"Inside the Shadowy Business of Prison Phone Calls"

"Jones says she’d travel to Texas to visit her son in person, but Hays County Jail, where he is locked up, banned visitations in November 2013. That happened shortly after the county jail entered into a contract with Securus.

Since then, all family communication with inmates at Hays County goes through Securus, which charges Jones about $10 for a phone call and about $8 for a video visit.

In the year and a half that her son has been locked up, Jones says she has racked up over $1,000 in bills with Securus to keep in contact with her son...

If you’ve ever tried to call an inmate, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of Securus, or its main competitor, Global Tel*Link (GTL). GTL was recently featured by Bloomberg, which reported that NPR spent $2,500 on phone bills to report for its “Serial” podcast...

The prison phone business is a wildly complex, fiercely secretive and enormously lucrative industry. Already, interested parties have held quiet skirmishes behind the scenes to protect their interests. Perhaps the most controversial element of the FCC plan to rein in the costs of prisoner calls is to limit the amount of commissions that get paid back to county sheriffs...

Paul Wright, head of the Human Rights Defense Center, also says that there’s little oversight over the money that’s generated from these commissions, and the funds are often misspent. For instance, in the Orange County Jail in California in 2010, the inmate welfare services fund grew to $5,016,429. Of that sum, 74 percent was used to pay staff salaries, according to documents filed with the FCC. About 0.8% was used for inmate educational programs and 0.06% was used for inmate re-entry programs."

http://atavist.ibtimes.com/fcc-prison-telecom-industry