Louisiana Voice

Vendors who wished to provide prison pay telephone service were scheduled to have submitted their bid proposals this week, according to information received from the Louisiana Department of Corrections.

Prison telephone service is big business, profitable to the vendor and to the Department of Corrections but has been a source of controversy across the country for several years.

The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) has been conducting a long legal battle against what it terms as inflated collect phone call rates and “kickback commissions” paid to states.

Louisiana’s contract, awarded on a competitive bid basis, does not approach CCR’s claim of charges levied against prisoners’ families who are the ones who ultimately pay the cost of the phone calls. While CCR maintains that some phone services charge up to $6 per minute for calls (in California, the rate is about $3.50 per minute), Global Tel Link Corp. charges from 9 cents to 25 cents per minute, depending on the distance and time of day.

In addition to the per-minute charge, there is a surcharge for each phone call placed from any state correctional facility that varies from 80 cents to $4.50, depending upon whether the call is local or person-to-person collect. All charges are paid by the call recipient, not the prisoner and therein lies the rub.

CCR and an organization called the New York Campaign for Telephone Justice feel that the exorbitant charges are not only wrong, but illegal. New York State receives 57.5 percent of all profits from prisoner phone charges. That comes to about $200 million per year for New York. Global Tel Link pays Louisiana 55 percent under its contract.

Some of Louisiana’s commissions are spent on computer software and security.

“We are not challenging how the commissions are spent,” CCR said. “But the high rates for prison phone calls are being paid by the families of incarcerated people.”

Louisiana’s 12 prison facilities grossed slightly more than $3 million during fiscal 2009-2010, netting the state more than $1.6 million, state records show.

In some states, the practice appears to be more questionable. While Louisiana, with the largest rate of incarceration in the nation, generated only $3 million in phone bills in FY 2009-2010 charges to California prisoners’ families came to more than $120 million.

Not surprisingly, prison phone contracts are a prized commodity in other states. Some carriers offer California counties signing bonuses. In the case of Los Angeles County, the bonus for the 2004 contract was $17 million.

An investigation conducted by Associated Press revealed that California counties received more than $300 million in revenue from prisoner phone calls over a five-year period.

“It’s a gouging of family members, those who have never committed a crime, said Charles Carbone, an attorney with Prison Focus, a San Francisco-based prisoner rights group.

The California State Assembly passed a law in 2000 that would have required negotiating for lower rates but then-Gov. Gray Davis vetoed the bill, saying it would cost the state $30 million per year in revenue.

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