When Mary Sheilds was first sent to prison, her daughter was too young to understand why their phone calls would cut off mid-conversation and why she would not hear from her mother again for days. Shields was among the many incarcerated people who had their contact with loved ones curtailed by the high rates for making prison phone calls. During her 21 years in a California state prison, she spoke with her family for 15 minutes twice a month. Each call cost $15.
“Those calls are very expensive,” she said, noting that her family paid the phone bills as well as the cost of caring for her children. Shields could have put more of a burden on her family but thought it would only drain their financial resources. “I wasn’t able to do that because I wanted the best for my children. I didn’t want to take anything away from them and that” — the phone bills — “was taking away from them.”
In 2013 and then again in 2015, President Barack Obama’s Federal Communications Commission, the body that regulates the prison phone industry, moved to alleviate the burden of the impossible choice like the one faced by Shields. After activists waged a decadeslong campaign to lower prison call rates, the FCC voted to cap the costs. Different facilities maintained different rates, but no incarcerated person, under Obama’s new rules, would be paying more than 49 cents per minute for a call to someone in the same state where their prison was located. ...