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Court Wipes Out Inmate Intrastate Calling Price Caps

posted by n1 on Wednesday June 14 2017, @04:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the captive-audience dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A federal appeals court today struck down price caps on intrastate phone calls made by prisoners. Inmates will thus have to continue paying high prices to make phone calls to family members, friends, and lawyers.

The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit sided with prison phone company Global Tel*Link in its lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission. But that's exactly what the FCC's current leadership wanted. The FCC imposed the prison phone rate caps during the Obama administration, but current FCC Chairman Ajit Pai instructed commission lawyers to drop their court defense of the intrastate caps.

-- submitted from IRC

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday June 14 2017, @04:23PM (3 children)

    by takyon (881) <{takyon} {at} {soylentnews.org}> on Wednesday June 14 2017, @04:23PM (#525492) Journal

    Intrastate calls are those in which both parties are in the same state; judges noted that the FCC is generally forbidden from regulating intrastate communication services, which is left to individual states.

    Simple fix: send the signals out of the state and back!

    Pai issued a statement on today's court decision, noting that "the DC Circuit agreed with my position that the FCC exceeded its authority when it attempted to impose rate caps on intrastate calls made by inmates."

    Going forward, Pai said he intends to "address the problem of high inmate calling rates in a lawful manner," but offered no specific plans.

    I'm sure appearing weak on crime will be a top priority for Congress, especially after one of their own was shot today.

    What do we call the opposite of criminal justice reform again? Bizarro justice reform?

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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 15 2017, @12:07AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 15 2017, @12:07AM (#525749)

    >Simple fix: send the signals out of the state and back!

    Simple, and almost certain to get the inmate in terrible trouble.

    Call forwarding is strictly forbidden in every facility I've heard of and the regulations are viciously enforced. You can end up in the hole for eight days, four of them on 24-hour lockdown, without a change of clothes, and spend an extra three weeks in prison because of lost good conduct time simply because of making a three-way call to family members.

  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday June 15 2017, @03:30AM (1 child)

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Thursday June 15 2017, @03:30AM (#525846) Journal

    I don't understand why the logic of just about every other Commerce Clause case in the past 75 years doesn't apply here. Wickard v. Filburn was based on the notion that even stuff you grow on your own land affects the "market" for everything around you. That's generally how Congress gets around "interstate" issues to regulate commerce in a state -- you just argue that the external interstate market is affected. If phone companies charge X instead of Y for intrastate calls, won't that affect how much they tend to charge for interstate calls? I could really only seeing this apply (maybe) to a case where you had separate providers for inter vs intra state, and even then it would likely only be an issue due to an unnecessary monopoly granted to those providers... In a free market, it would all affect interstate commerce.

    (To be clear, I'm actually not a fan of the expansionist reading of the Commerce Clause, but I'm not sure I understand why this case should be different.)