Data Source: Reports filed by the companies with the Federal Communications Commission about rates charged in 2021, and corrected and verified by the Prison Policy Initiative as described in our methodology and made available in Appendix table 3. (Map: Prison Policy Initiative, 2022)

This map originally appeared in State of Phone Justice 2022: The problem, the progress, and what's next.

The list of jails that charge more for in-state calls than the FCC allows for out-of-state calls is in Appendix table 7. Note that the FCC has two different out-of-state rate caps for jails: 21¢/minute for jails with an average daily population under 1,000; and 16¢/minute for larger facilities. A list of the most expensive in-state phone rates charged by jails in each state is in Appendix table 6. Data for Alaska, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, and Vermont are not shown, because these states each run a unified prison and jail system, so what would be an independent county jail in other states is, in fact, state-run and therefore uses the state phone system’s contract and rates.