BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM
For decades, a phone call home from prison could cost a family several dollars a minute. That wasn’t an oversight. It was the business model.
A growing number of state prison systems and county jails have moved to make calls free, arguing that regular contact with family is one of the more reliable tools for reducing harm during and after incarceration. A new report from Worth Rises, a nonprofit that monitors the prison industry, now has numbers on what actually happened.
The numbers are larger than expected
The report covered six state prison systems, California, New York, and the federal system among them, plus more than a dozen county jails across Los Angeles, New York City, and Massachusetts. When agencies negotiated contracts directly with telecom providers rather than routing deals through revenue-sharing arrangements, costs dropped. By a lot: about 62 percent for state systems, 68 percent for jails.
Across those systems, incarcerated people and their families have saved more than $622 million. Most of those savings went to Black and brown families, who are disproportionately represented in the incarcerated population.
Call volume went up sharply. Daily use per person in prisons rose from roughly 25 minutes to nearly 45 minutes once calls became free. In jails, it more than doubled, from about 27 minutes to nearly 57 minutes a day. In total: an estimated 600 million additional calls and 6.4 billion more minutes of connection.
What people talked about changed, too
When calls cost money, families ration them: emergencies, financial logistics, urgent updates. When cost disappears, so does the rationing. People call to check on children. They talk through housing plans before release, work out job details, or pass along the ordinary family news that doesn’t feel urgent enough to justify three dollars a minute.
Researchers have tracked where reentry breaks down, and family ties keep coming up. People who stay connected during incarceration are more likely to find stable housing and work after release, and less likely to return. Worth Rises didn’t produce that finding; it’s fairly well established in the literature. The report just shows how much contact was being suppressed by cost.
Correctional staff at the facilities studied reported something similar from inside. Tensions dropped. Safety improved for staff and incarcerated people.
A practical argument for a values question
Advocates for free prison calls have long argued from a human rights position: incarcerated people should be able to stay connected to their families. That argument is sound. It also hasn’t moved policy as fast as anyone hoped.
The cost argument lands differently. Free calls, properly contracted, actually run cheaper than what came before, because direct contracts cut out the revenue-sharing arrangements with private providers. For legislators weighing budgets, that removes the need to resolve a values debate before acting.
About 330,000 incarcerated people, or roughly 15 percent of the two million people in American jails and prisons, now have access to free calls, video calls, or messaging.
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