Inmates could pay for local calls

MAT-SU — Saying that they can’t afford to keep going at the current rates, Securus Technologies Inc. — the company that provides phone service to the state prison system — has asked the Regulatory Commission of Alaska for permission to charge prisoners for local phone calls.

“Absent authority to charge for completed, local calls… Securus is forced to provide service under confiscatory terms and conditions and realistically will be unable to continue to provide service to the Alaska (Department of Corrections) upon expiration of its contract in 2015 as it is not economically feasible to do so,” reads the company’s filing, dated Nov. 13, 2014.

The company says that changes on the national level have forced it to bring its rates for long-distance calls out of Alaska prisons more in line with what prisoners pay in other parts of the country for such calls.

The filing asks for a flat $1-per-completed-call fee and says that Alaska is the only remaining state where it is not allowed to charge for local calls. Inmates make 3.5 million completed calls each year. Only 220,000 of those are long distance.

Prisoners oppose the move.

Jason Pirtle, an inmate at the Goose Creek Correctional Center, mailed a letter to a long list of recipients detailing why he opposes the idea — mostly because he thinks it will hamper his attempts to parent his three young children.

The cost of phone calls will fall to his family.

“At the time of this writing I am employed and, like many inmates, I earn about $50 per month. Like other inmates, some of that money goes toward child support and the rest goes toward restitution. Even if inmates were allowed to pay for the calls, like inmates in other states, I would be unable.”

He writes that communication with family helps inmates rehabilitate but also helps reduce the next generation’s likelihood to follow them into prison. Pirtle went so far as to collect more than 140 inmates’ signatures on a petition submitted to the state’s regulatory commission.

The petition suggests a different alternative: let Securus provide e-mail services to inmates. Other states do it, charging 50 cents or more per message.

“This service will provide the added revenue which Securus claims to need while at the same time adding a new method for encouraging relationships that apply to rehabilitation.

The parents of Derek Sawyer, convicted of murdering his wife in Gakona in 1997, write that, when living out of state, calls between Sawyer and his children cost them $400 to $600 per month.

“Eventually we were back in Alaska when Derek was moved to Goose Creek. We are now able to talk with him without the exorbitant charges,” their letter reads.

The Alaska chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union also spoke out against the change. In its seven-page filing, the group notes that the Federal Communications Commission is currently mulling rules for rates for local calls from prisons. The commission last year said it’s focusing on a proposal for seven cents per minute for local calls.

“If the $0.07 per minute charge holds in the FCC’s final rule making for local calls, Securus’s $1 per 15-minute call proposal would be unreasonable for every caller except the one who made exactly a 15-minute call, and would result in gross and unreasonable overpayment for short calls,” the ACLU writes.

The group also points out that although a person’s lawyer can advocate for them in court, the lawyer is forbidden from advocating for the person on other matters. Therefore, prisoners need access to groups like the ACLU, or the Alaska Innocence Project.

“We suggest, therefore, that if the Commission approves Securus’s plan, it first modify it so that indigent prisoners may make a certain number of free calls per week,” the group writes. “We suggest that 20 free calls, or up to 60 minutes a week, would be reasonable.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.