Month: September 2011

Prisoners held in U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons’ facilities are generally limited to no more than 300 minutes of telephone calls per month.  This limit was recommended in 1997 and enacted in 2001.  It served to lessen the burden of human monitoring of prisoners’ telephone calls.  Since then, technologies for automatically monitoring, searching, and analyzing telephone calls have improved greatly.  Nonetheless, the call-minute limit has changed little.  A call limit that recognized the capabilities of new technology would increase call revenue for the Bureau of Prisons and increase welfare for prisoners and their family and friends.

When humans were the primary monitors of prisoners’ telephone calls, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) enacted a limit on prisoners’ calls to help reduce the challenge of monitoring calls.  Prior to 2001, BOP prisoners’ telephone calls were not generally limited.  In 1999, the U.S. Inspector General studied the BOP’s management of prisoners’ telephone use.  The Inspector General noted:

Permitting inmates access to prison telephones and protecting the public against crimes facilitated through use of prison telephones present a complex balancing of interests. … At the present time, the balance appears tilted too far in favor of inmate access.

Among the Inspector General’s recommendations were the following:

1. The BOP should impose limits on all inmates’ telephone privileges. The 1997 Wardens’ Working Group recommended 300 minutes per month, an arbitrary figure arrived at without examining data on inmate telephone usage. The BOP should research this issue and develop a recommendation for limiting the number of minutes that inmates can use the telephone which takes into account inmate calling patterns and the number of calls that can be effectively monitored by available staff.
2. The BOP currently monitors less than four percent of all inmate calls. This is an unacceptably low percentage to detect and deter criminal conduct by inmates. We recommend that the BOP set a significantly higher goal and then calculate the resources needed to meet this goal. Undoubtedly, this will require two things: more staff assigned to monitoring inmate telephone calls and fewer inmate calls.

On April 2, 2001, the BOP enacted the 300 minutes per month limit that the 1997 Wardens’ Working group had recommended.  The BOP subsequently increased the limit to 400 minutes for only the months of November and December.  Americans not incarcerated spend on average about 850 minutes per month on the telephone.  Hence the limit on prisoners’ telephone use limits prisoners to less than half as much telephone communication as that of persons not incarcerated.

Information technology developed within the past decade offers major advances in storing, searching, and analyzing prisoners’ telephone calls.  Internet search engines run flexible keyword searches over massive datasets.  Similar machine searching of inmate calls offers a forensic tool that is far beyond anything that human monitors could achieve.  Such technology can also handle a wide range of languages much more easily than can human monitors.  This new technology surely should affect the balancing of interests in regulating prisoners’ telephone calls.

The number of minutes per month prisoners spend on the phone probably isn’t correlated with criminal activity. With crude human call monitoring, minutes per month is correlated with staff work requirement.  That seems to have been the primary concern in 1999.  Current automated call monitoring and call profiling largely eliminate the correlation between minutes of use and human staff work.  Hence whether a need for any general limit on prisoners’ call minutes currently exists should be carefully considered.

Increasing the limit on prisoners’ telephone calls would have significant benefits.  Raising the limit to 500 minutes per month would generate an estimated additional $1.2 million for the BOP.[1]  That limit would still constrain prisoners to 41% fewer telephone minutes per month than the 850 minutes per month that non-incarcerated persons use.  With a 500 minutes per month limit, an estimated 10% of prisoner would reach that limit.[2]  The additional telephone calls would increase the welfare of prisoners and their families and friends.  Moreover, at a cost well within the bounds of the additional phone revenue gained, new technology almost surely could advance public safety relative to the balance recommended in 1999.

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Spreadsheet calculating effect of increasing prisoners’ call limit (Excel version)

Related post: prisoners are promising customers for communications services

Notes:

[1] Calculation based on an exponential model for the distribution of monthly call minutes across prisoners.  Available evidence indicates that the prisoner-minute distribution has a fatter tail than an exponential distribution.  That implies that actual revenue would be greater than the revenue estimated with the exponential model.

[2] Increasing the monthly minute limit to 850 minutes would generate an estimated additional revenue of $1.8 million.  An estimated 2% of prisoners would be at that limit.  The revenue benefit of eliminating the general minute limit would be greater than $1.8 million.  A more precise figure is difficult to calculate because it depends on the weight in the distant tail of the call-minute distribution.