By Tori Marlan
The family got into the habit of neglecting other bills, and now they’re behind on the mortgage and utilities. Martin, says Giron, “comes first. I don’t want him to come out crazy or institutionalized, where he’s good for nothing. I don’t want him to wind up like where I work, where you just sit around, watch TV, get your three meals a day.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Phone calls are one of the few ties prisoners have to relatives, who often live hundreds of miles away and can’t visit regularly, if at all. With nearly two million people incarcerated across the country, prison phone service is an estimated billion-dollar-a-year industry; according to some reports, a company can take in $15,000 from a single prison pay phone–about five times the amount typically generated by a pay phone on the street. Fierce bidding wars for exclusive prison contracts have companies wooing states with large signing bonuses and commissions. In the early 1990s companies typically gave states 15 percent of their prison revenues; now it’s 50 percent. A prison contract means easy money–there’s a captive market, and the people paying for the calls are powerless to switch carriers if they’re dissatisfied with rates or service. Last year the four companies that serve Illinois prisons–Ameritech, Consolidated Communications Public Services, MCI, and AT&T–handed the state nearly $12 million.
Judy Pardonnet, spokesperson for the state’s Central Management Services, which negotiates prison contracts, denies that a conflict of interest exists. “How can anyone say that for $12 million the state has an interest in incarcerating people when it spends $1.25 billion a year on housing these people? That’s hardly a profit.”
Attorneys Michael Deutsch and Stephen Seliger are planning to file a class-action lawsuit in the next few weeks on behalf of the families involved with the Prison Phone Project. “I don’t think you could say that the companies that deal with the prisons shouldn’t make a profit,” says Seliger, “but this is like gouging. You can’t treat one class of people to a disadvantage.”
Another source of irritation for the families is the recorded message that intermittently interrupts conversations to repeat what’s stated clearly at the beginning of the call: that the call has originated from a prison and may be recorded. “It just comes on all of a sudden, about three times in 15 minutes,” says Giron. “You can’t converse–you have to wait.” Consolidated’s Carr says the recordings last only a few seconds and are a courtesy to unsuspecting people who might have been handed the phone in the middle of a call.
They also demanded a meeting with Governor George Ryan–which they happened to get on their way out. As they were exiting the elevators, Ryan and his entourage were entering. Someone thrust a postcard into his hand and said the group had just delivered a bunch of them to his office. “I’m gonna look at them,” Ryan promised as the doors closed. “Thanks very much.”
