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August 7, 2020 12:02 am

FCC Lowers Some Prison Phone Rates After Blaming States For High Prices

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission today voted unanimously to lower the prices inmates pay for phone calls from prisons and jails, but the organization reiterated its position that state governments must take action to lower prices on the majority of inmate calls. Today's action is a proposal to "substantially reduce [the FCC's] interstate rate caps -- currently $0.21 per minute for debit and prepaid calls and $0.25 per minute for collect calls -- to $0.14 per minute for debit, prepaid, and collect calls from prisons, and $0.16 per minute for debit, prepaid, and collect calls from jails." This is part of a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, which means the commission will take public comment before finalizing the new caps and could change the plan before making it final. Since the proposed rate cap limits prices on interstate calls only, it won't affect the approximately 80 percent of prison calls that don't cross state lines. Last month, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai urged state governments to cap intrastate calling prices, saying the FCC lacks authority to do so. Pai said that "33 states allow rates that are at least double the current federal cap, and 27 states allow excessive 'first-minute' charges up to 26 times that of the first minute of an interstate call." Prison phone companies Global Tel*Link and Securus Technologies have repeatedly challenged FCC-imposed rate limits in court. But while the Obama-era FCC fought in court to lower intrastate rates, Pai in January 2017 instructed FCC lawyers to drop the commission's court defense of the FCC cap on intrastate calling rates. The FCC might have lost that case anyway, as previous court rulings went against the commission. But Pai's decision to drop the court defense helped ensure that the FCC wouldn't be able to cap intrastate rates. The report notes that the FCC also took action to lower some of the "ancillary" fees prison phone companies apply to both interstate and intrastate calls.

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