Hundreds of Commenters Ask FCC Not to Delay Prison-Calling Price Controls
Hundreds of family members who have loved ones in prison filed comments at the FCC in recent days asking the agency not to delay some incarcerated people’s communications service (IPCS) deadlines until April 1, 2027 (see 2506300068). Meanwhile, public interest groups asked the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals not to delay its consideration of the prison-calling order, as requested by the FCC, which told the court it needed time to review the rules approved during the Biden administration.
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Congress required the FCC to implement the new IPCS rules in the Martha Wright-Reed (MWR) Act of 2022 no later than January 2025. The FCC initially defended the order after Republican Brendan Carr became chairman (see 2504250030). Carr voted for the order, though he expressed reservations that were reflected in the delay order.
“These comments are the tip of an iceberg of misery,” said Andrew Schwartzman, who represents the Pennsylvania Prison Society. “The delay in imposing fully justified rate caps is unspeakably cruel,” he told us. “Incarcerated persons and their loved ones are understandably furious -- they used the democratic process to obtain relief from a manifestly unjust system, and Chairman Carr has now pulled the rug out from under them.”
Last week’s IPCS waiver order didn’t appear to meet the agency’s standard for waivers and is unlikely to survive judicial scrutiny, said FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez in an interview Tuesday. “We didn't actually have any petitions before us to waive the implementation of the rules,” she said. “A two-year waiver is really a deferment of enforcement, and it swallows the intent of the rule.” The FCC isn’t complying with the MWR Act, she added.
The FCC’s pause on the IPCS reforms is “devastating, especially to people who have loved ones in county jails,” said Rebecca Aubart, executive director of Wisconsin-based incarcerated persons advocacy group Ladies of Solution, Change and Innovation. The group was formed by women who had family and partners incarcerated in the state's Stanley Correctional Institution. Aubart’s husband was jailed in Polk County, Wisconsin, prior to the FCC’s 2024 IPCS order, and she spent close to $5,000 on calls with him over more than four months he was there, she said.
“They were profiting thousands of dollars off of people who are, in a lot of cases, the most hard up in the community,” Aubart told us. After the order, the jails had to lower the price of those phone calls, but Aubart is concerned that the rates will rise again after the recent waiver. “Nobody wants to care about incarcerated people, but what they should care about is the people who aren't incarcerated that are their loved ones, because it's my money,” she said. “I didn't do anything wrong. I wasn't in jail. But it's my money.”
The hundreds of comments in dockets 23-62 and 12-375 ask the FCC not to delay the reduced IPCS rates. A typical filing was made Thursday by Naomi Kosek, who called the delay “shameful.” The MWR Act didn’t “just expand the FCC's regulatory authority but mandated regulations be passed within 18 to 24 months, in clear recognition of the urgency of the harm it sought to address,” Kosek said. “Families need relief now.”
Legal Battle
Groups representing prisoners and their families, meanwhile, told the 1st Circuit that the court should hear the case. The brief was filed late Wednesday by Direct Action for Rights and Equality, the Criminal Justice Reform Clinic, the Pennsylvania Prison Society and the United Church of Christ Media Justice Ministry. “The Court should reject the Commission’s last-minute attempt to avoid judicial review based on nothing more than speculation about whether the Commission may change parts of the Order at some unspecified point in the future,” they said.
The FCC’s arguments are “based on entirely speculative reasoning,” the brief said. “The Commission has promised no action by any discrete date nor pointed to newly identified facts triggering its sudden reversal.” All the delay order says is that “the Commission is ‘assess[ing] whether to take further action,’” the groups said. “The case is already fully briefed. If the Commission had truly wanted to conserve judicial resources, it would have sought abeyance before briefing in this case commenced, or at least before it filed its 22,000-word brief fully and forcefully defending the Order in April of this year.”
The public interest intervenors “advanced a solid legal argument against abatement of the litigation, while the volume of comments on the FCC's docket illustrate the number of people impacted by the agency's action,” emailed Stephen Raher, who advocates on behalf of prisoners and their families. “It would be one thing if the FCC developed a record and proposed changes to the 2024 rules, but instead the agency mounted a persuasive defense in court and then surprised everyone by suspending the rules without notice.”
It’s not shocking that the FCC's “abrupt change of course prompted a swift and vocal reaction by the enormous number of consumers who will lose real money as a result,” Raher said.