When it comes to our criminal justice system, especially in Massachusetts, there’s often a fender bender at the intersection of Compassion, Coddling and Common Sense.
This week, the Massachusetts Legislature will take up a bill presented by state Sen. William Brownsberger, asking that phone service for prisoners in department of correction facilities and county houses of correction be provided at no cost to the prisoners or the receiving parties.
And you thought you had a good calling plan.
It’s a popular proposal, with the petition before the Legislature signed earlier this year by state Sens. Mark C. Montigny, Cynthia Stone Creem, Sal N. DiDomenico, Patricia D. Jehlen, Joseph A. Boncore, Julian Cyr, Harriette L. Chandler, James B. Eldridge and Michael D. Brady and state Reps. Denise Provost, Daniel J. Hunt, Mary S. Keefe, Antonio F. D. Cabral, Mike Connolly, Thomas M. Stanley, David M. Rogers, Tami L. Gouveia and Nika C. Elugardo.
The issue at hand is the high, often onerous, cost of those phone calls. The provider for Mass. county and state house of corrections facilities is Securus Technologies, a Texas-based prison communications firm. It charges 10 cents per minute for calls within the state, 14 cents per minute for collect calls outside of Mass. (11 cents per minute for pre-paid). So a half-hour call to a loved one inside prison runs $3. If you make five such calls a week, that’s $15 for a family member to come up with on their own, or put into a prisoner’s Securus account.
And while rich and famous guests of the state like Felicity Huffman have grabbed the limelight lately, most of those behind bars are low income — so high phone bills have a huge effect on tight budgets.
We get it — contact with family and friends is important to rehabilitation, to helping inmates make a better life for themselves on the outside.
However.
A prison sentence is as much, if not more, about being punished for the crime committed than a chance to hit the “reboot” button on one’s life. Crimes have consequences — for the victims, for their families and for the families of the criminals themselves. Yes, it must be horrible to jump through hoops to visit or talk to an inmate — but that’s primarily due to the poor decisions that inmates made that landed them in prison and upended the sense of normalcy for everyone.
If Brownsberger’s bill is passed, the phone calls won’t be free — just free to prisoners. Taxpayers will doubtless be footing the bill. Which is just what we, faced with gas taxes and looming bills for MBTA improvements, need. And if they are free to prisoners, you can bet few incarcerated callers will be limiting their talk time.
Taxpayers haven’t committed any crimes — why hit us up for prison phone calls?
If you want to help the inmates and their families be able to afford regular phone calls — then do something to reduce the price of those calls, don’t shift the cost to someone else. The contract with Securus runs out in 2023 — use this time to negotiate a better deal, or find a new provider.
