The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has approved its proposal to nearly double the prices that people in prisons and jails will be forced to pay for phone and video calls. In addition to implementing the expected pricing structure from its draft proposal released earlier in October, the FCC has tacked on an “inflation factor” that was not part of its draft proposal and was pushed through without notice to the public.
At a highly anticipated monthly meeting on October 28, the agency voted to adopt sweeping revisions to its historic 2024 regulations lowering the prices of Incarcerated People’s Communication Services (IPCS). Among other changes, the order puts new caps on the per-minute rates correctional telecommunications providers are allowed to charge incarcerated people, and by extension their families. For most, the revised caps will not make a meaningful difference in what they pay.
As anticipated, Commissioner Anna Gomez (D) was outvoted 2-1 by Chairman Brendan Carr (R) and Commissioner Olivia Trusty (R). The approved order has not yet appeared in the Federal Register, but once it does it will take effect 120 days from that date.
“The order the commission is adopting today is indefensible,” Gomez said in her prepared remarks. “It implements an egregious transfer of wealth from families in incredibly vulnerable situations to greedy monopolies that seek to squeeze every penny out of them. And this transfer is sanctioned by the government.”
Unexpectedly, the FCC added a last-minute 6.7-percent inflation factor based solely on a letter from an unnamed IPCS provider. We can reasonably assume the provider was Securus Technologies, as it submitted the only letter in the FCC’s electronic comment filing system that both discusses inflation costs and dates to a plausible time period. The letter was posted October 21, the same day commissioners entered the mandated pre-vote week of deliberations during which they cannot be contacted by the public about anything on the upcoming agenda.
The inflation factor will add an additional $0.01 to $0.02 to the per-minute rate caps for most facilities.
FCC pricing structures in 2024 IPCS order (top) and revisions approved October 28 (bottom). The revised figures do not include the new inflation factor.
Though the FCC had not previously been inclined toward inflation adjustments for IPCS, during the meeting Wireline Competition Bureau Chief Joseph Calascione characterized them as “routine.” He then briefly addressed a question about the absence of a productivity adjustment, which typically accompanies inflation adjustments to offset the difference.
“We have no data available to do a similar exercise for IPCS,” Calascione said, before hastening to add, “and again, that just allows me to underscore that these are interim rates.”
Throughout the IPCS order reconsideration process, Securus and other IPCS providers like ViaPath Technologies (commonly known as GTL) repeatedly declined to provide the FCC with verifiable data to support their claims that the original 2024 rate caps would effectively bankrupt them. Gomez also accused corrections departments of failing to demonstrate “why they need a cut of the money that families pay.” But proponents of the revised order brushed off the absurd lack of evidence backing the higher rate caps by emphasizing that this was just an interim order, and more evidence could be added later.
“There’s a lot of evidence on it, it’s been put in the record, it’s relied on by the FCC in our decisional document,” Carr said. “If people want more evidence, or they feel like there’s evidence that’s contrary to the evidence that was put in the record, at this point I’d encourage everybody … to put your evidence in the record and we’ll make the decision then based on the record as it exists at that point. But we had very sufficient, adequate evidence in the record at this point that we grounded this particular decision in.”
Carr obviously knows that the people who want more evidence are not the same people in a position to put that evidence on the record; they’re referring to financial data from IPCS providers, who are quite comfortable leaving the record as it is.
Commissioner Trusty also justified her vote by leaning heavily on the idea that this is merely an interim order, and that the agency now looks forward to receiving more robust evidence from providers and corrections departments. There is no real reason to think that they’re going to send any. The order accelerates the mandatory data collection that will take place on the way to making permanent rates, but the nature of data providers choose to send isn’t going to change.
Preparations for the FCC’s October Open Meeting are still underway during the government shutdown.
My office welcomes requests for ex parte meetings regarding the nine items on the agenda.
Sunshine is Tuesday, October 21.
— Anna M. Gomez (@AGomezFCC) October 10, 2025
The IPCS proposal was one of nine items covered in the meeting. After it formally concluded, Gomez said that never before had she seen so many items on the agenda for a single meeting—a particularly notable choice during a government shutdown, when most of her staff was furloughed and the public wasn’t sure how to comment on the items or even whether the meeting was still happening.
She alleged that her colleagues used the shutdown to approve the removal of a large number of consumer protections, in the name of deleting redundant or ineffective regulations.
“This was set up to be the most anti-consumer agenda ever put forth during my time as a commissioner.”
Image (cropped) of FCC commissioners Gomez (left) Carr and Trusty during the October 28 IPCS vote via Federal Communications Commission/YouTube
