From the Editor
For over 32 years the Human Rights Defense Center has advocated against the financial exploitation of prisoners and their families. Since 1992 HRDC has advocated, litigated, investigated and exposed the abuses, corruption and exploitation of the prison phone industry. This has included extensive interactions with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) urging them to cap and limit the cost of prison and jail phone calls.
We have had steady success over the years with the FCC issuing a number of orders limiting the costs of prison phone calls. The most recent order is detailed on the cover of this issue of PLN and follows years of interactions and advocacy by HRDC of the FCC and filing dozens of petitions and comments and testifying at hearings to keep advancing the agenda of controlling costs through regulation. The FCC order is over 600 pages long and is a culmination of almost two decades of work by HRDC and a number of other hard working, dedicated advocates.
Literally as this issue of PLN is going to the printer 14 Republican attorney generals have filed a lawsuit in the 8th Circuit federal court of appeals in St. Louis claiming that the FCC has overstepped its authority by seeking to regulate and control the cost of prison and jail phone calls. We will report on this challenge in more detail in an upcoming issue of PLN as well as other efforts around prison phone calls.
One issue HRDC is concerned about is the practice by Securus and Viapath (FKA Global Tel Link) of taking people’s money from their phone accounts due to inactivity, when phone vendors change, prisoners are moved or released, placed in segregation, etc. If this has happened to you please contact HRDC with any documentation or evidence supporting the taking of your money.
We are conducting our annual fundraiser now. If you can donate to support our work please do so. Subscription and advertising income do not cover the expenses of doing things like our Prison Phone Justice Campaign and other projects where we advocate for prisoners and their families. If you cannot afford to donate, please ask others who can to do so on their own or on your behalf.
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After three years of litigation we have settled our lawsuit against the North Carolina prison system. If you are or were a prisoner subscriber of PLN and/or Criminal Legal News (CLN) you will be receiving a copy of the settlement from our legal team as well as having your subscriptions extended by HRDC. In addition, NC prison officials have agreed to print and deliver the censored issues of our magazines to the respective subscribers. If you are a prisoner subscriber in North Carolina and have difficulty receiving PLN or CLN please let us know. We will report on the settlement in more detail in next month’s issue.
For over a decade now our Prison Ecology project has reported on the intersection between prisons, mass incarceration and the environment. As climate change results in dramatic weather events we are seeing the folly of building prisons in remote, rural areas as wildfires, earthquakes, floods, mudslides and other climate related disasters take their toll. As this issue of PLN goes to press, Hurricane Helene has devastated the states of Florida, Georgia and North Carolina and the areas hardest hit by Helene also happen to be rife with prisons, many of which have been destroyed or rendered uninhabitable.
We have long reported on the lack of disaster preparation plans around the country where the response by prisoncrats is to hunker down and hope for the best. This mentality shows the disdain for human life, both that of prisoners and staff alike, by prison administrators. We will be reporting on Helene in an upcoming issue of PLN. The trend in recent years is that of bigger, more powerful and more dramatic weather-related events impacting the US in general and prisons in particular.
Enjoy this issue of PLN and please donate to our annual fund raiser if you can afford to do so.
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