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INfeasible Rather than lower rates, Arkansas jail simply cancels all inmate phone calls One angry sheriff takes on the FCC. Nate Anderson Mar 18, 2025 4:08 pm | 26 Credit: Getty Images Credit: Getty Images Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreSheriff John Montgomery of Baxter County, Arkansas, isn't going to take it anymoreif by "it" you mean "having to offer lower phone call rates to incarcerated inmates." Noting that such phone calls are "not required to be provided by law," Montgomery is ending all inmate phone calls on March 30, 2025.The cause of Montgomery's wrath, and of his March 30 date, is the Federal Communications Commission, which set an April 1, 2025, deadline for smaller jails to lower the obscene rates of inmate phone calls. (Larger jails had to comply in January.) According to the FCC, 15-minute phone calls to inmates could run as much as $12.10 in these smaller jails. The Commission now demands that such calls cost no more than $1.35. (You can read the new rate schedule here.)The rates are high in part because extra security is required for inmate communications services, but the system had also become a way for local agencies to make money by charging vendors a "site commission payment." In this model, vendors might be selected based less on what was good for security and for inmate families and more on how much cash the vendor could funnel to the jail. FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks even referred to these payments as "kickbacks."In 2024, the FCC finally took a hatchet to this entire system. The Commission slashed the fees paid by inmates, it banned all sorts of nickel-and-dime fees that had crept into the process, and it prohibited communications vendors from making "site commission" payments to jails.Now, with compliance coming into view, agencies like the Baxter County Sheriff's Office are expressing their displeasureand taking it out on the inmates. Montgomery recently announced that he is canceling all inmate phone calls. He knows that this will "place a hardship on families," as his press release puts it, but he places all the blame on the federal government, which is name-checked three times in four paragraphs.If "the Federal Communications Commission reverses their adverse regulations," Montgomery said, "the Baxter County Sheriff's Office will revisit the feasibility of reimplementing the inmate phone system."One might expect this view to generate some sympathy in the MAGA-fied halls of FCC HQ. But the Commission's two Republicans actually voted in favor of the rate control order last year. Current FCC Chair Brendan Carr even agreed that inmate phone calls in American prisons were often "excessive" and that the private operators behind these systems represented a "market failure." He then voted for straight-up, old-school price caps.In fact, Carr went on to offer a robust defense of inmate calling, saying: "[I often] heard from families who experienced firsthand the difficulties of maintaining contact with their incarcerated loved ones. I also heard from formerly incarcerated individuals who underscored the decline in mental and emotional health that can result from a lack of external communications. Beyond that, studies have repeatedly shown that increased communication between incarcerated people and their families, friends, and other outside resources helps reduce recidivism rates."So Montgomery may not get this decision reversed easily. (On the other hand, Carr did just launch a "Delete! Delete! Delete!" initiative focused on cutting regulations, so who knows.)Baxter County claims that the FCC decision means that phone services are no longer "feasible." In 2018, however, when Baxter County wanted to expand its jail and didn't have the cash, officials found a way to make it feasible by asking voters to approve a 1-cent sales tax collected between April and September of that year. (You can even watch a time-lapse video of the jail expansion being built.) Feasibility, it turns out, is often in the eye of the beholder.Montgomery did say that he would add some additional in-person visiting hours at the jail to compensate for the lack of phone calls, and last week his office posted the new schedule. But as positive as in-person contact can be, in a busy world it is still nice to have the option of a reasonably priced phone callyou know, the kind that's "feasible" to offer at most other jails in the US.Nate AndersonDeputy EditorNate AndersonDeputy Editor Nate is the deputy editor at Ars Technica. His most recent book is In Emergency, Break Glass: What Nietzsche Can Teach Us About Joyful Living in a Tech-Saturated World, which is much funnier than it sounds. 26 Comments
