EDITOR’S NOTE: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.
As families gather this holiday season, it’s a heartbreaking time of year for those with incarcerated relatives. Not only are they deprived of seeing their loved ones in-person, but also they’re often forced to choose between having no contact whatsoever with those loved ones or accumulating staggering debt.
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That’s because in the United States’ jails and prisons, many incarcerated people are charged steep fees to make phone calls to the outside world. On average, a 15-minute call costs $5.74, with some prisons charging a dollar or more per minute—not counting tacked-on hidden fees that can increase overall costs by up to 40 percent.
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All told, the correctional telecom industry rakes in more than $1.4 billion annually from prisoner phone calls. That cost is generally passed on to the families of incarcerated people—who are disproportionately low-income, and disproportionately people of color. More than one-third of families with incarcerated relatives go into debt to cover the cost of staying in touch.
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Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.
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