The FCC has approved new rate caps for Incarcerated People’s Communication Services (IPCS), undoing key 2024 reforms and reducing financial relief for families by an estimated $215 million annually, while allowing providers to recapture surveillance costs, impose facility fees, and adjust rates for inflation.
Advocates and families are urging the FCC to maintain affordable prison communication rates, as the FCC is set to consider weakening rate caps established in 2024 under a 2023 federal law.
Worth Rises has criticized the FCC’s proposal to increase the phone call rate cap for incarcerated people, arguing that it will result in a loss of $215 million in annual relief for incarcerated people and their families.
Nearly 15,000 individuals and over 100 organizations are urging the FCC to reinstate caps on prison phone rates after the agency suspended protections earlier this summer.
Bianca Tylek has raised concerns about the expansion of private prison corporations profiting from the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement policies, which has led to longer detention periods, the reopening of previously closed facilities, and the influx of new vendors in the immigration detention space.
A coalition of public interest groups has filed an Application for Review with the FCC, urging them to reverse the Wireline Competition Bureau’s suspension of 2024 rules aimed at lowering the cost of phone calls from prisons.
The UK’s National Contact Point for the OECD accepted complaints alleging that Barclays and HSBC violated OECD guidelines by maintaining financial ties to CoreCivic and GEO Group, two private prison operators accused of systemic human rights abuses.
New York has become the first state to make all phone calls from state prisons free, following a new agreement between the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision and telecom provider Securus Technologies, which will cost the state approximately $9 million this fiscal year.
Worth Rises, a nonprofit organization, has criticized the Federal Communications Commission for delaying the implementation of new rules capping phone rates for incarcerated individuals, and is instead rewarding the prison telecom corporations and their profit-sharing partners.
Bianca Tylek’s new book The Prison Industry: How It Works and Who Profits reveals how corporations, investors, and government actors profit from human incarceration, and provides a blueprint for resistance through divestment campaigns, legislative advocacy, and public pressure.
U.S. prison system is a $80 billion industry that impacts nearly 2 million incarcerated individuals. Bianca Tylek…