LaVia had only two months to pay off the debt, the invoice warned, until it would be turned over to a collection agency. 

He didn’t have anything close to that amount of money, and even if he did, he was disinclined to pay because the demand seemed ridiculous; a jury had just found him not guilty of the charges that had landed him in the notoriously brutal Harrisburg jail to begin with. After all that time inside, it felt especially insulting for the county to hound him to pay for his own confinement even following his acquittal. 

LaVia and his loved ones tried to put the debt out of their minds, but it hampered his chances at successful re-entry, his mother told Bolts recently. “It’s hard to be a productive member of society when you have $17,000 over your head,” Judi LaVia Jones, said. Her son is 50 years old and has long struggled with addiction and mental health issues, and can ill afford the additional burden of state-imposed debt, she added: “Try applying for an apartment with that. Try starting a business. It is always hanging over you.”

In September, Dauphin County’s commissioners voted to forgive the nearly $66 million in pay-to-stay debt looming over formerly incarcerated people and their families. The move, championed by a commissioner who won in 2023 after running on jail reform, followed a 2022 decision by the commission that ended pay-to-stay fees but had not erased people’s previous debts for jail stays. 

LaVia Jones said the decision to finally forgive the outstanding jail debt will help her son move on with his life, calling it “a huge relief.”

“The longer you sat in jail, the more debt you incurred, the more debt your family incurred. People sit there pretrial for one year, two years. It’s so wrong,” she said. “So this really helps him to move on with his life.” 

Local groups that advocate for incarcerated people in Harrisburg argued for years that the pay-to-stay scheme worked against efforts at successful re-entry for people released from jail, who are typically poor and who are almost always more concerned with basic survival and staying free than with settling debts. 

Derrick Anderson of Harrisburg says that after he got out of jail a few years ago, the nearly $3,000 bill the county sent him for his stay seemed unreal and unworkable. “Even just $30 in my pocket felt like a lot,” he told Bolts. “It made the difference between me staying out here and me going back to prison. I could buy me something to eat, catch a bus, catch a cab. Something in my pocket. It makes a difference, and I’m telling you from experience. And they want to take it from you, and release guys with absolutely nothing.”

Lamont Jones, a Harrisburg City Council member who was formerly incarcerated, and who is running for mayor this year, was active in pushing for the county to erase people’s jail bills last year, saying such debts effectively work to encourage recidivism and degrade public safety. “In the scramble for survival, a lot of times, out of necessity, people will turn to a life of crime, not necessarily because they want to be a criminal. How can they figure out another way to pay?” he told Bolts.

Jones, who was released from incarceration in 2008, said it took him 15 years beyond then to pay off his debts to the system. He considers himself fortunate for not having succumbed to what he described as a financial “pressure cooker.”

“These fees, plus probation and parole constantly asking you for your supervision fee, plus the fines you owe, plus you may have child support, plus you need to feed yourself, clothe yourself—there just isn’t enough money in the pot,” Jones told Bolts. “And a lot of people, if they can’t find their way out of it, end up going back to the same thing that got them incarcerated in the first place.”

The jail-debt policy that Dauphin County finally ended last year is hardly unique. Such pay-to-stay schemes exist in some form in at least 43 states, according to Captive Money Lab, a research project of several universities that tracks economic punishment in the U.S. criminal legal system. The Associated Press reports pay-to-stay policies exist in many parts of Pennsylvania. 

The practice of charging people for their time in lockup is but one contributor to a vast array of fines and fees that extracts money from people at virtually every stage of the criminal legal system—starting with jail booking and often lingering, through probation and parole, for years or decades after someone has been released, and affecting even those charged as children.

Cities, counties, and states try to collect such fees to fund government operations. But by reaching into the skinny accounts of incarcerated people and the family members who support them, these governments place vulnerable people in financial ruin while often failing to generate sustainable revenue streams. 

In Pennsylvania, as in every other state, people dogged by fines and fees in the criminal legal system are disproportionately poor and non-white, a result of persistently classist and racist disparities in rates of arrest, prosecution, and incarceration. (The jail population in Dauphin County is majority-Black, even though the overall county populace is under 20 percent Black.) The fact that so many incarcerated people are poor ensures that pay-to-stay debts, and those for many other fines and fees, are unlikely to yield much return for the governments and collectors that call for them.

“It is unbelievably ineffective,” Dylan Hayre, national advocacy and campaigns director at the Fines and Fees Justice Center, told Bolts. “It’s one of those things where even surface-level scrutiny reveals the fact that this is not a smart thing to do.”

Justin Douglas, the Democratic commissioner who scored a shock upset win in 2023 on an uncommon platform of reforming the Dauphin County jail, and who championed the recent debt forgiveness, says that the county was spending about as much, if not more, on collecting those jail fees as it was taking in. 

“This is fake debt to begin with, in that we’re never going to recoup $66 million, and it’s comical to think we would,” Douglas told Bolts. 

Even those counties that put in serious effort to recoup criminal-legal debt can still struggle. Bucks County, Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia, spent the last four years carrying out a Delinquency Recovery Program that county leaders report has brought in less than 1 percent of the total debt owed there.

It was not any moral calling, but rather frustration over the county’s failure to recoup most jail fees, that first prompted Dauphin County to end pay-to-stay charges at the jail in 2022, when the commission moved to instead charge people a one-time booking fee. 

To ensure it actually received money for the booking fee, the county started automatically taking $125 from everyone who entered the jail, at the moment of entry. For those who could not afford that fee upfront, the county would garnish funds that loved ones sent incarcerated people to buy marked-up commissary items and to make costly calls to family and friends on the outside.

The jail has been garnishing funds for other debts for years, pre-dating the booking fee. “If I got $100, they were taking $25. I had a $25 money order come in, they took half of it. You’re essentially being robbed,” Jerome Coleman, who’s been incarcerated multiple times in Harrisburg, and free since 2017, told Bolts. He now runs a small local business at which he employs other formerly incarcerated people. 

Even as Dauphin County has now relieved all past pay-to-stay debt, it continues charging the $125 jail booking fee and continues to garnish funds to pay for it. Advocates hope the commissioners will abolish that system as a follow-up act to last year’s debt forgiveness, but they aren’t holding their breath. 

Douglas, the commissioner who put debt forgiveness on the county’s agenda last year, said it has been difficult to bring about even modest reforms since his election. In the last year, for example, the county let incarcerated people go outdoors, briefly, for the first time in decades. The county is also putting out a bid for a new medical services contractor at the jail for the first time in almost 40 years, following repeated complaints against the current, longtime provider.

“This year,” Douglas said, “I’ve learned a lot about the lane I live in, and it has certain levers I can pull. I don’t set bail. I don’t determine the length of stay for somebody in jail. The fee is something that does fall under our purview. Building a coalition takes a long time, though.” 

He added, “Dauphin County prison has some massive obstacles in front of it. We have earned our reputation, in a lot of ways.”

People formerly incarcerated in Harrisburg agree. 

“It’s a shithole,” Anderson said. 

Coleman remembered the food: “The meat they used to give us was green and pink.” 

“When it got cold, there was ice inside my son’s cell,” LaVia Jones said.

Douglas flipped the board to Democratic control with his 2023 election, but that by no means signalled a progressive turn. Douglas said he finds he and his fellow commissioners have “different value systems” regarding the jail they oversee.

When the three-member board voted on forgiving the pay-to-stay debt, the other Democratic commissioner, George Hartwick,  did not support the reform. It only passed, advocates told Bolts, because Douglas and a persistent outside advocacy campaign won over Republican Mike Pries, with whom Douglas is now forging an unusual power-sharing agreement. 

In an email to Bolts, Pries said it was “an easy decision” to vote with Douglas on debt forgiveness because the debt was undercutting other county programs meant to reduce recidivism. “We were literally spending money on a good conceptual idea and goal,” Pries wrote, “but at the same time keeping individuals from reaching that goal by making it almost impossible to get credit, unable to get a mortgage, unable to rent an apartment, unable to get a car loan. That then becomes a cycle of despair and many times forces them to make decisions that put them right back where they started.”

Hartwick did not respond to an interview request or emailed questions from Bolts about the debt forgiveness and the booking fee.

Even though Pries described his vote in September as a no-brainer, Onah Ruth Ossai, an abolitionist organizer in Harrisburg, said she’s skeptical the issue would have come to a vote at all had Douglas not joined the board. “Having someone like Justin Douglas in office, at least we start to be able to shed a light on what’s happening. We felt completely in the dark before,” Ossai said.

She believes the booking fee must be the next target. Douglas told Bolts he “definitely” wants to abolish that fee, and that he’s planning a push, but that he does not believe he has support yet from his board colleagues to approve the change. That reform would be even more politically challenging than the debt forgiveness because the booking fee, unlike the pay-to-stay fee before it, actually does generate consistent revenue for the county, as a result of the garnishment policy.

In its most recent annual report, published in May, the county said it took in an average of 17 new detainees per day. That comes out to more than $2,000 extracted daily from people who, with rare exception, are detained pretrial—that is, still presumed innocent because they have not been convicted of the charges that landed them in jail. Cash bail amounts set by judges in the county ensures many are kept in the jail only because they cannot afford freedom. 

In his email to Bolts, Pries said he’d be open to eliminating the booking fee, but only if the county comes up with a way to replace the money the fee generates. “If an alternative that does not negatively impact the county can be found, I will certainly consider that,” he wrote.

The organizers who sought the debt forgiveness say they will press now to end the booking fee and that they are encouraged by having an ally on the board in Douglas.

“What a light of hope this has been,” said LaVia Jones, Chad’s mother. 

She told Bolts that she spent 27 years working in law enforcement in Pennsylvania, mainly investigating cases of alleged medical fraud. Since retiring and bearing witness to the financial exploitation and general suffering of her son and others in jail in Harrisburg, however, she has had a change of heart.

“I was always proud to say I worked in law enforcement,” she said. “When I got a true picture of what it’s like to be poor and to be incarcerated, I started to say to myself, ‘Boy, this criminal justice is not so just.’”

The post This Pennsylvania County Wiped Out Millions in Jail Debt appeared first on Bolts.

“People are talking about how life-changing it’s been inside to be able to make some choices about what they’re watching on TV, or what music they’re listening to—to be able to listen to music at all,” Kinnon said. Plus, incarcerated people have tens of thousands of choices within the free eBook and audiobook library, which contains more than 63,500 titles. Some inmates with vision issues can now read almost anything in large print, when they were previously limited to the small selection of large-print books. Other inmates with low levels of literacy take advantage of audiobooks to open up the world of books to them.

Media services like these are often offered in other jails, but as they’re typically controlled by for-profit prison telecom companies, they’re often exorbitantly expensive. In most places any form of communication used to keep incarcerated people connected to the outside world, be it phone calls or tablets, has also been used to control incarcerated populations and generate profits for jails and their contractors.

San Francisco has offered jail tablets and their content at no cost to incarcerated people, part of a wave of institutions starting to decouple carceral communications from a profit motive. The free tablet program was introduced in May of 2023, a logical follow-up to San Francisco making jail phone calls free in 2020, the first county in the country to do so and the second city after New York.

Before 2023, the San Francisco jails had never implemented any tablet program for all inmates. When the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department decided to dip its toes into providing the devices, Michelle Lau, the acting director of the Financial Justice Project within the San Francisco treasurer’s office, recalls that the very first iteration of the bid request was similar to others across the country—riddled with charges for tablet services.

She remembered thinking, “We just did this whole thing with jail phone calls—why are we doing basically the same thing on a tablet?” The San Francisco Jail Justice Coalition, a coalition of community groups, pushed for a completely free tablet program. “Some [community members] even said if there were any charges, they would prefer no tablet, rather than one with high charges,” Lau said.

Tablets have been trickling into prisons and jails over the past several years, with the devices first launched in 2012 by prison communications company JPay, now owned by prison telecom giant Securus. Soon prisons and jails began hailing “free” tablets for their inmates, as these companies would indeed often distribute tablets to inmates at no cost. But once incarcerated people actually used the tablets, they were far from free.

Music might be $1.99 per song, as it is for the most expensive songs in Washington State. In Pennsylvania state prisons, eBooks cost between $2.99 and $24.99. E-messaging can be as much as Arkansas’s $0.50 per message. Or, tablet costs may rack up based on how much the tablet is used; in Minnesota’s Fillmore County, tablet use costs $0.25 for each minute, which adds up to more than $30 to watch a typical movie on a tablet screen.

Meanwhile, most incarcerated people earn little money, if any, to pay for these services. As a result, families, many of whom are indigent themselves, may support them financially. And because of the disproportionate share of Black inmates in prisons and jails, much of these fees are paid by low-income Black women, either mothers or girlfriends or wives.

Over the past two and a half years, five states have made prison phone calls (though not necessarily jail phone calls) free. The latest one, Massachusetts, just passed a law in November. A handful of major cities in addition to San Francisco have also made jail phone calls free, including New York, Miami, Louisville, and Los Angeles. 

Change will soon happen on the federal level, too. In early January 2023, President Biden signed the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act of 2022, which allows the FCC to regulate in-state prison and jail phone calls as well as out-of-state phone calls. Under federal regulation, which is set to begin sometime in the latter half of 2024, the price of prison and jail phone calls nationwide will likely fall significantly. 

In San Francisco, Sheriff Paul Miyamoto had already supported free phone calls, so it wasn’t surprising when his office ultimately released a request for proposals for a completely free tablet program. Alissa Riker, the sheriff’s office’s director of programs, said free tablets were “a long time coming” given the office’s “philosophy of not charging the folks in custody and their families.”

Lau says San Francisco received bids from the two major prison telecoms, Securus and ViaPath (formerly GTL) for the project. They also received one from Nucleos, a new company focused on prison education programming that seemed excited about a free tablet program. The company recently transitioned to a public benefit corporation, which requires it pursue both profits and positive social benefits.

In the end, Nucleos won the contract. 

Most jails and prisons, however, are contracted with either Securus and ViaPath for their tablets. Together, the companies hold roughly 80 percent of the prison communications market valued at more than $1 billion. And Securus and ViaPath have been tracking the recent and growing trend toward free phone calls

“Some of the companies running jail phone calls, they see the writing on the wall” about the looming unprofitability of jail phone calls, said Joanna Weiss, co-executive director of the Fines and Fees Justice Center. “They are often making up the money through the use of tablets.”

In 2015, a Securus presentation to potential investors noted that the company has “successfully decreased its exposure” to new regulation by “investing in businesses that are not regulated.” These businesses are any number of ancillary services like e-messaging, eBooks, movies and TV show rentals, and music that the company can then charge inmates to use on a tablet. (The Martha Wright-Reed Act clarifies that the FCC may now regulate video calls.)

But companies aren’t the only ones that profit—prisons and jails can earn commissions on tablet services just as with phone calls. “We’re always looking for ways to bring in additional money to the county,” Pennsylvania’s Westmoreland County Jail Warden John Walton told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, commenting on the jail bringing in $161,000 in tablet commissions in 2019.

Riker, from the San Francisco sheriff’s office, noted that this is what sets San Francisco’s free program apart. “Money is why other sheriff’s offices aren’t doing it,” she said. 

Typically, an institution’s profits from jail communications, whether via tablets or phones, are intended to fund inmate programming (though they sometimes simply shore up budgets or go to dubious purchases). Riker told Bolts that she’s gotten calls from people working at other jails who were astonished that San Francisco could afford to fund free tablets and give up that funding stream—regardless of the fact that the money is sourced from vulnerable prisoners and their families. 

In 2023, the mayor’s office committed to using approximately $500,000 annually from the city’s general fund to support free tablet services for people in jail. As the San Francisco sheriff’s office’s annual budget is just under $300 million, the tablet program makes up roughly 0.2 percent of the department’s total budget.

The move has been part of a citywide shift away from prison profiteering. In 2020, San Francisco’s board of supervisors passed an ordinance to bar the city from profiting off of goods and services purchased by prisoners, which led to free jail phone calls as well as the end of markups on commissary items.

But even as tablets may be an important tool for people behind bars to connect with the outside world, carceral institutions also use them to replace in-person services like classes and visitation, and even to help better control a jail or prison population. Miami-Dade County jails, like many jails across the country, suspended in-person visitation during the initial months of the Covid-19 pandemic. But also like many other jails, Miami-Dade has yet to reinstate in-person visits almost four years later.

“Visitation right now is only video calls,” said Katherine Passley, the co-executive director of Beyond the Bars, a Miami activist group organizing families of incarcerated people and pushing for changes at the jails. Passley’s father is incarcerated at a Miami-Dade County jail. Even though the county offers free 15-minute video calls, the service itself is “horrible,” Passley said, not only because of Miami’s internet connection problems—the National Digital Inclusion Alliance ranked Miami one of the worst cities in the country for internet connectivity—but also because the video contract with ViaPath precludes the use of Apple iPhones for video calling. The vast majority of Beyond the Bar’s membership can’t even access video calls, she said.

As for prison programming, the sheriff’s office in San Francisco considers the tablets a supplement to in-person classes and programming and explicitly refuses to use them as a replacement. This is not necessarily the case in other jurisdictions, which may see tablet services as an affordable replacement for educational programming. Low staffing issues in South Carolina prisons partly inspired a tablet program with educational services so the state could “use technology to deliver services to these folks in their cells,” as Department of Corrections Director Bryan Stirling told the Greenville News. 

Plus, many wardens have extolled the virtue of tablets for keeping incarcerated people busy—and keeping them under their thumbs. “It’s a great tool for us, because number one it keeps them occupied, but number two it’s something that we can take away from them for behavior modification purposes,” Pennsylvania’s Lackawanna County Jail Warden Tim Betti told The Scranton Times-Tribune in 2020.

In Miami, Beyond the Bars has concentrated on tackling fee elimination in the jails, following in the footsteps of San Francisco. For instance, they’ve successfully advocated for the county to get rid of a $2 daily fee that pushed inmates into debt and commit to providing free 90-minute phone calls each day for people in jail. The group is currently working to reintroduce in-person visitation in the jails to ensure that incarcerated people and their families aren’t only able to see their loved ones through a screen.

Beyond the Bars has also recently pushed for free tablet services in Miami-Dade County jails. The tablet program outlined in the county’s request for proposals is not quite as ambitious as San Francisco’s but is better than that of the vast majority of jails nationwide. When the Miami-Dade County jails implement the program, the plan is for inmates to get their own free tablets with access to a limited number of free resources, such as an eBook library and one free movie a month. More specific details of the tablet program, however, will likely be up to the as-of-yet unannounced contractor. Beyond the Bars reached out to the local public library, which has agreed to work with them similarly to the San Francisco library—but it’s unclear if the library will ultimately be part of the program.

Kinnon, the San Francisco librarian, said she’s fielded inquiries “every week or two” from libraries interested in replicating San Francisco’s model. But she notes most of these libraries are in jurisdictions contracted with Securus or ViaPath—companies that would have to give up their profits on books and music, unlike the newcomer Nucleos. Kinnon said that from what she understands, ViaPath and Securus “have not expressed any openness or interest in working with public libraries.” Kinnon mused that one possible, though clunky, workaround would be for carceral systems to offer two tablets, one with free library services and one with the telecom provider’s services.

Companies like ViaPath and Securus “need to feel pressure…to be more open to do this and make it work,” said Kinnon, adding that San Francisco and Nucleos needed to work together to find creative ways to make the free tablet project happen. 

“But we did it,” she said. “And that means it could happen anywhere.”

The post San Francisco Expands Free Jail Communications by Adding Tablet Services appeared first on Bolts.

Annalyse Gosselin would like a new coat. Hers is ripped, and its zipper doesn’t work anymore. 

She’d also like a new phone and to eat at a restaurant one of these days—the last time she dined out was in May, on her 20th birthday—but can’t afford those things either. Gosselin works two jobs, at a grocery store and part-time as a nursing assistant, but she says that nets her less than $20,000 a year. That isn’t nearly enough to thrive where she lives in Boston, where the median one-bedroom apartment rents for about $3,000 a month.

Fifteen months ago, she started a relationship with an imprisoned man she’d been corresponding with through a pen pal program that connects incarcerated people with concerned strangers. Now budgeting is even harder: her boyfriend, Syrelle, is held in Norfolk, 30 miles from her home, and keeping in regular touch with him is enormously expensive. It costs about $2.50 to talk with him for 20 minutes on the phone, and twice that if they do a video call. Emails cost 25 cents apiece. The private company the prison system uses to run communications takes a $3 surcharge every time she adds money to her account. 

Gosselin says she’s spent about $5,000 just to talk with Syrelle since the start of their relationship, and roughly the same amount on purchases for him at the prison commissary: an extension cord, a small television, chicken, vegetables, medicated protein shakes.

“I go broke, literally. I make my bank account negative,” Gosselin told Bolts. “I don’t do much for myself; I just do for him. My mom and everybody always tells me, ‘You can’t keep making sacrifices for your relationship.’ But who else is going to do it?”

Massachusetts is now poised to ease that financial burden for Gosselin, as well as for the thousands of people held in the state’s prisons and jails, and their loved ones. Lawmakers just approved reforms on Monday that would eliminate charges for communicating with incarcerated people. It would also limit commissary markups in all jails and prisons to 3 percent above an item’s purchase price.

Gosselin says making communications free would change her life. She’d be able to speak with her boyfriend without watching the clock or her wallet. “It will honestly be the best thing,” Gosselin said. “It just feels like a burden taken off my back once it happens.”

The reform, which is part of the state’s annual budget, now awaits the signature of Governor Maura Healey, a Democrat who has expressed support for the change and is expected to approve it. Her predecessor, Republican former Governor Charlie Baker, denied a similar proposal last year. 

If Healey does approve this change, Massachusetts would be the fifth state to make prison phone calls free. Connecticut in 2021 became the first to do so, followed by California in 2022 and Colorado and Minnesota earlier this year. Several large U.S. cities have also mandated free phone calls for people in jails, starting with New York City in 2018 and followed by Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Miami, among others. Last year, Congress also passed a law granting the Federal Communications Commission new and greater authority to regulate the high cost of calls to and from incarcerated people.

The Massachusetts reform would be among the most wide-reaching: The state would join only Connecticut in making communications of all kinds free for all incarcerated people—that is, not just phone calls, but also video, email, and messaging. Massachusetts would pay for the communications out of a $20 million state trust fund meant specifically to cover those costs.

The changes were guided in large part by the advocacy of people directly harmed by the exorbitant costs of communicating with loved ones in prison. For instance, many of those people expressed worry that some facilities would respond to free communications by further restricting the amount of time people can spend on phone or video calls—indeed, Healey’s initial budget proposal called for just such a cap, and also excluded jail communications. Advocates told Bolts that incarcerated people helped add a provision to the current budget prohibiting jails and prisons from limiting communication access beyond their existing policies as those services become free.

“We’re feeling extremely happy with the language that came out of the legislature,” Jesse White, policy director at Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts, told Bolts. “Not only will phone calls be free, but also access should not be reduced.”

Many people now cheering the prospect of free prison phone calls once thought such reforms would never happen. Jarelis Fonseca, whose partner is incarcerated in Norfolk and who says she spends more every month on prison communications than on her car insurance, rent, and groceries combined, told Bolts she long ago accepted that extreme costs come with the territory of having a loved one in prison. 

“It’s something we feel like we just have to deal with, and deal with by ourselves,” she said. By becoming active in advocating for the Massachusetts change, she added, she’s come to understand how common her struggle is. 

“I was like many families: in the dark. I knew what I knew from what I pay and how much it cost for me. Many people are not able to talk about it,” she said. “We’re all deciding what we’re going to go without, putting things off, to add money to continue to speak to our loved one. It’s stressful.”

In recent years, a groundswell of activism has coalesced around cutting the high costs of communicating with people behind bars. Bianca Tylek, executive director of Worth Rises, an abolitionist organization helping lead a nationwide movement for free prison and jail communications, says organizers wanted to help incarcerated people and their loved ones while also chipping away at the network of private companies that profit off them. 

“Our strategy, when we started this work in 2017, was that we had to start somewhere,” Tylek told Bolts. “If we’re going to dismantle an industry—one that very few people know anything about—we have to start somewhere that feels accessible.”

Worth Rises estimates that prison telecommunications companies make nearly $1.9 billion annually from contracts with jails and prisons. That money goes mostly to a small group of private equity-owned corporations, but those corporations typically send kickbacks to governments who award them exclusive contracts. For instance, before Colorado made prison phone calls free, the state received up to $800,000 per year from the company Global Tel*Link for rights to run the prison system’s phone program.

Tylek says organizers highlighted the exorbitant cost of prison phone calls because they thought it would resonate with others. “I don’t think there’s anything more accessible than a simple phone call,” she said. “A phone call to your mom, to your child, to your partner. That seemed like something we could explain to people: that children deserve to hear ‘I love you’ whether or not their parent can afford a phone call.”

Tylek says there’s legislation planned for next year in Hawaii, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin, and that advocates are actively organizing for reforms in a half dozen other states. She says organizers hope to make at least prison phone calls free in every state by 2027.

Free communications may well enable even more advocacy from incarcerated people in Massachusetts, who could participate remotely in policymaking at no cost if prison calls are free. As this reform nears the finish line, organizers are already working on other legislation to loosen restrictions on in-person visitation that the prison system implemented in 2018. 

James Jeter, director of Connecticut’s Full Citizens Coalition, said he’s been able to dramatically expand his advocacy network since his state made calls free in 2021. That reform led to an immediate doubling of both total phone calls by incarcerated people in Connecticut and of average call duration, CT Insider reported. 

“We had this idea that once the phone calls went free, we could actually start in the prisons, educating guys in there on how to be advocates to their families, to run a phone-banking campaign through the incarcerated and their families,” Jeter, who is formerly incarcerated and whose organization is working toward full enfranchisement for all people in Connecticut with felony convictions, told Bolts. He added that his coalition now sends about 400 emails into the state prison system every day.

“We’re having conversations with people that we would otherwise have no access to,” Jeter said.

In this way, Tylek said, the movement to make communications free is already building on itself.

“We plan to get people from talking about prison telecom to talking about how we get into financial services or food or health care or commissary. Talking about telecom has allowed us to talk about exploitation more broadly,” she said.

For now, in Massachusetts, those most closely affected by the big business of calling home are hoping for financial relief and also closer connection to their loved ones behind bars. Research has consistently shown that maintaining close ties with family and friends is critical not only in improving outcomes for people while incarcerated, but also in giving those people a better shot at success once released.

Fonseca says she calls the prison about five times a day to talk with her partner in hopes that he feels connected to home. “For him and for anyone incarcerated, we know that when people feel incorporated still to their family and friends, they’ll do better when they’re in there and they’ll do better when they come out,” she said. “It’s about him knowing he’s supported, that sacrifices are being made for him, because he’s worth that.”

Joanna Levesque has also been stretching her budget to keep in touch with her partner, who is incarcerated in a prison in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. “It’s amazing what the consistency of having someone to talk to does for someone’s mental health,” Levesque said. “Nobody wants to be alone.” 

“It makes little sense to me that the cost of phone calls for inmates is so insanely high when the vast majority of us are indigent,” Levesque’s partner, Christopher O’Connor, told Bolts by email. “I often feel so bad for being a financial burden to my friends and family.”

Levesque says she hopes free calls allow them to remain close and also enable her to live more comfortably, including by eating breakfast and lunch more often. At the moment, she told Bolts, she works multiple jobs and prioritizes communication with her O’Connor over her own wellbeing—which, she says, means long stretches of fasting.

“I am so beyond excited,” she said.

The post Massachusetts Is Making Communications Free for Incarcerated People appeared first on Bolts.