Idaho prisoners and their families get ripped off just for making a phone call | Opinion
If Tina Thompson wants to talk to her daughter, Siena, in the Canyon County jail, she first needs to put some money in her account with the jail.
Sometimes, all she can afford is $10.
That $10 deposit, though, becomes a $13.30 charge.
That’s because the for-profit company that handles the phone calls and video chats at the Canyon County jail charges $3.30 just for the privilege of putting $10 into an inmate’s account.
A 33% fee is borderline criminal.
On top of that, inmates and their families are charged outrageous rates to make phone calls, send texts or talk by video.
These families are getting ripped off, and they’re usually those who can least afford it.
Tina Thompson, for example, is 69, retired and trying to survive on her $1,166 monthly Social Security check.
“It costs you a lot of money to give them a little money,” Thompson said. “And the more money you try and give them, the more it costs. There is no reason they need to charge that.”
Jail communications
In the course of writing a series of columns about the opioid epidemic, I spoke with Siena, who’s in the Canyon County jail, and her girlfriend, Sawyer Morrison, who’s in the Valley County Jail.
The two women are being housed in county jails as part of their state prison sentences on drug charges because there isn’t any room for them in a state prison. Neither jail has in-person visitation available.
My experience communicating with them was maddening. I can only imagine how infuriating it is for families who have to deal with this all the time.
I spoke with Morrison by phone — five minutes at a time. Phone calls in jail are limited to five minutes. In all, we conducted five such phone calls, interrupted by a voice recording alerting us that we had two minutes left, then one minute left, then the call would be disconnected, and Sawyer had to call me all over again.
Those calls cost 21 cents per minute, or more than $5 just to talk for 25 minutes.
Talking to Siena was a little more complicated — and invasive.
We agreed to do a video interview, which costs $7.50 for a 30-minute session, or 25 cents per minute.
First, I had to set up an account with Getting Out, the ironically named service that facilitates the phone and video calls at the jail. I had to enter my name, number, home address, email address, last four digits of my Social Security number, birth date and credit card information to open and put money in my account. I thought they were going to ask for my first-born son at some point.
I received several messages that my account wasn’t verified, and when I requested a meeting with Siena, it was denied. Two requests to the “help center” went unanswered.
Eventually, my account was verified, and I was able to schedule a meeting. When the time came for our video call, though, Getting Out wouldn’t charge my account and charged Siena’s account instead.
Even once we finally were able to connect and talk via video, our call abruptly and inexplicably ended after just 12 minutes.
That’s a regular occurrence, Tina Thompson later told me.
Siena and I finished our interview via phone, for another 27 minutes, for which I was charged $6.72, or 25 cents per minute, in addition to the $7.50 charge for the video call that got cut short.
As an aside, I was notified via email that my video visit with Siena was confirmed and scheduled — three days after my visit. Customer service, apparently, is not a priority. Why would it be? They have a captive audience, so to speak.
Texts from jail cost 10 cents for 160 characters. Phone calls cost 21-25 cents per minute. Video calls cost $7.50 for 30 minutes, or 25 cents per minute.
These families are getting ripped off.
It’s immoral.
Held hostage
Inmates at the Canyon County jail do get two free video visits per week, and Thompson said they try to stick to just those visits each week.
But Thompson said she has a heart problem, and Siena gets worried about her and wants to check in with her every other day or so.
“She gets so worried about me that she uses the phone to hear my voice and to talk to me,” Thompson said. “And that eats up pretty much two-thirds of her money.”
Inmates are also charged to buy their own underwear, bra, toothpaste, snacks, etc. These are typically handled through a separate service and contract. In Canyon County, Summit provides commissary services; in Ada County, it’s Aramark.
“Trying to help these kids out, or whoever you have in there, try and buy their hygiene products and stuff, I can’t do it,” Thompson said. “I mean I do what I can, but my God, the products that they have access to and the prices for those products is insane.
“And then try to give them a little money so they can call you every now and again on top of that, you just can’t do it. You just can’t do it. It’s just so expensive.”
The charges for items from the commissary can be hefty: $4.51 for boxers; $16.94 for a bra; $3.71 for a small tube of Colgate toothpaste; $7.15 for a 10-ounce container of mixed nuts, according to a commissary list Tina Thompson shared with me.
“I tried to send her $5 the other day because she wanted $5 to get toothpaste,” Thompson said. “I can’t do it because it’s a minimum of $10. There’s a fee for everything, and it’s an exorbitant fee.”
Thompson, who retired after working 20 years as a technical engineer for HP, said she tries to put $100 into Siena’s account at the beginning of every month right after she gets her Social Security check. They try to stretch that to the end of the month, but it usually doesn’t make it.
And this month, Thompson said she wasn’t able to put $100 in her account for the month.
“So they go without,” Thompson said. “She doesn’t have anybody but me to put money on her account, so they go without. You know, their hygiene and snacks. It’s not a crime, you know, to want a snack in there and her paper and envelopes. So (the money) goes, and then the phone calls, you add all that together, and $100 doesn’t do squat.”
Thompson has another adult daughter, who is disabled but lives on her own, and she tries to help her as much as she can.
“So it gets overwhelming pretty fast, honestly,” Thompson said. “But we do what we can.”
The ability to call and talk to her daughter in jail should not be yet another burden placed on Thompson — or on anyone.
It’s not just Idaho. This is happening all over the country, and it’s been going on for years. Companies are profiting to the tune of billions of dollars. Efforts have been made to regulate the charges through the Federal Communications Commission, with limited success. We should be better than this in America. We shouldn’t allow companies to profit off inmates and their families just because someone has landed in jail. We shouldn’t make it so onerous for inmates to have simple communication with families, the most basic of all rights.
“I mean, they have phone systems set up in jail, and if it’s a local call, what are they out?” she said. “I don’t understand. What are they out to allow somebody to make a local call? You could put limitations on it, sure, but they don’t have to charge for that.”
Thompson lives in Nampa, in a double-wide mobile home she owns outright, just a few miles away from the Canyon County jail in Caldwell. But in-person visits are not allowed, so the only way for Thompson to communicate with her daughter is by paying for phone or video chats.
She’s held hostage by the system.
How important is it to maintain communication with someone in jail?
“It’s everything,” she said. “When you’re incarcerated, and you have no clue what’s going on in the outside world, you worry and you think of the worst case scenarios that can happen to your loved one. So she worries incessantly about if I’m doing okay, because she can’t get to me. She can’t do anything for me. So if they don’t have that communication, it impacts her mental health greatly.”
Importance of staying in touch
Several studies over the years have shown a direct correlation between family contact during incarceration and positive outcomes after release.
“The central finding of this research is the strong and consistent positive relationship that exists between parole success and maintaining strong family ties while in prison,” according to one study.
Only 50% of “no contact” inmates completed their first year on parole without being arrested, while 70% of those with three visitors were arrest-free during the same period.
“In addition, the ‘loners’ were six times more likely to wind up back in prison during the first year (12% returned compared to 2% for those with three or more visitors),” according to the study. “For all … levels, we found that those who maintained closer ties performed more satisfactorily on parole.”
What’s worse is that calls from county jails are typically more expensive than calls from prison. The Prison Policy Initiative estimates it’s 2.6 times more expensive to make a call from jail than it is from prison.
That affects people like Sawyer, Siena and their families — and they are being housed in a jail only because the broken Idaho system means there is no room in prison.
Contract kickbacks
But here’s the dirty little secret, and the reason that these contracts still exist: Governments get a “kickback.” Government agencies are financially incentivized to keep these contracts going.
Canyon County received about $130,000 last year from its contract with TelMate.
Ada County received $540,000 last year from TelMate.
The Idaho Department of Correction received $1.5 million from its provider, ICSolutions.
And that’s on top of the money that the private companies made off the deals. It’s millions of dollars off the backs of people who can least afford it.
It’s unconscionable.
These dirty contracts with these private, for-profit companies need to go. The only ones who benefit are the companies — certainly not the prisoners, inmates and their families.
Patrick Orr, spokesperson for Ada County, wrote in an email that the money goes into the county general fund and is used to reduce the tax burden for the operation of the jail.
That’s been the standard justification for such kickbacks.
It may seem like taxpayers get a good deal out of it, because we don’t have to pay for their phone calls and actually make a little money off it, but think about recidivism, not to mention decency. If regular family communication reduces the number of people coming back into the criminal justice system, it could very well save the taxpayers money in the long run. Aren’t we supposed to be rehabilitating people in this country, not making it more difficult for them to get back on their feet?
The system is bad for morale, bad for inmates and bad for the families that end up bearing an unreasonable financial burden.
It’s time for public officials to end this immoral practice.
