Dialing for dollars

County jail inmates cut off by exorbitant phone rates.

By Will Evans

GO DOWN TO the Bryant Street lockup during visiting hours and utter the words "phone call," and you'll get an earful.

"Oh, the collect calls!"

"They're too expensive!"

"I can't afford no $1,800 phone bill."

Outside the San Francisco County jail on a recent Sunday, the family members and girlfriends of inmates were griping. Inside the jail, the inmates were passing around petitions. They're angry at the escalating cost of reaching out and touching someone.

A collect call from San Francisco jails runs $2.95 for the first minute and $4 for 15 minutes. That's local. A long-distance in-state call costs $13.35 for 15 minutes. The phone cuts off after that – to call back means another $3 surcharge.

"Before you can get into a good conversation, they have to call back," Tashima Johnson said, sitting on the steps of 850 Bryant. "Before you know it, that adds up to hundreds of dollars." Indeed, she said, she's planning to put a block on all collect calls, which will keep her incarcerated friend from calling her. Another woman said she lost her phone service because she couldn't pay her bills.

In contrast to the high rates for prisoners, a pay phone in the visitors' waiting room advertises a 10-minute local call for 30¢. A local collect call from that phone costs $1.06 for the first minute and 3¢ for every additional minute.

Until recently San Francisco's five county jails had a decent phone system. Inmates could deduct phone charges from their jail commissary accounts or buy phone cards, allowing them to call home on the cheap: 75¢ for the first three minutes and 15¢ a minute afterward.

The Sheriff's Department axed the debit system Jan. 15 because of a contract dispute with the company that runs the commissary, Swanson Services Corp., which claimed to be losing thousands of dollars on the arrangement. "They've just been a pain," assistant sheriff Michael Marcum told the Bay Guardian.

When asked about the dispute, Swanson vice president Clay Kling failed to provide much insight. "We started selling calling cards as a menu item at the county's request," he said. "We withdrew them at written request from the county."

Since then inmates have had no choice but to call collect – and have run into a host of problems. With collect calls, inmates can't leave voice mail messages or place calls to cell phones. The effect, Teresa Nelson of San Francisco's Prisoner Legal Services explained, is that inmates are losing their support network, both social and legal.

And then there are the exorbitant collect-call rates.

"It's a lousy system," Marcum admitted. "And at this point we don't know what to do about it." Swanson's contract ends in June, and the Sheriff's Department is considering revamping its phone policy, though some staffers oppose it. "We're looking at it cautiously," he said. "We don't want to raise the expectations of the inmates."

Phone problems are nothing new to inmates in Contra Costa and Alameda Counties, where the jails never had phone-card systems. Raven Hanson, who one evening last month made the trek from Oakland to Alameda County's Santa Rita Jail with her two kids to see her husband, lost her phone service because of collect-call costs. "There's no way for him to reach me right now," she said. "If you've got loved ones in jail, it's really hard. They should at least make it the charge of a regular call."

At Santa Rita a 15-minute local collect call costs inmates $4.16. In the nearby room for visitors, a collect call costs $1.07 for the first minute and 1¢ for each additional one.

Not surprisingly, most of the women waiting with Hanson had also lost their phone service. Their credit is ruined. A woman named Tiffany worked out a payment plan but is still $1,000 in debt to her phone company. Janelle Kertes, who drove from San Jose with her children to see her husband, said she had to ask her parents for help with the bill. "If you don't have resources, there's no way," she said. "After all, you just lost your main source of income."

Willie Dennis Jr. has been sitting in Santa Rita for four and a half years on robbery charges. His fiancé no longer accepts his high-priced calls. "It's really a misfortune for a lot of us," he said. "We cannot contact those we love, which is a form of relieving our stress." Dennis can't even call his lawyer, who uses a mobile phone.

Jail officials in Contra Costa and Alameda Counties aren't necessarily against the phone-card systems but aren't actively considering them either. Contra Costa Inmate Services director Mike Rutledge said he worries inmates will steal one another's PIN numbers and corrupt the system. "I'm not personally against it as long as it doesn't add to [administrative problems]," Rutledge said.

Other counties are already sold on phone cards. Last month Riverside County instituted a debit card system that brings charges down by 20 percent and allows calls to Mexico, where collect calls aren't accepted. "We're trying to be proactive," Sheriff's Department captain Alan Flanary said.

County jails in the Bay Area use computer systems to monitor outgoing calls, a service for which phone companies such as SBC Pacific Bell and Public Communications Services charge $1.70 a call. Multiply $1.70 by the roughly 340,000 calls Alameda registered in just one month last year and you get the picture: telephone companies are collecting nearly $19,000 a day in fees just for the monitoring service.

Company representatives deny reaping gargantuan profits. "At best it's a marginal business, and sometimes I ask myself why I am in it," said Paul Jennings, CEO of Public Communications Services, which provides phone service to San Francisco County lockups.

Telecom companies must give 35 to 50 percent of their revenue, depending on the contract, back to the county corrections departments as "commissions." Contra Costa documents show, for example, that Pacific Bell made $1.5 million in 2001 after giving more than $1 million in commissions to the county. When making deals with phone companies, counties often look for the highest commissions, not the lowest rates, critics say.

By state law the commissions must be applied to the county's Inmate Welfare Fund, which covers the costs of programs and services for prisoners. This fund pays for education and literacy programs, vocational training, and substance-abuse, domestic-violence, and anger-management counseling – just about everything that has anything to do with making jails humane and rehabilitative.

"The vast majority of money that's brought in is turned around and spent for [the inmates'] benefit," Contra Costa's Rutledge said.

But a loophole in the law allows sheriff's departments to spend "any funds that are not needed for the welfare of the inmates" on whatever they want. That's how San Francisco spent $100,282 of fund money on roof repairs last year. Contra Costa spent 10 percent of its $1.4 million budget – what amounts to $80 an inmate – this way on things like carpet and furniture replacement, library shelves, and dining room tables. Alameda is spending $25,000 on "management growth" expenditures such as travel and conferences and $25,000 on an intercom system this year. Depending on the county, some 7 to 25 percent of the fund pays for administrative salaries. Fund expenditures are decided in closed-door meetings by department staff and sheriff-appointed civilians. (Some of the appointees interviewed for this story admitted to having no contact with inmates at all.)

Pointing all this out may sound like nit-picking to some, but as a 1999 Contra Costa Grand Jury report warned, without "careful monitoring" these funds can easily be abused. That's certainly been the case in San Francisco, where between 1997 and 2000 a rogue Sheriff's Department accountant failed to deposit $179,834 in commissions and was up to three years late in cashing $1 million more. After a scathing county audit in 2000, he was reassigned.

Lt. Jerry Maldonado, manager of inmate services for Alameda County, can talk for 40 minutes about how much he believes in the prisoner programs, their ability to "plant the seed," "break the cycle," and treat people "like human beings, not a bunch of caged animals."

"A lot of times it's the first time they've been recognized for doing something," he told us. "It's the first public recognition for 'You did good – you're not a failure.' "

Assistant sheriff Marcum is proud of San Francisco's array of nationally recognized programs. "All have a documented impact on reducing recidivism," he said.

But Kay Perry, coordinator of the Equitable Telephone Charges campaign – which is taking on prisons and jails across the country – raises a fundamental question: Who should be paying for these rehabilitative programs? "If those programs are worthwhile, that's a county responsibility," she said. Counties should drop commissions, which would bring down rates, and pay from the general fund. After all, Perry reasons, what's the point of destroying one support system in the name of building another?