![]() ![]() ![]() Karen Stuckey, whose son and husband are incarcerated, says she pays about six times more to speak to them than she does for her personal phone service. In a previous interview with the Orlando Sentinel, an FDC spokesperson said state officials were “looking to maximize value” for the majority of prison callers, who were not using the much lower call rate for local calls that was priced at 4 cents a minute.Īccording to the spokesperson, less than a quarter of prison calls were local, due to many of the agency’s prisons being located in remote areas of north Florida, while the majority of prisoners’ families live in Central or South Florida. State officials supported the contract with ViaPath Technologies because it lowered the per-minute call rate by half a cent and also offered longer call times and the option to leave voicemails. The money collected goes into the Inmate Welfare Trust Fund, which is meant to fund wellness programs for people in prison but instead has almost entirely gone back into the state’s general fund. The initial term of the $24.375 million contract ends in December 2025, with the option to renew the contract an additional year for five years.Ĭontract language states the FDC receives $5 million a year from telephone commissions, or about $417,000 a month. The Florida Department of Corrections uses Viapath Technologies, previously known as Global Tel*Link Corporation (GTL), which charges users a rate of 13.5 cents per minute a phone call, in addition to a 99-cent deposit fee to add money into a pre-paid service account. He helped pitch the proposal to create FDC’s free call pilot program and, in April, advocacy work he crafted with the Florida Student Policy Forum spurred action by Alachua County commissioners, who voted 4-1 to make all calls from the county jail free by Oct. “If you can keep people who are incarcerated in touch with their families, they’re more likely to be content and happy, you’ll have less assaults on other inmates and you’ll have less assaults to correctional officers.”įor the past year, Bernstein has advocated for legislation in Florida to promote communication between incarcerated people and their family members for free. “It doesn’t make sense from a variety of standpoints to have the communication system work the way it does, from a public safety standpoint, from the standpoint of the well-being of families, from the well-being of children of the incarcerated and for the well-being of the correctional officers who are short-staffed right now,” he said. ![]() He noted that people who receive calls from incarcerated individuals pay for the phone charges, though they themselves have committed no crimes. But in the eyes of Graham Bernstein, a student at the University of Florida and director of political affairs for the Florida Student Policy Forum, the pilot represents a “first step” to eventually making all prison phone calls free. ![]()
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