Increased cost of jail calls threatens prison safety and family ties | Opinion

As if Americans weren’t already financially struggling, the Trump administration has decided to add another financial burden to millions of Americans: The Federal Communications Commission recently voted to dramatically increase the cost of prison and jail calls.

Phone calls will now be capped at 10 to 18 cents per minute and video calls at 18 to 41 cents per minute. The impact of this decision will also be felt across the country: Nearly half of all Americans have had an immediate family member — sibling, parent, spouse or child — incarcerated. So that increase in cents might not sound like a lot, but these rate hikes will cost American families an estimated $215 million every year.

The FCC claims that these rate hikes are necessary for safety and security reasons, but this is clearly about greed.

The prison telecommunications industry is a billion-dollar industry dominated by just a handful of corporations, including The Geo Group and CoreCivic, which are major donors to President Donald Trump. Higher rates mean higher profits for phone companies. Prison telecommunications companies have even been sued for conspiring to ban in-person visitation so that incarcerated people have to rely on expensive phone and video calls to talk to their loved ones.

One long-standing problem with prison phone calls is that prisons and sheriffs get a cut of the money spent on calls. According to the FCC’s new rule, this is now banned, but the FCC has said it is open to further comment on this policy, as well as ancillary fees, so these rate hikes might not be the only ones happening in the near future.

The irony behind the FCC’s “safety” excuse for these rate hikes is that they will actually make jails and prisons less safe because they will result in less communication between incarcerated people and their loved ones.

It is well documented that more communication between incarcerated people and their loved ones not only reduces violence and contraband in prison, it also reduces recidivism because it helps incarcerated people stay more connected to the outside world and transition more smoothly once they are released.

Some states have led the way in moving to free phone calls, and the results have been overwhelmingly positive. For example, California made phone calls from state prison free, starting in 2023. Prior to that, the cost was more than $6 for 15 minutes for in-state calls and more than $17 for 15 minutes for out-of-state calls.

Families who were previously going into debt just to stay in touch with incarcerated loved ones no longer had that financial worry, and contact between incarcerated people and their loved ones skyrocketed: In just a matter of six months, the call volume in California state prisons increased by 2.5 times —from 1.4 million minutes per day in December 2022 to more than 3.5 million minutes in June 2023. Phone calls are recorded and still capped at 15 minutes, but there is no cap on the number of calls an incarcerated person can make.

Making phone calls free benefits both incarcerated people and the institutions where they are incarcerated by making them safer places to be and helping prepare people for coming home.

California’s progress at the state prison level, however, is not matched at the county jail level: Some jails still charge for phone calls. For example, while jails in San Francisco and Los Angeles counties do not charge for calls, jails in Sacramento and Yolo counties still do.

As a criminal defense and civil rights attorney, I have seen both the devastating impact of incarcerated people not being able to regularly talk to their loved ones due to financial barriers and the positive impact of policies that allow for free and regular communication.

More communication is a win-win, and I hope California will not take the FCC’s recent move to further gouge Californians who are incarcerated in our jails. The FCC’s new rule is a move in the wrong direction.

Natasha Baker is a civil rights and criminal defense attorney based in Oakland.

This story was originally published November 19, 2025 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Increased cost of jail calls threatens prison safety and family ties | Opinion."