Communication between prisoners and their family and friends serves important public interests. Prisoners often lack sufficient programs and activities to keep them busy. Prisoners who are bored are more likely to foster tension and hostility within a jail or prison. Communication with family and friends keeps prisoners occupied and peaceful. Moreover, modern prison phone systems include powerful call control, call tracking, and call monitoring technologies. The resulting massive dataset of prisoners’ social networks and communication contents provides a valuable forensic resource for detecting and stopping crime. In addition, communication with family and friends help prisoners to maintain personal contacts crucial for their re-integration into society as law-abiding, productive members upon release from imprisonment.
Most prisoners and their family and friends intensely desire to communicate. Being imprisoned typically is an unplanned event. Imprisonment can last for weeks, months, or years. Without communication, prisoners and their family and friends cannot share current experiences, exchange guidance, advice, and encouragement, and provide each other with personal understanding and emotional support. Moreover, the boredom often imposed in prison accentuates prisoners’ loneliness.
Given the public interest in fostering prisoners’ communication and the personal demand for it, spending for prisoner communication services is remarkably low. Based on Prison Legal News’ recent survey of U.S. state prison phone contacts, prisoners and their families spent on average $24 per month on communication services about the year 2008.[1] All U.S. households in that year averaged $149 per month on wireline phone, wireless phone, and Internet access services.[2] The prison phone spending figure and the household communication spending figure differ in many ways. The comparison, however, highlights that $24 a month is a relatively small amount to be spending on communication. That’s particularly true given the high public and personal value of communication with prisoners.
Underdeveloped prisoner communication services partly explain the low level of prisoner communication spending. Many prisoners have to share a single, immobile prison phone. In many prisons and jails in the U.S., prisoners currently cannot make calls to wireless phones. Since wireless phones are rapidly becoming the primary phone for most persons, not being able to call wireless phones is a significant limitation. In addition, most prisoners currently cannot send text message, cannot access YouTube, Facebook, and other social networking sites, and cannot access the Internet generally. They also cannot use rapidly developing video calling and conferencing services. Implemented with appropriate communication control, tracking, and monitoring, such communication services surely would stimulate prisoner communication service spending.
Other problems constrain spending even within the narrow category of prisoner telephone service. The Prison Legal News dataset indicates wide variation across states in average spending per prisoner per month. Encouraging prisoner communication service spending requires supporting operational policies. Prison and jail operational policies that lessen prisoners’ opportunities to use phones lessen prison phone revenue. In addition, contraband cell phones have become a significant problem in jails and prisons. Spending on contraband cell phones is not captured in the figures for authorized prisoner communications systems and probably partly substitutes for such spending. Authorized prisoner phone systems have much higher call prices than do normal phones. Given the challenge of suppressing contraband cell phones and the high responsiveness of calling volumes to price, some prison phone systems may have calling prices above the revenue-maximizing calling prices. That’s another possible source of lost prisoner communication revenue for service providers and prison systems.
The size of the prisoner communication service business could easily increase greatly in the future. While this rather obvious truth is often not recognized, prisoners really are promising customers for communication services.
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Data source: Prison Legal News, v. 22, n. 4 (Apr. 2011) p. 16, “Prison Phone Contract Data / Kickbacks / Daytime Collect Call Rates,” filed in FCC CC Docket No. 96-128 (“Wright Petition”), Apr. 25, 2011.
Derived Needle dataset, with some augmentations and modifications. Service provider names have been consolidated to reflect VAC’s recent acquisition of FSH and GTL’s recent acquisition of PCS. State prison populations are for year-end 2008, from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prisoners in 2008, App. Table 2. Here’s an alternate form of the Prison Legal News (PLN) Source (Excel file). Consult the original PLN source to resolve any questions about the data.
Notes:
[1] Prisoner phone service providers typically share gross service revenue with the incarceration facility or jurisdiction awarding the prisoner phone service contract. The revenue share to the incarceration facility or jurisdiction is commonly called a commission or kickback. The dollar value of this commission, divided by the revenue share, estimates total spending for the state. These data are available for states that imprison in total 71% of state prisoners. Total spending across these states, divided by total prisoners in these states, estimates spending per prisoner per year.
[2] FCC, Trends in Telephone Service , 2010, Table 3.4.