The Family Phone Bill: How Cost-Shifting Removes the Incentive to Reform Incarceration

Families fund the phone calls, emails, and commissary markups that flow back into county and state budgets. Six states have already broken that link. Here is how the incentive structure works, and what it would take to change it everywhere else.

Michigan’s 2017 Joint Task Force on Jail and Pretrial Incarceration found that criminal defendants in the state pay an estimated 418 million dollars a year in fines and fees, on top of 478 million dollars in taxpayer funded jail and corrections costs. Communication and commissary fees are a smaller, less visible piece of the same pattern. Costs generated by the system, paid not by the general public but by the people the system holds, or by the family members trying to stay in contact with them.

The Mechanism: How a Phone Call Becomes County Revenue

Most jails and prisons do not run their own phone systems. They contract with private vendors, companies like Securus, ViaPath (formerly GTL), and Telmate, to provide calling, video visitation, and messaging services. For most of the industry’s history, those contracts included a site commission: a percentage of call revenue paid by the vendor back to the county or state as a condition of winning the contract.

The commission is not a cost the county absorbs. It is collected from the families paying for calls and remitted back to the county as a cut of that same revenue. Michigan Radio’s review of Wayne County’s 2021 contract with Telmate found it guarantees the county a minimum annual revenue of 1.75 million dollars, tied to per minute earnings on every call placed, regardless of whether the person on the other end is a spouse, a child, or an attorney.

Under that structure, the vendor a county selects is not necessarily the one offering the lowest rate to families. It is often the one offering the largest return to the county’s own budget.

Michigan’s Workaround: No Commission, Same Money

The Michigan Department of Corrections stopped taking traditional percentage commissions on prison phone calls in 2008, a genuine reform at the time. In 2011, it raised its phone rates and began requiring its vendor to pay into a newly created Special Equipment Fund instead. By 2018, according to research published by the Prison Policy Initiative, that fund was taking in 11 million dollars a year, an amount that would equal a 57 percent commission had it been structured as one.

Beyond the Phone: Stamps, Video Visits, and the Commissary

Phone calls are the most visible cost, but not the only one. Electronic messaging platforms like JPay and its parent company ViaPath, along with Securus, sell “stamps” required to send or receive a message, typically priced between 25 and 50 cents each, though reported rates have ranged from as low as 9 cents in bulk purchase bundles in New York to 47 cents per message in Texas. Moving money into an incarcerated person’s account carries its own fee: a 10 dollar transfer can cost 3 to 4 dollars depending on the state and vendor. Commissary items, the food, hygiene products, and basic goods sold inside facilities, carry markups research has documented at roughly 600 percent above retail.

None of these charges move through a state or county’s ordinary appropriated budget. They are billed directly, item by item, to a population that is disproportionately low income even before the cost of incarceration is added on top.

Kalamazoo, St. Clair, Genesee: What the Contracts Actually Say

A September 2025 investigation by NowKalamazoo, working from records obtained through the Civil Rights Corps, examined Kalamazoo County’s phone and video contract with ViaPath. According to Kalamazoo County Sheriff Richard Fuller, all revenue from the contract, plus a bonus payment, goes directly to the county’s general fund, not to the sheriff’s department or the jail’s own budget.

Similar contracts with the same vendor are the subject of active lawsuits in St. Clair and Genesee counties. Those complaints allege what they characterize as a quid pro quo kickback scheme. The claims are allegations in active litigation and have not been adjudicated.

What Six States Prove

Connecticut became the first state to eliminate the cost of prison telecommunications entirely in 2021. California, Massachusetts, and Minnesota followed in 2023. New York did the same in 2025, without new legislation, an administrative decision the state projected would save roughly 30,000 families an estimated 13.3 million dollars a year. Colorado reached full free calling in July 2026.

A May 2026 report from Worth Rises, a nonprofit focused on the prison industry, examined six state prison systems and more than a dozen county jail systems. It found that when agencies negotiated communication contracts directly with vendors instead of through revenue sharing arrangements, costs dropped by roughly 62 percent in state prison systems and 68 percent in jails. Combined, the report estimated incarcerated people and their families have saved more than 622 million dollars to date. Daily call use per person in prisons included in the study rose from about 25 minutes to nearly 45 minutes once calls became free. In jails, daily use more than doubled.

Correctional staff at the facilities studied broadly supported the change, describing calmer, safer conditions rather than the security and cost consequences often cited to justify keeping the fees in place.

The Federal Backslide

Congress passed the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act at the end of 2022, directing the Federal Communications Commission to set fair, cost based rate caps and end the site commission model nationwide. In July 2024, the FCC adopted new rules lowering audio call rate caps, establishing the first video call rate caps, and phasing out commission payments on a staggered schedule between January and July 2025.

The reform did not fully take hold. In late 2025, the FCC reversed course, adopting higher interim rate caps and postponing the stronger reductions by two years. FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez said the decision was “shielding a broken system that inflates costs and rewards kickbacks to correctional facilities.”

Why the Incentive Problem Is the Real Story

The mechanism matters more than any single fee. As long as the entity that sets policy over a facility is also the entity collecting revenue generated by that facility’s population, cost and reform pull in opposite directions. A county whose general fund depends on a 1.75 million dollar annual phone contract, or a state agency relying on an 11 million dollar equipment fund, has a direct budget interest in maintaining call volume, which means maintaining or growing the number of people incarcerated and the length of time they stay.

This is not a claim that officials are consciously choosing to keep people locked up for revenue. It is a structural observation. Institutions respond to the incentives built into their own budgets, whether or not any individual official intends that response.

The Counterargument: “This Pays for Necessary Costs”

The standard defense of these fees is that they fund security equipment, contraband detection, or family contact programming that would otherwise fall on taxpayers. Michigan’s own history undercuts that argument. MDOC eliminated commissions outright in 2008, then reintroduced extraction through the Special Equipment Fund three years later, suggesting the security cost framing followed the funding mechanism rather than the other way around.

The reform states make the same point more directly. When Connecticut, California, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, and Colorado eliminated these fees, facility operations did not collapse and security did not measurably deteriorate. Several negotiated lower base rates directly with vendors and absorbed the modest resulting cost through general appropriations, the same process used to fund any other public safety function. If a facility’s equipment or family contact programming has genuine public value, and it does, it should be funded the way the rest of the public safety budget is funded: through ordinary appropriations, subject to ordinary oversight, not billed line by line to the family member trying to keep a relationship intact.

None of this requires a new theory of criminal justice. It requires treating a phone call between a parent and a child, or an email between spouses, as a public function worth funding directly rather than a revenue opportunity to be extracted from the people with the least ability to refuse to pay.