Cost of jail calls questioned
Sable
Rose Guerrero felt her life had been put on pause for several months in 2018
and 2019, when she was held at the Sonoma County Jail for a felony vehicle
theft case.
Her
occasional phone calls to family and friends and in-person visits were a
lifeline as the long periods in her cell took a heavy mental and emotional toll
on her, she said.
But
while the visits were free, the cost of phoning her loved ones from the
facility created a financial obstacle that Guerrero’s relatives and boyfriend
had to help her shoulder, she said.
“That
phone call is that touch with the outside. It really takes your mind off of
being out there,” Guerrero, 21, said. “Next thing you know, you have to put
more money on the phone card.” Now, the prices Guerrero and other inmates in
Sonoma County have paid to phone friends and family — calls that criminal
justice experts say help inmates rejoin society and avoid ending up back behind
bars — are under scrutiny.
An
investigation by the Sonoma County civil grand jury found the price the
Sheriff’s Office places on calls from the jail — where inmates often are
awaiting trial and haven’t been convicted of any crimes — far outstrips prices
in state and federal prisons.
The
report, which one Sonoma County Board of Supervisors member called “shocking,”
was released last month and calls for the supervisors and Sheriff’s Office to
reform the system, which charges inmates more than 20 cents a minute for calls.
The
county’s phone service is provided by a multinational company that has been
accused of predatory practices elsewhere by inmates and their families and, in
at least one case, state regulators. The company charges its own fees, and jail
and prison operators, in this case the Sheriff’s Office, tack on commissions.
The
civil grand jury also questioned the sheriff’s use of much of that money, which
is designated for inmate programming and welfare but instead has been used to
pay jail staff salaries and feed a growing trust fund.
Much higher charges
Federal
facilities charge inmates about 10% of what Sonoma County charges, the grand
jury found. State prison phone calls were reduced to 2.5 cents a minute from
7.6 cents a minute in March, when California Department of Corrections and
Rehabilitation officials announced they had renegotiated their contract with
Global Tel Link, the same provider Sonoma County uses.
The
Federal Communications Commission has tried to rein in inmate phone charges for
almost a decade, but the agency’s reach extends only to interstate or
international calls.
“Local
county jails, including ours, represent the last refuge in the State for these
commission- based contracts,” the grand jury said.
Even
as the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors and Sheriff Mark Essick review the
grand jury’s investigation, the California Public Utilities Commission is
working on issuing rules that will ensure “just and reasonable rates” for
inmates statewide.
The
utility could issue those rules as early as this year.
Last
summer, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and that county’s sheriff
aligned to make phone calls for inmates free by switching to a contract where
the county paid a flat rate to GTL every month.
The
Sonoma County Sher-iff’s Office has gone the opposite direction, increasing the
price inmates had to pay to call loved ones and friends by 10% in 2019, the
investigation found.
Spending scrutinized
Essick
initially declined to comment on the investigation specifics before his agency
crafts an official response.
“I
feel I have an obligation to the (grand jury) to provide an answer to them
first,” Essick said, adding that his staff worked closely with the grand jury
on their investigation.
After
this story was published online, Essick stressed that the jail staff salaries
the fees funded were for employees who worked for inmates’ benefit,
specifically an inmate program manager and commissary staff.
Essick
said he was not opposed to a policy change, but wanted “buy-in” from the public
and supervisors. He suggested the jail might need more funding to cover the
loss of phone revenues. “The commitment to make a change is not the concern
here,” he said. “It’s the finances behind it and how are we going to pay for
it.”
Essick’s
use of the phone revenue was a focus of the grand jury’s concern.
Revenue
from the phone system is generally supposed to be spent on programming that
benefits inmates. Much of it has gone to help pay for jail staff salaries and
has piled up in a trust fund — the Inmate Welfare Trust — that as of the grand
jury’s report held $1.6 million.
The
sum, which is also swelled by steep markups on commissary items, is enough to
pay for the next two years of phone calls, the investigation concluded.
The
grand jury focused on two years of the trust fund’s revenues and expenditures,
fiscal years 2017-2019. Over those two years, the Sheriff’s Office spent more
than $566,000 on salaries. It spent a little more than $1 million on
educational programs for inmates and put an unspent $274,037 into the trust
fund.
The
Sheriff’s Office price increase came at the end of the 2019 fiscal year.
For
the grand jury, a price hike even as the trust fund swelled called into
question the purpose of the steep prices on the county’s incarcerated.
“Our
jail should not be a profit generating entity,” the grand jury concluded.
Global
Tel Link is a private-equity-backed operator with a big footprint in the
lucrative prison business ecosystem. During the company’s last sale, in 2011,
investment banking giant Goldman Sachs sold the company to a hedge fund,
American Securities Capital, for $1 billion.
Prison
activists have accused GTL of monopolizing the inmate phone market, and the
company has faced class action lawsuits in multiple states. In 2017, GTL paid
$2.5 million to settle a racketeering and bribery case in Mississippi.
The
company denied any wrongdoing in the case and said it settled to focus on
“innovation.”
In
Sonoma County, GTL sells phone cards that carry 90 minutes at a cost of 7 cents
a minute. From there, the Sheriff’s Office tacks on a 15-cent surcharge,
bringing the price up to 22 cents a minute, according to the grand jury. The
company and the Sher-iff’s Office also leverage steep commissions on families
transferring money online to their incarcerated loved ones’ phone accounts,
charging $3 on every $20 transferred. The Sheriff’s Office collects 70% of
those fees, according to the grand jury.
According
to the investigation, the Sheriff’s Office has complete control over how much
of a commission it places on top of GTL’s prices.
Recent
annual budget proposals the sheriff presents county supervisors do not contain
a detailed accounting of the phone fees, appearing to lump it into a line item
for agency revenues that includes donations and fines.
Calls for change
Supervisor
Lynda Hopkins, the current board chair, called on Essick to bring changes to
the Board of Supervisors based on the recommendation of the grand jury report,
which she called “shocking.”
“It’s
important for the sheriff to step forward and take action on this issue,”
Hopkins said.
If
Essick does not offer changes, the board may be able to act without him,
Hopkins said. The grand jury cited San Diego County, where, in March,
supervisors rejected the sheriff’s proposal to fund programming through phone
and prison commissary fees.
Sonoma
County Supervisor David Rabbitt said he agreed that the jail’s contract with
GTL deserves review. “I don’t know what the contract’s negotiations were, but
it’s something that we would look into to make sure we got the best all-around
deal, and that would be for the sheriff, the county and the inmates,” Rabbitt
said.
Rabbitt
questioned why the price of the calls increased in 2019, he said. He also
wanted to know how much the jail was spending in overhead to run programs under
the Inmate Welfare Fund, and how that amount compares with the money being
pulled from the fund to pay for jail staff salaries, Rabbitt said.
But
Rabbitt warned against comparing a much larger county like San Francisco’s new
free call system to Sonoma County’s.
“Just
because San Francisco leveraged one solution, it doesn’t mean we have the same
capacity to leverage the same solution,” Rabbitt said.
Hunger strike by inmates
Supervisors
got some insight into the phone system earlier this year, Rabbitt said, when
inmates on a hunger strike put free phone calls on their list of demands after
coronavirus-related restrictions cut off in-person visits at the facility.
After
the strike, and the involvement of Sonoma County’s Independent Office of Law
Enforcement Review and Oversight, the jail began giving inmates 10 free phone
call minutes a day. The grand jury questioned whether those calls were really
“free,” given that the Sheriff’s Office paid for them out of the inmates’ own
trust fund.
During
the pandemic, the educational programs the trust fund is supposed to support
were canceled, but the steep charges on inmates’ commissary items and phone
calls remained.
“The
result is a phone charge that serves mainly to enlarge the $1.6 million (trust
fund) surplus,” the grand jury concluded.
Though
in-person visiting has resumed at the jail, the committee that manages the
Inmate Welfare Trust is maintaining the free phone calls, Essick said. “They
decided there was plenty of money available to continue,” he said.
Offering
10 free minutes a day for the inmate population has been running around $4,000
a month, Essick said.
THE
PRESS DEMOCRAT
By Staff Writer Andrew Graham
July 24,2021
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