Collect Calls From Jail Run Up Bill for Families

Even though she looks forward to conversations with her husband, 20-year-old Valerie Madrid turns off the ringer some days so he cannot call her from Ventura County Jail. Other days, she tells him to call home less often. She thinks about blocking the calls altogether.

Last month her phone bill hit a new high of $296--half the amount she earns each month as sales clerk at a clothing store.

Madrid’s phone bill is so high because her husband, who is awaiting trial on a robbery charge, has to call collect every time he wants to talk to her and their 8-month-old son. And he calls frequently--sometimes two or three times a day.

It costs $3.70 for Marcos Madrid to make a five-minute collect call, compared with the 35 cents it would cost him to dial direct. Inmate advocates say that’s too steep and takes advantage of poor families.

Much of the surcharge is used to pay for inmate services, such as parenting classes, drug rehabilitation and job training. But defense attorneys and inmate advocates argue that those are services the jail should provide to help reduce recidivism.

“The families being affected by this surcharge are the ones who can least afford it,” said veteran Ventura defense attorney James Farley. “It’s being heaped on their backs. I think it’s unconscionable.”

Officials understand that the calls are expensive for relatives. But making personal calls cheaper for inmates is not a high priority for the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department, which runs the jail, said Chief Deputy Ken Kipp. Inmates may contact their attorneys for free.

“It may sound callous, but we do have to all take a step back and realize we are a jail facility,” he said. “Nowhere in the Constitution does it say inmates have the right to make personal phone calls to family and friends at the taxpayers’ expense.”

The Sheriff’s Department, which receives 41% of every inmate collect call, raised $820,000 last year. That money pays for inmate programs, including health education, sports equipment and religious services. It also covers the cost of providing phone service, protecting citizens from harassment and occasionally monitoring calls.

A consultant with Public Communications Services, which manages phone services for Ventura County jails, said the Sheriff’s Department is not to blame for high rates. Most call revenue goes to the phone companies, who charge higher rates to account for fraud and payments they will never receive.

“Sometimes the finger seems to be pointing in the wrong direction,” said the consultant, who declined to give his name. “The sheriffs don’t have anything to do with the rates. It’s really the carriers who are raising their rates.”

The problem is echoed in jails and prisons throughout California. Most counties allow inmates to make only collect calls, at higher rates than equivalent calls outside jails. MCI Worldcom recently settled a suit with the Utility Consumers’ Action Network for $533,458, after admitting that it had incorrectly billed some calls from the state’s 33 prisons.

“It’s just a horrific abuse of people at the bottom rung of society who simply cannot afford to take these collect calls from prisoners,” said Charles Langley, a consumer advocate with the network. “It’s a choice between paying the phone bill or paying rent.”

Former Ventura County Jail inmate Elario Rodriguez knows the collect calls he made burdened his parents. During the eight months he served for an assault conviction, Rodriguez called his family in El Rio nearly every day. Often the bills were between $300 and $400 a month.

“It was difficult to buy food and dress my [other] kids,” said Rodriguez’s mother, Virginia Lopez, who earns $1,000 a month working at a convalescent home. “But my son was in jail and he wanted to talk to us, so I made the sacrifice.”

He tried to call at night and only talked for a short time, but said he couldn’t give up the calls altogether. He said he relied on conversations with his family to keep him sane.

“They helped sustain me in there, knowing I had somebody out here on my side,” said Rodriguez, 24, who was released last week. “Inside, it’s another world. So you feel like you’re dead when you can’t talk to anybody outside.”

Connection with family helps inmates avoid more trouble when they are released, advocates say. They argue that inmates should be allowed to use debit or prepaid calling cards or choose their own carrier. Ventura County inmates are restricted to using Pacific Bell for local calls and AT&T; for long-distance.

Kipp said he is constantly looking for ways to reduce costs for jail inmates and may change companies when the contract expires in 2003. The Sheriff’s Department is considering a debit card system, but deputies worry that the cards would become jail currency.

Locally, the collect-call revenue goes directly into an inmate welfare fund, controlled by law enforcement and county officials and audited each year.

“We are not trying to get rich off of this,” Kipp said. “We do not use it to offset brick-and-mortar costs.”

Other counties have used their funds to pay for inmates’ food and clothing or to subsidize building costs and security equipment. The Ventura County fund, which also receives revenue from the jail’s commissary and print shop, is used for inmate programs that are not state-mandated.

Providing phone service for inmates entails more than just putting pay phones on the wall, said Paul Jennings, chief executive of Public Communications Services. Jail officials have to block calls for relatives who do not want to receive them and install security devices to record calls when necessary.

A 1999 Justice Department study revealed that some convicts were using pay phones to arrange drug deals, business frauds and murders from inside the nation’s federal prisons. Recently, a 22-year-old woman was sentenced to five life terms for helping gang members orchestrate stabbings and beatings from inside Los Angeles County Jail.

While conceding that abuse can occur, defense attorneys say most inmates just want to call loved ones and the high cost of collect calls keeps them from doing so.

Valerie Madrid said she’s not the only one who misses her husband, who was incarcerated in January. She used to put her infant son’s ear to the receiver so he could his father’s voice, but that is now a rare treat for them both.

“I don’t like it,” she said. “They should have lower charges.”

Derek Lee, 24, who works on a fishing boat off the Alaska coast, has both made and received calls from Ventura County Jail.

“It’s bad enough you’re in jail, and then you come out and get a huge bill,” said Lee, who was in jail on a fraud conviction. “I can call cheaper from the Bering Sea than from the Ventura County Jail to Camarillo.”