Yesterday, the New York City Council made New York the first jurisdiction in the country to make telephone calls from its prisons and jails free. The city will not only give up the commission it currently makes on phone calls – it is going a step further and making the phone calls themselves free. This change will save the poorest families in the City of New York more than $8 million a year.
In many prisons and jails, calls home from jail are very expensive, costing up to $1/minute. Typically, the facilities grant one phone company a monopoly contract in exchange for the company sharing the revenue with the facility. Some jurisdictions, however, including the New York State prison system, have refused to accept kickbacks on contracts and have instead negotiated for lower rates. They argue (correctly) that giving up that income is a cost-effective investment in lowering recidivism.
Going further and just paying for the calls makes particular sense in jails, where people are either serving short sentences or are detained only because they are too poor to make bail.
[For more on this story by Peter Wagner, go to https://www.prisonpolicy.org/b.../07/19/rikers_calls/]
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