Dear Friend,

In some states, it still costs as much as $24 for a 15-minute phone call to a local jail — and these astronomical bills are most often being paid by Black and brown families already living on low incomes. The connection between these high costs and the Federal Communications Commission isn’t an obvious one, but the basic need to communicate with a loved one drove one Black woman to research and lead a decades-long campaign for government regulation of the predatory contracts between phone companies and prisons._1,2 

Because of our donors, MediaJustice has been able to champion Mrs. Martha Wright-Reed’s fight for justice throughout the last decade. The road has been bumpy: in 2013, due to our coalition's advocacy, the FCC capped rates for interstate calls to prisons, but since that landmark victory, attempts to lower the cost of local calls have been consistently halted by private phone companies. In 2019, MediaJustice and our allies pushed for the introduction of the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, introduced by Senator Tammy Duckworth, which would affirm the FCC’s authority to regulate those local calls.