Bowing to pressure from jails and companies, FCC raises phone rate caps

The agency has voted to raise rate caps to accommodate complaints made by companies and facilities, saddling low-income families with higher costs.

by Wanda Bertram

Last week, the Federal Communications Commission voted to increase phone and video calling rate caps for incarcerated people, changing the rules that it adopted last July and then suspended earlier this year. The new rate caps hike prices by as much as 83% compared to the rates announced last year.

These tables were originally compiled and the rate changes calculated by the UCC Media Justice Ministry in their fact sheet about the FCC order. Not reflected in this table is the “inflation factor” that the FCC added to its calculations at the last minute. While the impact that this will have is unclear, it will likely add about 1 cent to most of the rate caps listed above.

The FCC issued rules last year — as required by the Martha Wright-Reed Fair and Just Communications Act — bringing unprecedented relief to families who, all too often, were forced to choose between the cost of communicating with their loved ones behind bars and meeting basic everyday needs. After issuing the rules, the FCC received complaints from phone companies, sheriffs, and state attorneys general. Bowing to this pressure, the agency suspended its 2024 ruling and calculated new rate caps, which inflate the rates and impose new costs on families.

Phone companies and sheriffs challenged the 2024 rules, claiming that they made it unprofitable for companies to serve certain very small jails, as well as to offer call monitoring technology — previously given to jails as a kickback. Neither the companies nor the FCC have ever published any data to back up these claims. Nevertheless, the FCC adjusted its calculations to:

• Incorporate “safety and security” costs into all rate caps, meant to allow the companies to recoup the costs of offering call monitoring technology;
• Add a 2¢ “facility fee” to all rate caps;
• Create a new tier of “extremely small jails” with fewer than 50 people, where rate caps will be higher.

The FCC also added, during a period of no comment and without informing the public, a 6.7% “inflation factor.” While the impact that this will have is unclear, it will likely add about 1 cent to most of the rate caps listed above.

The final rate caps are much higher than those passed in 2024. However, in a rare piece of good news, the FCC will reinstate two parts of its 2024 ruling: the ban on site commissions (kickbacks that companies give to facilities) and on ancillary fees, both of which had had the effect of inflating the final costs families paid.

Ultimately, these higher rate caps further burden incarcerated people and their families, while lining the pockets of companies and facilities.

Facilities still have a choice

The new rate caps are set to go into effect as soon as the order is published in the Federal Register, although facilities will have 120 days to come into compliance.

It’s worth noting that the rate caps instituted by the FCC represent the legal maximum that prisons and jails can charge for phone service. The new rate caps are higher than what many facilities were charging even before the 2024 rules, and in the few months when those rules were in effect, thousands of facilities across the country implemented them successfully.

It is up to each individual jail and department of corrections to decide whether it will keep these lower rates — which guarantee more family contact and thus reduced recidivism — or choose to raise them, imposing the cost of call monitoring technology and other perks from companies onto families struggling to stay connected.

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For more information, including footnotes, see the full version of this blog post on our website.