FCC postpones its groundbreaking 2024 rules, allowing excessive phone and video rates to continue

Incarcerated people and their loved ones will continue to be exploited by sheriffs and telecom companies for two more years, while these same interests lobby the FCC to water down its rules.

by Wanda Bertram

Last week, the Federal Communications Commission abruptly announced a two-year postponement of rules reducing prison and jail phone rates that it passed unanimously last year in accordance with the Martha Wright-Reed Fair and Just Communications Act. The FCC's reversal defies the Act, a bipartisan law that gave the agency a deadline (which it is now blowing past) to implement these regulations.

In a statement, FCC Commissioner Anna M. Gomez blasted the decision, saying the Commission was "shielding a broken system that inflates costs and rewards kickbacks to correctional facilities at the expense of incarcerated individuals and their loved ones."

Families should not have to face two more years of being squeezed by telecom companies and the prisons and jails they collude with. Unfortunately, this order means that they will do just that. By kicking implementation of its rules down the line, the FCC is capitulating to a system it has already acknowledged is full of bad incentives.

A gift to sheriffs and prison telecom companies

Why is the FCC changing course on an order that all of its members — including Trump-appointed Chairman Brendan Carr — voted for last year?

In large part, the move is a response to a small group of sheriffs who have lashed out in reaction to its 2024 order. Before the order, companies had been able to offer commissions and other kickbacks to agencies they partnered with (which drove up the prices of phone calls for consumers). The 2024 order barred companies from offering almost all kickbacks and commissions. In retaliation, a handful of sheriffs, most notably the sheriff of Baxter County, Arkansas, have said they will no longer offer phone calls at all.

Additionally, before the order, prison telecom companies provided call monitoring services to prisons and jails that were — inappropriately — paid for via the rates charged to consumers. The new rules triggered some companies and sheriffs to claim that they could not provide these services if families didn't foot the bill. Piggybacking on these claims, several Republican state attorneys general filed a lawsuit against the FCC, arguing that the 2024 order has put police investigations in jeopardy. While the FCC's 2024 order addressed these concerns, the order yesterday echoes the language in the lawsuit.

What this means for incarcerated people and their families

The 2024 order technically went into effect earlier this year, but it granted prisons and jails with active contracts an extension of up to one year (or to the end of their contracts, whichever came sooner) to implement new rates. That means that while many facilities have already changed their contracts, many have not.

Incarcerated people in facilities that have not yet amended their rates (or that have amended them, but reverse the changes in light of this move by the FCC) will continue to be charged the old rates until April 2027. In the meantime, we expect that sheriffs and the prison telecom industry will lobby aggressively for rollbacks to the 2024 order, meaning that the new rules, when finally implemented, may look very different than what the FCC originally passed.

Justice delayed

The 2024 FCC order was projected to save the loved ones of incarcerated people many millions of dollars every year — cutting the maximum allowed phone rates by approximately half, thus sparing households from debt and from impossible choices between communication and other basic necessities. In postponing its own rules, the agency is delaying economic justice for millions of working-class and low-income families.

This backtracking is also defying Congress. As FCC member Gomez noted, the Martha Wright-Reed Act was "a bipartisan law that ensures prison communications are priced fairly and no longer exploit incarcerated people and their families." Rather than fulfilling the mandate of this law — the product of decades of advocacy by consumers, advocates, and law enforcement officials — the FCC's latest move concedes to profit and political interests.

The Prison Policy Initiative strongly opposes this decision. Together with our allies, we will fight to ensure the historic 2024 order is not watered down to protect profits, but implemented as written to protect families.