For those of us with family, friends, comrades or loved ones in prison, receiving the phone bill at the end of the month is a painful and enraging experience. The walls between inside and outside the prison seem unclimbably high when one of the only lifelines connecting the two worlds is a financially crippling bill that can be as high as rent. Meanwhile, multinational phone companies such as AT&T, MCI and Sprint, as well as a large number of smaller companies, have been waging a fierce battle for control over a highly profitable and ever expanding new market: prison phones. Phones, an important tool we use to keep connections alive through the prison walls, have become a $1 billion industry, and that $1 billion is coming out of the pockets of prisoners’ families and into the overflowing wallets of telecommunications companies and government budgets. While corporate profits soar and states get ever larger and larger kickbacks in the form of commissions and signing bonuses, the families, friends and lawyers of prisoners are becoming more and more limited in how often they can remain in contact due to financial constraints.

CEML, in collaboration with the Prison Action Committee (PAC), has decided to focus a significant portion of our energy and resources to fighting this grossly unjust prison phone system. We believe focusing on prison phones can bring together a wide base of people outraged by the exploitation caused by the current phone system and can help to build community and organizational power to counter the constant attacks on prisoners, their families and all our communities. We began our work at what seemed like a natural starting point: researching and collecting information. Over the last couple of months we’ve traced state contracts and phone regulations through phone calls and Freedom of Information Act requests to various state offices. We’ve also made a connection with and built a relationship with PAC, which we hope will continue to develop to the benefit of both organizations. In the near future we also hope to reach out and make connections with other individuals and groups working on prison issues and convince them that the phones should be something they consider as part of their work. We’re on the verge of sending out a survey and fact sheet to the thousands of prisoners and family members that PAC has collected in their database over the past few years. Once we collect all of this first hand knowledge of peoples’ interactions with the prison phone systems, we plan on holding a strategy session and then a large scale press conference/meeting to kick off an official public campaign.

Prison phones are a billion dollar business and one of the fastest growing industries in America. The recent history of prison phones begins with the break up of Bell/AT&T in the late eighties and the national phone deregulation in 1996. In the opening up of the telecommunications market, a number of small companies sprang up to take over the phone systems in prisons, correctly seeing that they have a completely captive market from whom to extract profits. Initially it seemed that most of these companies were run by relatives of local public officials and connected to other similar shady dealings, and this is how it is believed they gained the prison contracts. In Illinois it has long been rumored that Consolidated Communications Phone Services (CCPS), which still holds a large share of the state’s prison phone market, once had family connections to the Governor or his wife. In the late 80’s, once automated operating systems became available, costs were cut drastically and profits swelled even more. As these small companies began to grow off of the massive profits they were pulling in, the big guys started to notice, and soon AT&T, Sprint, MCI, and Ameritech, and the like were buying out or out bidding small companies for the prison phone contracts.

Five or ten years ago it was standard that the state or DOC would get 5 to 15% of the phone profits in the form of commissions. Now they are being offered 50% and signing bonuses of $500,000!! The huge phone companies also escalated a technology war that the small companies couldn’t keep up with by continually delivering higher-tech recording equipment and other supposed "anti-fraud" features. Once these large companies consolidate and lock a monopoly on the prison phones we can expect that these signing bonuses will vanish and commissions may go down, but rates certainly won’t be reduced as no company is voluntarily going to give up any increase in profit margin. John Gamino of John Richard Associates, an industry consulting firm, has said "Prisons have the highest margins around. It’s a golden egg." With the advent and growth of phone cards and cell phones outside the prison walls, prison phones is one of if not the only growth market in the collect call business, so companies are scrambling to control it and wring out any possible profits to make up for this shift in technologies/phone use.

All prisoner calls made from the Illinois Department of Corrections have to be made collect, from payphones run by a phone company of the state’s choosing. The state certainly doesn’t choose which companies get control of the phones based on the fairness of their rates, but clearly based on the money they promise to dump into the state budget. This is crystal clear in the case of AT&T, which has contracts with 4 prisons and gave the state a "signing bonus" of $500,000 to get those contracts. Ameritech has contracts at 11 prisons run by the Illinois Department of Corrections, and gives 50% of the profits back to the state, and we all know that no company gives half their profits away unless they’re making a ton of money!!! In fiscal year 1997, four major phone companies paid the state $11, 717,809 in commissions, this $11 million does not, of course, include the profit the phone companies kept. State legislatures have become addicted to these massive amounts of revenue flowing into the state budget. As Jean Auldridge of the Virginia chapter of CURE says, "They think they’ve found a group of people who have no voice, who they can do anything they want to. They can’t see the moral issue. The legislators don’t want to give up the money." Russ Vitale, the manager of AT&T’s corrections operation concurs, "Once state, county or city budgets find out how much money they can get they become dependent on it." This dependency is at the cost of friends and family of prisoners.

Basically, a system has developed where the state is charging the families of prisoners to run the prisons yet no one has ever accused the families of a crime, never mind convicted them or sentenced them to bear this egregious financial burden. Part of the reason these phone rates can be so ridiculously high is that the state considers prison phones to be "private," and that they therefore don’t fall under normal telecommunications regulations. This means that unlike home phones, they are not regulated by the Illinois Commerce Commission, which then means that companies have very few restrictions as far as what rates they charge us for prison calls. This is clearly a case of conflict of interest as at once the state decides which phones it regulates, and it collects the massive profits from the decision it makes. The state’s public justification for this conveniently profitable deregulation is that these companies work under the laws of "capitalist competition" so that supposedly they will "naturally" charge low rates to stay competitive, but since these companies have a monopoly on the phone options prisoners have to choose from, there is no competition to keep prices in check, and the rates we pay are more than proof of that.

As if the straight phone rates weren’t high enough, most companies limit prison calls to fifteen minutes, but allow prisoners to call 2, 3, or even unlimited times. The catch is that with each call there is a connection surcharge fee that can be as high as $2.60 that is charged on every single fifteen minute call. Also an "operator assisted call" charge is often leveled on prison calls even though none of them require a live operator, but are completely regulated by a computer-run phone maze that is more often than not both hard to follow and difficult to understand. The exorbitant rates are making it difficult for lawyers to afford to talk to their clients. Many lawyers have stopped accepting calls from their clients inside, severely limiting the possibility of the prisoners they represent receiving adequate representation. This overcharging is also making it hard for prisoners to keep in contact with loved ones outside, one of the few things that has shown to help prisoners rehabilitate themselves. Cutting down the communication of men and women behind bars only serves to further isolate them and makes it much more difficult for them to integrate back into their community when they are released.

On top of the clear financial injustice, a whole laundry list of other injustices are also a product of the current phone system. Many companies have strict time limits and time of day restrictions that make it much harder to talk to loved ones. This is painfully clear to those whose loved ones can only make calls at the same time that they have to be at work or out of the home due to other responsibilities. Companies like Ameritech also use recording equipment to record phone calls without asking permission; we call this an invasion of privacy. Every citizen is supposed to be protected from the arbitrary recording of their phone calls and surveillance of their personal lives, but the prison’s often heard call for "security" is trumping our once thought "inalienable" rights. With most systems, each call is continually interrupted with a recorded message explaining that the call is "originating from a correctional facility," as if we weren’t already painfully aware of that. This message takes up valuable phone time by repeatedly interrupting the flow of conversation and making it difficult to hear the person on the other end of the line. Any one with experience talking to prisoners over the phone knows about these and dozens of other nuisances to downright harassment techniques that the phone system imposes on us. We feel like it’s time that both the DOC and the corporations that run the phones are held accountable to these issues by the people that are forced to use their "services."

Over the past five years a number of groups and individuals have done work in Illinois around the prison phone issue, most notably PAC and the Prison Reform Advocacy Yardstick coalition (PRAY). A couple years ago a group of family members and activists were meeting regularly around the issue, under the name "Concerned Citizens of Illinois for Lawful Phone Services" and they came up with a list of demands, a number of which we think should be adopted generally around the phone issue. In both 1996 and 1997 PAC called for 30 day phone boycotts and received very good responses in Pontiac and Statesville (both maximum security prisons) as well as a couple medium security camps, these being the prisons at which PAC had the strongest contacts and members inside. The phone companies gave no response, but the IDOC labeled the strike a "gang activity" and a number of those involved lost there jobs and faced other harassment. In September 1996 there was a small uprising by prisoners at Pontiac and the phone system was one of the issues claimed by the prisoners as reason for their actions. We feel that all of this history shows how necessary it is to have a strong, well-educated, and organized group on the outside to both show the state and the companies that we are serious and not going away, but also to help fight for those on the inside who will inevitably face repression due to their activism.

Around the country anti-prison activists on both sides of the prison walls have been working around prison phone issues, from the gross overcharging we focused on above to privacy issues (large numbers of phone calls from prisons are listened to and/or recorded) to the prison phone system playing a role in obstruction of prisoners access to lawyers. The Committee to End the Marion Lockdown decided to get involved and try to campaign around phones for a number of reasons. We realize it’s a shift away from much of the work we’ve been involved in over the past couple of years but it’s very important because:

1. Rather than pick the issue we find the most morally reprehensible, we feel it was important to pick an issue that touches as wide a swath of those affected by the criminal justice and prison system as possible. If the amount of money being stolen from prisoners and their families was being stolen from any other sector of society all hell would break lose.

2. We wanted to choose an issue that would lead us to work closer with other prison activist organizations in and around Chicago and Illinois as well as with more individuals on both sides of the walls, prisoners and their loved ones.

3. We choose to work on the phones because we’ve researched the issue and feel like it has the potential to set some groundwork for long-term organizing goals, and maybe give us some small victories along the way.

4. We think we might be able to gain some victories because in other states people have fought the phone system and won!! The following list of examples shows that it is possible to tackle phone companies over this issue:

- In Louisiana prisoners at the LA State Penitentiary began a phone boycott in 1993 which reduced calls from the prison by 75% and forced the phone company Global Tel-Link to reduce rates. The Public Service Commission then ordered Global Tel-Link to refund $1.2 million in overcharges from June 1993 to May 1994.

- In Florida a company called Oncor was fined $250,000 for overcharging prisoners’ families and had to refund $750,000 . More recently MCI was forced to refund $1.7 million to customers in Florida for overcharging on prison calls.

- In Nebraska a new contract with Sprint was announced in May 1997 that gave no commission to the state in return for lower rates.

We need to learn from these examples from other states. The work that has already been done in Illinois, and our combined experience around prisons and other forms of activism will help us to forge an effective strategy around the prison phones. The state and phone companies like AT&T and Ameritech have been making millions of dollars off of family and friends of prisoners for far too long, and they don’t think there is anything we can do about it. We think it is time we prove them wrong.

1. Freedman, Alix M. "'Mom, It's Mugsy': Phone Firms Wrestle for Prisoners' Business in Hot Growth Market." Wall Street Journal, February 15, 1995.

2. ibid.

3. Prendergast,Alan. "Reach Out and Gouge Someone." Westword, February 5-11, 1998.

4. "The Boom in Prison Phone Systems: Reach Out Gouge Someone." U.S. News & World Reports, May 5, 1997.