{"id":602,"date":"2013-07-08T10:06:53","date_gmt":"2013-07-08T14:06:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/?p=602"},"modified":"2024-08-14T11:29:45","modified_gmt":"2024-08-14T15:29:45","slug":"ex48","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/2013\/07\/08\/ex48\/","title":{"rendered":"FCC has questions on prison phone service fees, we have answers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Now that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is thinking about how to regulate the predatory prison phone industry<\/a>, the commissioners are asking for lots of information to guide their deliberations. Most recently, the Commission asked for more data<\/a> on the many fees associated with prison telephone service.<\/p>\n

It’s great that the FCC is looking into these fees because, as we found in our latest report, they’re a really big deal<\/a>. Nationally, we estimate that 38 cents of every dollar spent on prison phone calls goes right to fee revenue for the phone service corporations.<\/p>\n

Given how profitable these fees are in the prison phone industry, I shouldn’t be surprised that the phone companies have so far been totally unwilling to share information about their fees with the FCC. (If you ask me, that lack of response is yet another reason why the FCC should act without further delay.) <\/p>\n

Fortunately, however, we\u2019ve given the FCC a lot to work with. Our 28-page report, Please Deposit All of Your Money: Kickbacks, Rates, and Hidden Fees in the Jail Phone Industry<\/a>, documents the many fees associated with prison phone service, and explains how exactly prison phone companies justify the charges. We documented our report\u2019s 120 footnotes with 54 exhibits<\/a> containing 1,225 pages of the industry\u2019s own documents. We submitted all of that in to the FCC\u2019s docket record<\/a> in May.<\/p>\n

In response to the FCC\u2019s call for information on fees, on Friday we submitted a letter<\/a> to the FCC, drawing their attention to several tables in our report containing extensive information on charges such as deposit fees, refund fees, and account maintenance fees. We also attached an exhibit that’s particularly relevant to the FCC’s question, Exhibit 48<\/a>, which presents a chart of the account fees charged by 10 of the companies in the prison and jail telephone industry. Our exhibit includes the \u201cjustifications\u201d for each fee in the companies\u2019 own words.<\/p>\n

Hopefully our submission will inspire the phone corporations to offer up some data of their own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The FCC wants to know about the many fees prison phone companies charge. While the companies aren’t talking, we’ve got answers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"coauthors":[13],"class_list":["post-602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-phones"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=602"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16366,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602\/revisions\/16366"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=602"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}