BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — The price tag for inmates to call home from Louisiana's prisons and local jails will drop over the next couple of years, under a proposal approved Wednesday by the Public Service Commission after complaints that current rates are burdensome on poor families.
The five-member regulatory panel, which oversees telecommunications companies, unanimously agreed to cut the rates charged for prison calls by about 25 percent when a prisoner is calling family, legal counsel, clergy or certain government agencies like schools.
Surcharges on the calls will be removed.
The changes will take effect in two years or when existing phone contracts expire at the prisons, said Colby Cook, a PSC spokesman.
If prison officials believe they need to charge higher rates or add new fees, they'll have to make individual requests to the regulatory agency.
The issue was contentious, and the PSC deadlocked on it a month earlier while asking for more study. PSC Chairman Foster Campbell pushed for the rate reduction, calling it a moral outrage that collect calls from Louisiana jails averaged 30-cents per minute, plus additional fees, compared to about 2 cents outside the prison.
Sheriffs said cuts in phone charges would damage their budgets and the dollars were used to pay for prison services. Critics of the high prison phone rates, including members of the clergy, said the price tag was unjust to inmate families who pay the charges.
"Those rates are 15 times higher than the average citizen pays on a daily basis. It's just grossly unfair that we should penalize the families of the people who are incarcerated in our state," said Opelousas Mayor Don Cravins.
Rep. Terry Landry, a former state police superintendent, said the phone rates are a tax on working people who didn't commit a crime. He called it profiteering.
"There are people filling their pockets with money on human capital," Landry said.
PSC member Eric Skrmetta of Metairie said prisoners have used their calls to arrange for illegal activities, like drug deals and murders. He said the telephone services cost more in prison because sheriffs and jail operators must monitor calls for security concerns.
"There's a lot of sheriffs in here who, if this happens, they may just have to turn their systems off," Skrmetta said.
But a consultant hired by the PSC to review the rates said the changes would still cover the costs of providing phone services and shouldn't force any prison or jail to shut down its phones.
Commission members agreed to limit the rate cut to certain categories of calls and approved the changes, which will include an initial phone charge of $1.69, plus a 5-cent charge for each additional minute.
Before the vote, exchanges over the issue were heated.
At one point, Skrmetta questioned whether Rob Tasman, representing the Louisiana Conference of Catholic Bishops, was properly describing the bishops' position on the issue.
Tasman said the bishops group supported a reduction in rates. Skrmetta, however, said he was told by one bishop that while the group doesn't want to see the rates rise higher, it's not necessarily pushing for a reduction. Skrmetta told Tasman that he'd meet him "at confession on Sunday."
"Sir, I don't need to confess," Tasman replied.
PSC member Lambert Boissiere of New Orleans took issue with comments Campbell made after Boissiere last month sought to postpone a decision. He suggested Campbell had questioned his integrity.
MAY 21 Gambit columnist Clancy DuBos writes about the Mother's Day shooting, and how the stages of shock and blame and healing mirror those traveled by the same city following Hurricane Katrina. The city will recover, just as it did following the storm, by reaching out to help the people injured most seriously by the event, DuBos writes. It's how we heal, he says.
MAY 21 Here's a post on the Advocate (but buried on a subpage, not on the front) that reports something Louisiana Voice reported some time ago: a top DOE official lives in Los Angeles and "commutes" to Baton Rouge. The positioning of the story caused a stir on Facebook Monday, with several posters asking if the Advocate was covering someone's hiney. Sentell's stories on DOE are notoriously soft, and this one is no different: don't expect any hard questions in here.
MAY 21 Here's another post from blogger Tom Aswell about the "course choice" program. He's already reported on kids being signed up without their consent or knowledge, and has more here: For example, he tells of a six-year-old who was signed up for high school Latin. He also digs a little deeper into the sister companies of the main one operating in Louisiana; all of them seem to have complaints against them. Stinky.
MAY 21 Given the 80 percent cut in higher ed funding since he's been in office, it's clear Gov. Jindal would rather give tax cuts to out of state companies than have a functioning system, blogger Dayne Sherman argues in this post. The cuts have been such a disaster, Sherman says, that it will take 30 years to fix what's been broken. He says he believes the aim is to shut down most of the schools before Jindal leaves in 2016.
MAY 21 Blogger CB Forgotston says there are too many elections in Louisiana, and they're costing us too much money. The proof is in the pudding: turnout for most of these nonsensical pollings gets worse and worse, CB opines, even as millions of dollars that could be spent on health care or higher ed go down the tubes. The legislature must take action to stem the tide of pointless elections, he says.
MAY 21 Here's an interesting investigative piece by WVUE on the retirement benefits of some Jefferson Parish public employees. According to the story, the taxpayers are paying 100 percent of the retirement contributions of employees who started work prior to a certain date in April 1986 -- and have done for more than 30 years. It costs the parish millions annually, and might not be legal, the story reports.
MAY 21 This post on Bayou Buzz provides insight from Louisiana's intrepid pollster, Bernie Pinsonat, on the winners and losers from this year's legislative session. But to hear Bernie tell it, there's almost nuttin but losers: Jindal, the Republican party, the Fiscal Hawks all get big goose eggs in his win column.
MAY 20 This post on The Lens takes a look at a huge (either $500K or $250K) bill that one NOLA charter now has for school lunches. The RSD says the charter group didn't fill out the proper paperwork for federal reimbursement, but the story details how the RSD didn't ensure the people running the charter had the proper training, despite requests from hapless charter employees trying to fill out forms. Either way, somebody's asleep at the wheel.
Most Read
in case you missed it
Subscribe to this comment's feed