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| New York to Adopt One Billing Rate for Inmate Calls |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 08/05/2003 |
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Starting August 1, people receiving collect telephone calls placed by New York state prison inmates will be charged the same rate, whether the call is local or long distance. State Corrections Commissioner Glenn Goord said 83 percent of call recipients will see lower phone charges. That is because the bulk of prison inmates are from the New York City area while most prisons are upstate, meaning the majority of calls placed by prisoners are long distance. Charges for local calls will double, prison officials said. About 17 percent of inmate-placed calls are local. 'Implementing fairness and equity has a cost: those who have the benefit of being most able to visit incarcerated loved ones - because they are housed closest to home - will see their telephone charges rise,' Goord said. The new standardized charge of a $3 connection fee plus 16 cents a minute will replace 126 different per-minute rates now imposed on inmate calls depending on the time of day and day of the week they are placed and how far away the recipient is. An inmate call typically lasts 19 minutes, according to prison officials. In-state long-distance calls cost $6.44 under the old system, interstate long-distant calls cost $6.63 and local calls cost $3.02. Starting August 1, a 19-minute call placed by an inmate will cost $6.04 across the board. Inmates complete about 500,000 telephone calls a month from the 3,335 collect call-only phones in state prisons. Phones are available in common areas of prisons from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily and calls are limited to 30 minutes. Calls to 800 and 900 numbers are blocked out. Prison spokesman James Flateau said a flat rate will help families better plan their telephone budgets. He said it is also fairer, because inmates are frequently moved to different prisons at the direction of prison officials. 'Is it the inmates' fault that he's from New York City and he's at Dannemora (a state prison near the Canadian border)?' Flateau said recently. 'That's not fair. They had no control over that.' The families of inmates who place local calls might complain about their higher charges under the new rate structure, Flateau said, 'but I don't think any of those families are going to ask us to move the inmate farther from home.' Also last week, a state appeals court in Albany threw out a suit filed on behalf of inmate families challenging the MCI Worldcom prisoner calling system. Among other things, the families claimed the state's contract with MCI Worldcom violated their right to take calls from inmates over lower-cost carriers. The Appellate Division of state Supreme Court said the families did not have legal standing to bring their claims. |
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