FCC rules that prisoners can use cheaper VoIP alternatives to call home

Cyrus Farivar - Sep 26, 2013 11:45 pm UTC

Being in prison sounds pretty terrible all around. Among all the elements of incarceration that seem awful, prisoners even face crazy-high call rates to simply stay in touch with their loved ones. Those charges were capped at $0.21 per minute as recently as last month—down from $1 per minute (and sometimes higher).

But on Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) made it a little easier for those in the clink to call home by ruling that a VoIP-powered service called ConsCallHome can continue to exist.

Typically, inmates have to call a long-distance number (an anachronism in the age of cellphones) to reach their friends and family. But for the last five years, ConsCallHome (CCH) has given families a local (read: cheaper) phone number to pass along to their incarcerated family member. The prisoner calls the new local VoIP number (rather than their family's actual number), and CCH then forwards the call to the family's real number.

Securus Technologies, one of the leading companies providing existing wireline services to prisons, petitioned the FCC to block this service. The company argued that it was a "[c]all diversion scheme" that "re-routes inmate-initiated calls to unknown terminating telephone numbers." The Texas-based firm went so far as to block all ConsCallHome calls made over its network.

Why? Securus said that this was routing around its traditional network and therefore potentially compromising security. (This is a prison, after all, where calls are routinely monitored so that prisoners cannot communicate illicit information with informants or unauthorized contacts on the outside.)

Today, the FCC wrote that this is not the issue Securus made it out to be:

The call routing services are not initiated by the calling party, as in the case of "operator services," but rather are subscribed to by the party being called. The calling party does not have to engage any automatic or live assistance in order to complete the call: indeed, for the calling party, the routed call is completed in a seamless manner.

The FCC added they "expect that Securus will abide by its commitment to discontinue the blocking of inmates’ calls to CCH customers."

Ars may continue to look into this practice, so if you know anyone affected by this service, give us a shout.