My son has to use a company in Bossier City LA when he calls home. It costs me $9.75 service charge every time I add money and then it costs me $9.25 for every 15 minute call!! It is such a legalized crime going on what these telephone companies get by with! Talk about price gouging!

At least you guys have a few options....can you use Google voice or try to get a local number for the area that they are in?

It would cost more. I tried the other companies but it would have been more money. I pay a transaction fee too. They don't give money back. I want to see how many people try to get money back when you still have money on that company's acct and you are not using that phone company anyone.

We will soon see Heartbroken, I still had $20.00 left on the other company when I closed that account.

Donna how long has it been? I want to see about a class action suit against these assholes taking advantage of the situation with our families. And I will ask my attorney I work for regarding this. This system has taken so much from my family!!!

I have spent $1085.77 on collect jail and prison phone calls for my Colorado son since 07/05/2011. When he went to prison, I changed my Missouri phone number to a Colorado phone number, so the calls would be cheaper.

I have received refunds two times. On 07/12/2011, I received a refund of $7.10 from Securus. On 06/07/2013, I received a refund of $13.98 from IC Solutions. Those were both accounts required by the county jails he was in. Now that he's in prison, he pays nothing to call me, but I pay the charges out of my phone account with Value Added Communications.

I've spent much less than this on phone calls from my Iowa son. I purchased a second cell phone, a Tracfone, and asked for an area code and prefix in the same area as the prison. He has to pay something like $2.00 each time he calls me. All I have to pay for is the airtime. The reason I spend less on phone calls from him is that he doesn't call me very often. He sends me frequent emails through www.corrlinks.com instead. Those are 25 cents each.

Here's a recent article about this topic from the New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/opinion/unfair-phone-charges-for-inmates.html?_r=0

Unfair Phone Charges for Inmates
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD JAN. 6, 2014

The Federal Communications Commission ended a grave injustice last fall when it prohibited price-gouging by the private companies that provide interstate telephone service for prison and jail inmates. Thanks to the F.C.C. order, which takes effect next month, poor families no longer have to choose between paying for basic essentials and speaking to a relative behind bars. The commission now needs to be on the lookout for — and crack down on, if necessary — similar abuses involving newer communication technologies like person-to-person video chat, email and voice mail.

Research shows that inmates who keep in touch with their families have a better chance of fitting in back home once released. Before the recent ruling, a 15-minute interstate telephone call from prison could easily cost a family as much as $17. The cost was partly driven by a “commission” — a legalized kickback — that telephone companies paid to state corrections departments. The commissions were calculated as a percentage of telephone revenue, or a fixed upfront fee, or a combination of both.

State prison officials and phone companies said the extra charges were necessary to pay for security screening. But this argument was discredited years ago in New York State, which has outlawed the kickback system and requires its prison phone company to provide service at the lowest possible cost to inmates and their families. Federal prisons also allow inmates to place calls cheaply to a preregistered, approved list of phone numbers.

The F.C.C. ruled that rates and fees may not include the “commission” payments that providers pay to prisons. It also set a cap for interstate calls: 25 cents a minute for collect calls and 21 cents a minute for prepaid and debit calls. And it required the companies to base charges on the actual costs of providing service.

An analysis provided last month to the commission by the Prison Policy Initiative, a Massachusetts research group, urged similar rules for video visitation, email, voice mail and other systems. It said that for-profit video visitation systems (allowing families and inmates to talk using, in some instances, personal computers outside the prison and video terminals inside) are being “driven by the same perverse incentives that caused market failure in the correctional telephone industry.”

Absent regulation, prisons and phone companies will simply use the video chats to get around the price caps on interstate calls.

Whatever the technology, gouging prison inmates and their families is both unfair and counterproductive, weakening family ties that could be critical to an inmate’s adjustment to the world beyond bars.

When our son was in a county jail we could put money on our landline phone number and he could only call us or we could put it in his "general" phone account and he could call any number. $50 plus $10.60 service charge - Calls only 15 minutes each- cannot remember how much they took off each call but I think it was less that $5.00. The wouldn't refund the $45 we had left but offered a phone card.

Now at the prison we put $50 on for about $6 fee and each 45 minute call costs about $3.95 for the call - same deal general phone account so he can call anyone. Cell phones cost air time so we stay with our landline.

I have seen outfits that say they can save you money if you use their service- they claim you are given a local number for the inmate to use when calling family - you buy X number of minutes for a fixed price - It sounded too good to be true.

Maybe someone else out there has used that type of inmate calling service and can let us know if it works.

I used conscallhome for awhile when they had a local number to where my husband was and it did save me money. It cost him .94 to connect and the then it went against the minutes I had set up for the month. I figured it out that each call cost about $3.00 for 15 minutes. Now that he was moved and they do not have a local number I got a local cell number to where he is and he still only pays a .94 connect fee and my cost for the cell which still saves me money over what I would of been paying. Goggle voice does not have a local number to where he is as I tried that.

Thanks everyone and Honest, this is everywhere or just New York? I want to report this to FCC because this is ridiculous that my son can't even call his father. And we are with the same network.

Heartbroken

It's nationwide, but only applies to interstate calls, and it doesn't take effect until sometime this month. The same groups that were pushing to get the FCC involved in this are now directing their efforts toward getting the rates capped for intrastate calls, but that could take longer.

I can only chime in about Federally incarcerated (like my son).
We have also used ConsCallHome and it has worked very well for us. They have several plans available. We chose the 100min/month plan. It costs us $95 dollars and it cost him 6cents a minute on his end.
As is all Federal calls, there is a 15min limit per call.
Our son calls us once a week, and I don't think he has ever exceeded his 100minutes.
ConsCall Home does setup a local number for him to dial, and it gets translated to my wife's cell phone (TracPhone). Originally, we had it translated to our landline, but ended that nonsense a yr ago.
The only real beef I have, and one I know is ConsCallHome's doing, the other I am not sure.
CCH will start calling you to renew MONTHS before its due. Not that you or your inmate will lose any time or the yearly timeline changes. It justs annoying. I told them last time (last week for gosh sakes!) to stop calling me months in advance. I bought & paid for a yr (it renews in April)..The rep told me they are FORCED to call us 60days in advance. I said call me one more time BEFORE April 1st, and I will be forced to blow a loud whistle in your ear!... The other beef is will will get random calls that show up on my wife's phone as from coming from my son, when ,in fact its telemarketeers. How the heck the got a hold of an unknown MS phone# is beyond my comprehension, and I suspect somehow CCH may/or may NOT of sold a list of numbers for profit!..They deny it, but who really knows?? We have had the local number changed, and, although less, it stills happens. Basically , we know the day & times he is supposed to call us, and mainly we try to ignore the random calls. But, I would hate to miss his call if it was really him calling. It is a two-edged sword. Anyway, that is my experience with ConsCall
Home. For the majority, it has worked really well for us.