Prisoners at the San Benito County Jail make some of the most
expensive collect calls in the county
– not because they choose to rack up exorbitant phone bills, but
because they have no choice if they want to communicate with the
outside world.
San Benito County – Prisoners at the San Benito County Jail make some of the most expensive collect calls in the county – not because they choose to rack up exorbitant phone bills, but because they have no choice if they want to communicate with the outside world.
A phone call made by an inmate at the San Benito County Jail to a friend or family member in Hollister costs 50 cents per minute, according to telephone records at the jail.
In 2002-03, inmates’ telephone calls from San Benito netted $62,000, or about $585 per prisoner. Those figures come from an Associated Press investigation of jail phone rates across California, which found that phone bills for friends and families of inmates totaled more than $120 million a year.
By law, counties are supposed to spend their share of the money, which is almost half of the total amount generated, on inmate welfare programs. These programs include inmate schooling, television sets and narcotics and alcoholic anonymous programs, according to Sheriff Curtis Hill.
However, the law gives sheriff’s wide discretion and many sheriffs in the state use it to fill other budget gaps, according to the AP.
“What we use the funds for follow strictly what the statue says,” Hill said. “We get 48 percent, and that revenue goes into the inmate welfare fund.”
Hill conceded some counties in California could abuse the revenue source, but he said San Benito County has only used the money as it was intended.
“The accusation out there is that counties are gouging inmates and their families,” he said. “I’m not sure if they understand that collect calls cost money… Families of inmates gotta pay attention. This isn’t a free chat line. The person accepting the collect call is accepting the charges.”
The funds are also used to fund a part-time jail maintenance employee who fixes leaky faucets, makes general repairs and supervises inmate workers, Hill said.
Hill said he doesn’t have any problem with the high rates, as long as the revenue is being spent where it should be – on the inmates.
A problem appears when sheriffs are not responsible in how they allocate the revenue and begin to rely on it to offset their general fund, he said.
“We don’t do that here,” he said.
“I’ve had tax payers say, ‘Why do we have to pay for TVs for inmates?’ Well, the tax payer’s money didn’t pay for that, the inmates paid for that,” Hill said. “(The inmates) understand when they make a collect phone call, the profit is going to them. They get it. They understand it.”
Unlike consumer telephone rates, calls from jails are unregulated. Neither the California Public Utilities Commission nor the Federal Communications Commission has control over contracts negotiated by counties or over the rates charged for calls from jails.
Telephone company Global Tel Link of Alabama, which the sheriff’s department has contracted with for the past eight or nine years, gets the other 52 percent of the money collected from calls from the San Benito County Jail, Hill said.
When asked why the rates were so high, Teresa Ridgeway, vice president of marketing for Global Tel Link, responded by e-mail that she did not have time to gather the information by press time.
She did say that San Benito County’s collect call rates for inmate telephone calls “mirror those of the dominant carrier rates for collect calls made from any pay phone. In fact, in San Benito, our interstate call rates for inmate collect calls are lower than the dominant carrier rates for collect calls from pay phones.”
She would not say what the dominant carrier rates – the standard rates issued by the company to any pay phone it owns – in San Benito County are.
Six companies provide most of the phone service to California’s county jails. Telephone companies defend the high charges, claiming specialized equipment and security features such as call blocking and monitoring are needed in jails, the AP reported.
San Benito’s contract with Global Tel Link, which was renewed in May for five years, included an upgrade in the jail’s phone system that allows jail personnel to digitally record inmates’ phone calls.
Hill didn’t know if the new contract was more expensive than the last because of the upgrade or if collect call rates increased with it.
One Hollister resident, whose son was in the San Benito County Jail from January to June, said she could only talk to her son for three or four minutes at a time because she couldn’t afford the charges.
The woman, who asked to remain anonymous, said she talked to her son a couple times a week, and, over the course of her son’s five-month incarceration, she racked up a $270 phone bill.
“I had to talk fast because it costs a lot of money and I couldn’t afford it,” she said. “It’s hard when people are not working good or have too many kids to support and they have to pay too much money. It’s not fair.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
