Washington Commission Finds AT&T is Prison Collect Call Provider

by Mark Wilson

On April 21, 2010, the Washington State Utilities and Transportation Commission (Commission) handed the dedicated loved ones of PLN’s tenacious Editor an important victory in their long-running challenge of prison collect call rates.

In 2000, Zuraya Wright, Sandy Judd, and Tara Herivel sued AT&T Communications of the Pacific Northwest, Inc. (AT&T); T-Netix, Inc. (T-Netix); Verizon Northwest, Inc. (Verizon); Qwest Corporation (Qwest); and CenturyTel Telephone Utilities, Inc. (CenturyTel), in the Superior Court of Washington for King County.

Plaintiffs alleged that between June 1996 and December 31, 2000, they received collect calls from prisoners confined in four Washington Department of Corrections (DOC) facilities. They also alleged that the named telephone companies were operator service providers (OSPs) that violated Washington’s rate disclosures for the collect calls they received.

The Superior Court dismissed Verizon, Qwest and CenturyTel from the suit, then referred two questions to the Commission under Washington’s “doctrine of primary jurisdiction,” which “requires that issues within an agency’s special expertise be decided by the appropriate agency.” The court sought the Commission’s expertise as to: (1) whether AT&T and T-Netix were OSPs under the contracts at issue; and (2) if so, ...

A fifteen-minute collect call from the Multnomah County jail in Portland, Oregon costs $2.35, billed to the party who accepts the call. Between May 2006 and April 2009 those calls generated $3.5 million in revenue for the jail’s phone service provider, Texas-based Securus Technologies, Inc., while the county’s 38% kickback totaled $1.3 million. Profits likely would have been higher were it not for a handful of prisoners who made free collect calls from the jail.

The first prisoner caught offering a little competition to what county officials thought was a monopoly on the jail’s phone system was Shawn “Sammy Straight Razor” McGinnis. Between December 2006 and October 2007, McGinnis called his parents collect from the jail and they would make three-way connections to Qwest Communications, according to sheriff’s deputy Jose M. Torres.

McGinnis claimed to be a small business owner – a landscaper, a window washer or the owner of a cleaning supply company – and said he needed special business lines for each of his 14 employees. He gave Qwest the “profiles” – names, Social Security numbers and dates of birth – of 14 identity theft victims, plus a billing address. After Qwest issued the business lines, McGinnis had ...

by David M. Reutter

On November 23, 2009, the New York Court of Appeals – the state’s highest court – affirmed the dismissal of a lawsuit arguing that the contract between the New York State Department of Correctional Services (NYDOCS) and MCI Worldcom Communications for prison telephone services violated the state’s constitution.

The complaint alleged that the portion of the telephone charge allocated as a commission (i.e., kickback) paid to NY-DOCS constituted an illegal tax or fee, amounted to a government taking without just compensation, and violated the peti-tioners’ equal protection, free speech and associational rights. NYDOCS used the phone commission payments to fund the Family Benefit Fund, which included prisoner health care services, bus transportation for family visitation programs, free prisoner postage, and expenses at prison visitor centers.

New York’s initial 1996 contract with MCI included a 60% per-call commission payment to the state. In 2001, a new contract lowered NYDOCS’ commission to 57.5%. A 2003 contract revision purported to provide relief to families from MCI’s “unfair” variable rate structure by enacting a flat rate fee of $3.00 per phone call plus $.16 per minute, but continued the 57.5% commission.

While the suit was on appeal, having been dismissed ...

U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert E. Larsen has recommended the denial of a motion to suppress phone recordings of a plot to harm a federal witness obtained by the government through a Rule 17 subpoena without a court order.

While awaiting trial on various federal charges, Gary Eye in concert with his wife, Stephanie Eye, allegedly plotted to harm a federal witness. The alleged plot was uncovered by an informant at a CCA facility who notified the FBI.

The grand jury issued a subpoena to CCA for phone conversations made by Eye. CCA turned the conversations over to the government, but the discs also contained recordings of calls between Eye and his lawyer. The attorney calls were not segregated.

Prior to trial, the government sent a Rule 17 subpoena to CCA for additional phone conversations made by Eye. CCA complied with the subpoena, turning over additional recordings on disc.

Eye moved to suppress the burden of recordings obtained via the Rule 17 subpoena, arguing that the government had failed to obtain a court order for the subpoena. The court found that the government had failed to comply with Rule 17, but Eye suffered no prejudice from the government’s error.

See: United ...

On September 11, 2009, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts held that jail prisoners had no right to privacy with respect to the recording of the non-legal phone calls they made while in jail, and the sheriff must provide recordings of the phone calls when the grand jury requests them via subpoena.

The Suffolk County grand jury subpoenaed the recordings of the telephone conversations of a specific prisoner at the jail. The sheriff filed a motion to quash, citing a ruling from a different Superior Court in a different case. The judge denied the motion to quash. The sheriff asked the judge to hold him in contempt so that he could seek an appellate ruling that prisoners had no privacy rights in the recordings. He was held in contempt and appealed.

The Supreme Judicial Court held that prisoners had no expectation of privacy in their jail telephone conversations under the state or federal constitutions. It noted that jail inmates and the persons they telephoned received recorded voice warnings in multiple languages that all calls not made to an attorney would be monitored and recorded. The inmates also received written notice in the jail handbook and by signs posted at the ...

by David M. Reutter

A company that offers a lower-cost alternative to the monopolistic practices of the nation’s largest prison and jail telephone service providers filed a federal lawsuit alleging violation of the Federal Communications Act.

The suit was filed by Millicorp, a Florida-based company that offers alternative phone services to prisoners’ family members and loved ones through its subsidiary, Cons Call Home (CCH). Millicorp, a provider of interconnected voice over Internet protocol (VOIP), is registered with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to transmit voice communications over a broadband Internet connection rather than traditional land lines.

Millicorp sued Securus, T-Netix, Evercom and Global Tel*Link (GTL). The first three companies are under Securus’ corporate umbrella, and in combination with GTL the firms control 70 to 80% of the nation’s prison and jail phone services.

On average, Securus and GTL charge $3.95 per call for local set-up and service plus an average of $.90 per minute for long-distance calls. Through CCH, Millicorp provides a legitimate, secure and very popular technological alternative to the higher prices charged by Securus and GTL.

To offer lower-cost phone services, CCH provides its customers with a telephone number in the prison’s local calling area, which prevents Securus ...

Just days after being accused of violating state law by secretly recording telephone conversations with reporters, Scott Gerber resigned from his position as communications director for California Attorney General Jerry Brown.

In a move fit for airing on an episode of “America’s Dumbest Public Officials,” Gerber – who, one would think, should have known better – sent a transcript of one of his secretly recorded conversations with a reporter to an editor at the reporter’s newspaper. He did so, apparently, because he didn’t agree with some of the statements in an article posted on the paper’s website that included quotes from the conversation.

Then, in a refreshing display of candor, or perhaps just naiveté, Gerber acknowledged that he had recorded conversations with other reporters without obtaining their permission. “Sure, I’ve done it before,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle, which broke the story of the secretly recorded conversations on October 30, 2009.

California is one of only a dozen states that prohibit the taping of phone calls without the consent of all parties involved (Cal. Penal Code § 632). When asked why he had recorded the conversation with the Chronicle reporter, Gerber said, “To me, it’s useful to have a ...

by John E. Dannenberg

Jail prisoners in California, Florida, Michigan and Texas have unknowingly had their phone calls to defense attorneys secretly recorded and handed over to prosecutors. The recordings surfaced before trial, when prosecutors were required to divulge all the evidence they possessed to the prisoners’ lawyers.

Highly indignant San Diego defense attorney Jim McMahon, whose calls with a client were recorded, complained, “We aren’t talking about cursory stuff [like] what kind of clothes to wear. We were talking trial strategy.”

“There’s no question that these calls are privileged, and we rely on that because the criminal justice system would come to a screeching halt if we had to drive to the jail every time we had to talk to our clients,” he added.

After McMahon’s complaint, San Diego jail staff temporarily suspended the phone recording system to allow the addition of “safeguards,” which consisted of software to automatically stop taping calls made to pre-approved attorney phone numbers.

The system was already using a database of 5,000 phone numbers for local lawyers, but it had serious deficiencies. “We thought we had a better database,” said Sanford Toyen, a legal advisor to the county. The jail’s phone system was originally ...

The military’s treatment of Army prisoners is “part of a broader pattern the military has of just throwing people in jail and not letting them talk to their attorneys, not let visitors come, and this is outrageous. In the civilian world even murderers get visits from their friends,” according to civil defense attorney James Branum.

Afghanistan war resister Travis Bishop has been held largely “incommunicado” in the Northwest Joint Regional Correctional Facility at Fort Lewis, Washington.

Bishop, who is being held by the military as a “prisoner of conscience,” according to Amnesty International, was transported to Fort Lewis on September 9, 2009 to serve a 12-month sentence in the Regional Correctional Facility. He had refused orders to deploy to Afghanistan based on his religious beliefs, and had filed for Conscientious Objector (CO) status.

Bishop, who served a 13-month deployment to Iraq and was stationed at Fort Hood, Texas, was court martialed by the Army for his refusal to deploy to Afghanistan. Given that he had already filed for CO status, many local observers called his sentencing a “politically driven prosecution.

By holding Bishop incommunicado, the military violated Bishop’s legal right to counsel, a violation of the Sixth Amendment to the ...

by David M. Reutter

When it comes to prison and jail telephone services, it’s all about how much money can be made without regard to the people who are bilked by for-profit phone companies. That is the sad conclusion that must be drawn from a recent decision by Florida’s Public Service Commission (PSC).

After the PSC received a complaint in March 2004 claiming that calls from the collect-only phone system at the Miami-Dade Pretrial Detention Center (MDPDC) were being improperly disconnected, the agency opened an investigation.

That investigation, conducted between 2004 and 2007, determined that three-way calling detection software was causing prisoners’ phone calls to prematurely disconnect. As a result, prisoners would have to call back to complete their conversation. That caused customers to incur additional surcharges of $2.25 per local call and $1.75 per intrastate toll call.

The MDPDC’s phone service provider, TCG Public Communications, Inc., was previously a wholly-owned subsidiary of AT&T; it was acquired by Global Tel*Link Corporation in June 2005. TCG replaced the errant three-way calling detection software in March 2008, and responded to the PSC complaint by offering to establish a settlement fund of $175,000 to provide refunds for affected customers.

PSC staff recommended in ...