Prison phone calls

A dozen years ago, a friend of mine spent nine months as a guest of the federal government. I was one of the names on his call list, but he had to call me. I could not call him. My phone would ring, a recorded message would tell me that XYZ was calling and would I accept the call. (No charges to me.) If I was there when the message came and accepted it, we got to talk for maybe ten minutes before the call shut off with no warning. If I was not there, no message showed up on the phone I had at the time and I had no idea that he had tried to reach me. 

I do not know if he had to pay a fee for those calls or not. 

This horrible story, however, from  "Inside the Shadowy Business of Prison Phone Calls" (International Business Times, 13 minutes, June 2015) brought the inconvenience of those months back to mind:

Joanne Jones, an occupational therapist from Warwick, Rhode Island, has made an unlikely foe in the past year: Securus Technologies, a billion-dollar prison technology company based in Dallas.
Sitting at her kitchen table one recent afternoon in front of a stack of Securus bills, Jones explained that her 29-year-old son, Nate Jones, had been arrested on an aggravated robbery charge in January 2014. Her son’s life may have taken a negative turn, but Jones tries to keep in touch with him as often as possible.
They speak roughly once a week in a 15-minute phone call, and speak for another 25 minutes on a video chat. Jones says she’d travel to Texas to visit her son in person, but Hays County Jail, where he is locked up, banned visitations in November 2013. That happened shortly after the county jail entered into a contract with Securus.
Since then, all family communication with inmates at Hays County goes through Securus, which charges Jones about $10 for a phone call and about $8 for a video visit.
In the year and a half that her son has been locked up, Jones says she has racked up over $1,000 in bills with Securus to keep in contact with her son. The cost to keep in touch, Jones says, “makes me ill.”

 Now I know some people will say that the son committed a crime and so deserves to have his life made uncomfortable. His mother, however, as far as we know, committed no crime and yet she is the one who pays to talk to him. And we know the best way to rehabilitate inmates is to make sure that they have no contact with healthy outside relationships but instead get all their socializing from other prisoners.

For what it's worth, my parents both worked for many years in prison administration. They find this situation applalling.