Ex-Con’s Challenge of Prison Policy Identifying Inmate Calls Dismissed

A Superior Court judge on Thursday dismissed a lawsuit by a former convict challenging a state Department of Corrections policy of identifying calls from inmates as coming from a prison.

Colleen Abbas, who filed the class-action lawsuit in August, was dropped because she took no further action after the suit was filed, according to court records. Abbas, who was acting as her own lawyer, has since moved from Garden Grove to another state and could not be reached for comment.

Abbas, who was released from prison in 1994 after serving time for drug and possession of stolen property convictions, contended the message was “obnoxious” and violated the privacy rights of the state’s 130,000 prisoners, especially those who didn’t want loved ones to know they were in prison.

State prison officials defended the message on inmates’ collect calls, played at random throughout a conversation, as a legal safeguard preventing prison-run scams.

Officials began playing the message in February 1994. A few months earlier, they started stamping mail identifying the sender as an inmate after a convicted child molester at Pelican Bay State Prison used the mail to harass a woman who aided in his arrest.

That summer, Soledad Prison inmates were accused of operating a fraud ring using prison telephones and stolen credit card numbers to buy gold.