Beginning August 1, the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) will make phone calls free for everyone in custody. New York will be only the fourth state to make prison phone calls free, and the first to do so through a non-legislative process. DOCCS announced the change July 22.
“This significant policy change eliminates financial barriers to communication and aims to strengthen the vital connections between incarcerated individuals and their loved ones,” DOCCS stated in a July 22 press release. “DOCCS continues to recover, recruit and rebuild following the illegal strike earlier this year, and this new program provides an important productive activity and means to communicate while programming and visitation has not fully been restored across the system.”
The new policy will apply to calls made from facility wall phones as well as from tablets provided by Securus Technologies. The correctional telecommunications giant currently provides phone service to DOCCS prisoners at $0.024 per minute for in-state calls—a low rate compared to what people face in most other state prison systems. Beginning August 1, that rate will be lowered to $0.015 per minute, and the state, rather than prisoners and their families, will cover the costs.
The new policy is the result of DOCCS negotiating with Securus directly. Up until now, the handful of state prison systems to waive phone call costs have all done so because they were compelled by new legislation.
The new policy will not apply to costs of video visits or electronic messaging.
In 2021, Connecticut became the first state to make prison phone calls free. California, Minnesota and Massachusetts have since followed. Colorado is often cited as the fifth state, including by DOCCS in its July 22 announcement, but has not yet done so; it’s removing the costs in stages after initially underbudgeting the change, and its current deadline is July 2026.
The federal Bureau of Prisons waived phone call costs for everyone in custody during the COVID-19 pandemic, but ended the practice on January 1, 2025. The agency now only provides free calls to those participating in or waitlisted for First Step Act re-entry programs.
New York’s new policy will not apply to costs of video visits or electronic messaging. Only Massachusetts and Connecticut also waived those costs, and Connecticut may soon reinstate them.
New York prisons currently provide three free 15-minute calls per person per week. Many corrections departments have some variation of the same thing, and for many adults in custody across the United States these are the only phone calls they have access to. Washington, for example, allows two free 20-minute calls per week and four free 30-minute video visits per month. Florida offers two free five-minute calls per month. Georgia offers nothing.
In 2019, New York City was the first large jurisdiction to make jail phone calls free. Communication costs in jails, particularly small jails, are often double or triple what they are in prisons. The smaller a facility’s daily incarcerated population, the less profit it represents to contractors like Securus.
The DOCCS policy comes as the Federal Communications Commission is beginning to back down from historic price caps on incarcerated people’s communication services approved in 2024, which were originally set for implementation no later than July 1, 2025. Securus and other correctional telecommunications providers launched a massive campaign to circumvent the impending regulations, effectively threatening to cut services at small jails if the FCC moved forward according to schedule. The FCC recently extended the deadline to 2027, and hinted that it may get bumped back indefinitely.
Image (cropped) via Dubuque County, Iowa
