Merely to add funds to an account, the family or friends of inmates must pay a service fee. I have an account myself with the prison phone giant Securus so that inmates I want to keep in touch with can call me. In February, I’d loaded my phone account without any fee. Then, a few weeks ago, I was charged $6.95 to add $5 of call time. So, the $11.95 that used to buy 49 minutes then purchased only 20.
These fees are an additional money grab by the phone companies and the prison commissions system. There’s a fee to create an account, a fee to fund an account, even a fee to get a refund. The companies are also taking advantage of a loophole in the F.C.C. order that allows them to add special fees for single calls by a user who doesn’t want to set up an account with them. For the “PayNow” option from Securus, for example, the call cost is $1.80, but the transaction fee is $13.19. Before the F.C.C.’s order was implemented, ancillary fees added nearly 40 percent to phone call costs for prison customers.