The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has temporarily waived the deadline for correctional telecommunications providers to implement the regulations poised to make phone and video calls more accessible to incarcerated people across the country. Private contractors that provide incarcerated people’s communications services (IPCS) like Securus Technologies and ViaPath Technologies were required to come into compliance no later than April 1, 2026. On June 30, the FCC’s Wireline Competition Bureau announced that the deadline has been extended to April 1, 2027, “or any alternative date the Commission sets as part of further action in the IPCS proceeding.”
In July 2024, in the wake of Congress enacting the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, the FCC approved a landmark set of regulations that capped the prices and fees on IPCS. This involved lowering the maximum allowable per-minute charges for phone calls; reducing one-time fees tacked onto those calls; capping video visit prices for the first time; and prohibiting corrections departments from receiving kickbacks (AKA “site commissions”) from the providers they contract with.
Securus and other providers launched a barrage of litigation attempting to overturn or circumvent the caps. But initially the FCC had denied their requests for exemption, and various other attempts to stall had been rejected by the courts. Now, the agency is stating that Securus has found it impossible to implement the changes on time, and if Securus—one of the nation’s two largest IPCS providers—couldn’t do it, no one else could be expected to either.
It’s pretty clear that the FCC is laying groundwork to make the regulations optional for any provider claiming financial hardship.
“[W]e temporarily waive the deadlines for complying with the rate cap, site commission and per-minute pricing rules adopted in the 2024 IPCS Order to ensure sufficient funding for safety and security tools,” Wireline Competition Bureau Chief Joseph S. Calascione wrote in the June 30 order. “[O]ngoing implementation challenges and the resulting risks to safety and security greatly exceed what the Commission considered or anticipated when it adopted the 2024 IPCS Order. Our action here is intended to preserve correctional officials’ ability to provide safe and secure access to IPCS while the Commission assesses whether to take further action.”
If you happened to notice the sentence where he mentions safety and security, that comes from the playbook of any corrections department anywhere in the United States when confronted with a reform they’d rather not make—whatever it is would pose a security risk, so unfortunately it is not possible.
The Bureau suggests that if corrections departments are no longer allowed to receive kickbacks then they may not be able to “fully fund all the safety and security measures that were previously implemented at their facilities.” This is often true. So often that it can’t really come as a surprise to the FCC.
In a slightly bolder claim, elsewhere the June 30 order states that implementing the price caps could “lead to abuse of the other incarcerated persons, families, friends and the public by some users of the calling systems,” particularly if the resulting changes don’t “include technology to protect the public from users of the service.” Meaning that it would be dangerous to stop charging exorbitant rates for phone calls, because then too many people in custody would be able to make phone calls, and it’s this lack of access that keeps the public safe.
Ultimately, the Bureau chief said that it’s in the public’s best interests to delay the price caps. He’s right.
This is actually the exact same thing corrections departments say about contraband cell phones, when explaining how it threatens safety and security for not enough people in custody to be using the approved IPCS. They probably don’t have to worry quite so much about the technology needed to protect the public, as cell phone carriers like T-Mobile take the liberty of including spam filters that often make it inordinately difficult for families and loved ones to receive calls from inside prisons and jails anyway.
It’s pretty clear that the FCC is laying groundwork to make the regulations optional for any provider claiming financial hardship. At one point the order references what appears to be a rumor (floated by “commenters”) that some prisons and jails, pushed into a corner by the FCC regulations, have begun doing business with “noncompliant” providers.
“Even if inaccurate,” the Bureau states, “the very suggestion of such activity only contributes to further contract renegotiation challenges, increasing costs for the parties involved.”
Ultimately the Bureau determined that since no one could have possibly predicted that implementing the price caps would be this difficult or expensive, it’s in the public’s best interests to delay them. While it’d be very charitable to accept that the FCC simply didn’t see this coming, the second part is true. It is in the public’s best interests to waive the deadlines.
There’s a lot of enthusiasm in left-wing circles for taking down giants like Securus, premised in the sensible idea that access to basic human rights should not be controlled by private monopolies that extort people being forced to work for a few cents per hour, or zero cents per hour. But often these arguments don’t account for the fact that if you get the unethical profiteers out of the picture, no one replaces them. Only five states have made prison phone calls free, and only two have made all IPCS free. Overpriced services are more useful than no services.
Threatened with the impending price caps, Pay Tel Communications for example cut services at four facilities. None of them contracted a replacement, meaning that the only phones people were left with were the old wall phones, resulting in “additional labor costs” due to needing an officer to supervise the calls. Amid the nationwide understaffing crisis, we can assume this kind of situation means that often there will be no access to phones at all.
All four facilities were small jails. Compared to larger jails and to prisons, these are the most expensive facilities in which service providers such as Pay Tel provide services—not that they absorb the expense themselves, of course. They just send the bill to incarcerated people and their families. By charging higher rates and fees.
Small jails are the bargaining chips that providers are going to use to duck the price caps indefinitely. If the FCC moves forward with the regulations as planned, providers will simply have no choice but to cut off services at those facilities. “Despite their best efforts,” of course.
Image (cropped) via United States District Court for the District of Kansas. Inset graphic via Federal Communications Commission.
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