Jail Lowering Cost of Phone Calls, Ending ‘Kickbacks’
County will stop taking commissions, or kickbacks, on phone charges.
Milwaukee County Jail. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.
Phone calls will soon be cheaper for inmates at the Milwaukee County Jail and their families.
In July 2024, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued a new rule capping the prices of calls to and from inmates and eliminating fees collected by correctional institutions, considered by some to be ‘kickbacks’ from the private communication contractors.
The Milwaukee County Sheriff‘s Office is now planning to lower the price of phone calls in the county jail, according to a report from the sheriff’s office.
The new regulations cap the rate for phone calls for jails at $0.06 a minute and video calls at $0.11 a minute. Charges for depositing money in phone call accounts will be eliminated. So will fees called “site commissions” which are collected by institutions like the jail from the private communications providers.
The site commissions are what critics have called kickbacks, because they are payments from the provider to the agency hosting the contract. These payments are paid for through the revenue made by charging inmates to use the phone, contributing to further increases in the cost of phone and video calls, especially as county and state correctional facilities choose contractors who pay the highest kickbacks.
The jail currently contracts with Inmate Calling Solutions LLC. An amendment to the contract instituting the changes is going before the Milwaukee County Board this month.
The 2024 budget provided persons in custody at jail and the Community Reintegration Center with 390 minutes of free phone calls and 60 minutes of free video calls. The plan was to offset the cost of the calls with the fees collected through the contract.
The free calls will be restructured, according to the report, and will provide 90 minutes of free phone calls and 15 minutes of free video calls a week, instead of the similar but monthly totals set by the 2024 budget.
The FCC regulations came two years after passage of the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, which removed the statutory limitations on the FCC’s authority to regulate the price of correctional communications, an industry that generates more than $1 billion in revenue annually.
The legislation was named for Martha Wright-Reed, an advocate for corrections telecommunication reform after spending hundreds of dollars a month to call her incarcerated grandson. She was also a plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the monopolies maintained in the corrections telecommunications industry.
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