Advocates, Sheriffs, and Service Providers Face Off Over FCC’s Prison Phone Rates
FCC rules prisoners shouldn’t pay for most communications security services. But opponents ask: Who will?
June 18, 2025 – The battle over how much incarcerated people should pay to stay connected with loved ones escalated this week.
Sheriffs, telecom providers, and civil rights advocates filed opposing briefs in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit over a Federal Communications Commission rule that slashed prison phone rates and restricted providers from passing along most of the costs associated with call monitoring and other security measures.
While sheriffs and service providers opposed the FCC’s limits on passing security costs onto incarcerated people, public interest groups said the FCC’s order didn’t go far enough.
FROM SPEEDING BEAD SUMMIT
Panel 1: How Are States Thinking About Reasonable Costs Now?
Panel 2: Finding the State Versus Federal Balance in BEAD
Panel 3: Reacting to the New BEAD NOFO Guidance
Panel 4: Building, Maintaining and Adopting Digital Workforce Skills
Along with the standard service costs that providers need to charge for a phone call or other communications service, incarcerated people’s communications services providers must provide security and safety services to ensure prisons can monitor inmates’ calls. The FCC’s proposed solution to this extra security cost has upset groups on both sides of the issue.
“[By] imposing an unreasonably strict definition of what qualifies as ‘necessary,’ the FCC systematically undervalues critical safety and security measures,” wrote two major providers of incarcerated communications services, Securus Technologies and Pay Tel Communications, along with the National Sheriffs’ Association, in a joint filing submitted Sunday.
Public interest groups, including the Direct Action for Rights and Equality, pushed back in a separate brief Monday stating, “The Commission correctly excluded site commissions and many…safety and security costs that do not benefit IPCS consumers. Nonetheless, the Commission’s Order should have gone further to protect consumers.”
The FCC’s 2024 order interpreting the Martha Wright-Reed Act, which ensures “just and reasonable” rates for communication devices like payphones for prisoners, caused a stir when it took effect last November. The order “slashed the cost of a 15-minute call from as high as $11.35 in some large jails to as low as $0.90.”
The ISPs serving prisons said in November that the FCC “went too far” and “overcorrected in a way that [will] ultimately hurt [everyone involved].”
But in their most recent First Circuit brief, public interest advocates argued the FCC still allowed too many security-related costs to slip through.
“In determining the lower bounds [of the price capping], the Commission unlawfully…included safety and security costs, but those costs predominantly serve law enforcement” and are not useful to IPCS consumers, DARE et al. said, continuing that the existence of these security costs are “speculative” and the FCC “arbitrarily included a two-cent ‘additive’ to account for ‘correctional facility costs.’”
Still, prison telecom providers maintained that “the rate caps place more than half of all providers underwater.” The FCC’s “conclusion that IPCS rates should not pay for [certain] safety and security measures does not make those costs disappear,” Securus and Pay Tel wrote.
