The Price to Call Home: State-Sanctioned Monopolization in the Prison Phone Industry
Publication year:
2012
| Cataloged on:
Feb. 04, 2013
ANNOTATION: “Exorbitant calling rates make the prison telephone industry one of the most lucrative businesses in the United States today … The prison telephone market is structured to be exploitative because it grants monopolies to producers, and because the consumers — the incarcerated persons and their families who are actually footing the bills — have no comparable alternative ways of communicating.” This report looks at the abusive corporate monopolization of prison telephone services and offers suggestions on how to deal with it. This publication is divided into seven sections—introduction; the prison telephone market is broken; exorbitant prison phone rates result from the monopolistic market; exorbitant prison phone prices harm society; government regulation would ameliorate the problem; why federal regulation would ameliorate the problem; and summary and recommendations.
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