The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has been conducting a proceeding on inmate calling rates. That proceeding, “In the mater of Rates for Interstate Inmate Calling Services,” resulted in an order and further notice of proposed rulemaking released on Sept. 26, 2013. You can find that order and notice here. The FCC’s order declining petitions to stay (released Nov. 21) is available here. Here’s an informal description of the order. All the public filings in this proceeding are available in Docket 12-375, online in the FCC Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS). Here’s a link to the filings in that ECFS docket.
Anyone interested in studying inmate telephone calling services can find much useful information in the FCC docket. To make some of the publicly filed data more easily accessible in a machine-readable form, I’ve compiled it into an online spreadsheet workbook. The workbook includes the Human Rights Defense Center’s compilation of inmate calling rates for inmates held in state Departments of Corrections (DOCs) and commissions paid from inmate service providers to state DOCs. The source for that data are state DOC contracts with inmate phone service providers. The workbook collates those data with US Bureau of Justice Statistics data on state DOC inmate populations. The workbook also includes some additional public data on inmate service provider sizes by number of contracts held.
Two inmate calling service provides account for a large share on inmate calling services. With respect to state DOC inmates, Global Tel*Link and Securus serve an estimated 55% and 21% of state DOC inmates, respectively. Measured by contracts and including inmate calling services to jail jurisdictions, Global Tel*Link and Securus account for an estimated 24% and 60% of all U.S. inmate calling service provider contracts. Contract shares that include jail jurisdictions are shaped by the large number of jails that in total hold only a small share of jail inmates. A recent Bloomberg news article on the prison phone market stated:
Global Tel*Link, based in Mobile, Alabama, has about 50 percent of the correctional phone services market, followed by Dallas-based Securus with almost 30 percent, according to Standard & Poor’s.
Those shares of the inmate phone services market are plausible shares by inmates served for both state DOC inmates and jail inmates. By that measure, two inmate phone service providers in total provide an estimated 80% of the U.S. inmate calling services.
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Data: inmate telephone rates, commissions, and provider shares (Excel version)
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