise you on your phone bill?

In February of this year, the FCC instituted rules that try to regulate the cost of calling from state prisons, so the new rate caps are:

• $0.25 per minute for collect calls
• $0.21 per minute for debit or pre-paid calls

This equates to a per-call rate cap (including per-call charges) of:

• $3.75 for a 15-minute call
• $3.15 for a 15-minute debit or pre-paid call

Charges that exceed these rate caps are in violation of federal rules.

But what’s your experience – are the phone providers sticking to the new rate caps or not?

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