Her son is in an Idaho prison. She can’t afford the cost of a phone call to him | Opinion

LuAnn Heston doesn’t know how she’s going to put food on the table for the next couple of weeks. She’s out of money until she gets her Social Security checks, which amount to about just $900 for the entire month.

This month, she had to put $150 on her son’s Idaho prison account to buy commissary items, such as toothpaste, toilet paper, a change of clothes and a sweatshirt. And that’s on top of the cost of making phone calls to him while he’s in prison.

“Right now, I have no money,” Heston, 66, told me in an interview at her home in Melba. “I have no money until the 28th. And I told my son, ‘I don’t have a dime to put on your books right now.’ Because when he was getting moved to prison, they don’t provide any toiletries, nothing, and he gets one set of clothes.”

For the past year, I’ve been writing about the corrupt system of allowing for-profit companies, such as Telmate, ICSolutions and others, to charge outrageous fees in Idaho prisons and jails.

Heston read one of my stories and contacted me about her own story.

Heston said she could pay only half of her electric bill this month and has no money left over for food.

She tallied up at least $2,545 in the past year on phone calls and commissary items for her son, who was sent to prison in August for a drug court violation.

Phone calls and video calls can cost 21 cents to 25 cents per minute or more.

Providers charge exorbitant fees just to put money into accounts. Heston said she put $10 on one account and was charged $13.30. On another account, she put $15 on it and was charged $22.65. That’s a 51% markup. That’s criminal.

To add insult to injury, every time her son gets moved to another facility, there’s usually a different phone service provider, which means if there’s any money left on the account at the previous facility, Heston can’t transfer it over to the new facility. And Heston can’t get that money back until her son is released from custody. So, while Heston tries to figure out where she’s going to get her next meal, she has a little bit of money in various accounts that she can’t touch.

“Every time he gets switched, even though it’s my debit card that buys the text or the stamps or the phone calls or whatever, because it’s on his account, it can’t be released to anyone but him,” she said. “It’ll go back on my card (eventually), but that’s not until he gets out. So like I’ve got all this money banked, like $30 here, $20 here, for when he gets out, and I don’t even know when that is.”

For example, she said she has 76 minutes of video calls remaining from a previous account, and she doesn’t know if she’ll get the money for that back. At 25 cents a minute, that’s $19 that she could really use right now.

Heston can ill-afford these calls and commissary items. She lives in a 974-square-foot, 1973 manufactured home in Melba, far from any sort of public transportation. She’s mostly home-bound because gas costs add up when traveling out of Melba, which is 15 miles south of Nampa and 32 miles southwest of Boise.

Her son was in the Canyon County jail for a time, where he worked in the kitchen, allowing him to buy his own commissary items and making it easier on Heston. But since then, he hasn’t worked, “so he sits around and plays pinochle all day,” Heston said.

“I know it’s all about the money, and I get that they’re in it for the business,” Heston said. “But I don’t know how to stress how important it is for me and for my son — he and I are really close — to be able to keep in contact with one another, just to hear each other’s voices. And for people to make money off of that, off people like me — like I said, I don’t have any other family — me sitting here by myself on Thanksgiving, with the cat, it gets depressing, and just being able to hear their voice is huge.”

Studies have shown that regular communication with family members and friends benefits those who are incarcerated and their family members.

“I spent Christmas by myself; I spent Thanksgiving by myself; I spent my birthday by myself,” she said. “It’s just been really tough, both for myself and for him. It’s hard to not be in communication with him. I know he’s the one doing time, but it’s been hard on me. I mean, it’s just a lot of stress on me. The thought of my son being in prison just absolutely terrifies me.”

But regular communication with the current system is an obstacle.

“He calls me every day, even if it’s for like, 30 seconds, just to say, ‘I want to say I love you,’” Heston said. “And it’s like, ‘You’ve got to stop. You can’t call me that often.’ And I hate having to say that to him, but I can’t afford it. I just can’t afford it.”

Government kickbacks

Getting the system changed, though, is going to be a tough sell.

That’s because the government agencies that sign these agreements get kickbacks from the private companies that are soaking prisoners’ families.

Canyon County received about $130,000 last year from its contract with TelMate. Ada County received $540,000 last year from TelMate. The Idaho Department of Correction received $1.5 million from its provider, ICSolutions.

It’s a corrupt system.

There is an alternative: Last year, I wrote about Ameelio, a nonprofit organization that builds software that allows people who are incarcerated to communicate with loved ones for free so they can maintain bonds with friends and family when they’re released.

But to run the service and recoup the costs of maintenance and storage would cost government money.

So instead of getting a $1.5 million kickback from ICSolutions, the state of Idaho would have to pay a fee to Ameelio, anywhere from $700,000 to $2.5 million a year, depending on storage requirements.

But it may well be worth the investment. Studies have shown that those who are incarcerated have a lower recidivism rate when they keep in contact with family and friends.

One study showed that within the first five years of release, incarcerated people with strong family connections were 25% more likely to cease criminal activity, according to the Urban Institute, a nonprofit research organization that last year published a report showing the benefits of low-cost phone calls for people who are incarcerated.

“My son is wrong for doing what he did, but the cost is just astronomical,” Heston said. “I mean, I should be sitting on my deck in the sun drinking a bloody Mary, not going through all this. I think he understands, and he’s very apologetic, but I told him I’m doing the best I can for you. I mean, I’m living on Top Ramen soup.”

Here’s another argument against this corrupt system, for those of you so hardened you remain unmoved by stories like Heston’s: That money is flowing out of the pockets of people like Heston and into the pockets of executives of out-of-state companies that are profiting off of people who usually can least afford it.

Two-thirds of people in jail report annual income of less than $12,000 before arrest, according to the Urban Institute.

Instead of spending her money at the Melba Valley Market or the pizza place down the street, Heston is sending her money to some faceless corporate executive in some other part of the country.

Forcing people like Heston to pay for these phone calls and commissary items actually masks the true cost of incarcerating people. The costs of incarceration are undercounted, probably in the millions (we don’t know because the revenues generated by these private companies are not public record).

I hope a state legislator takes up this cause, not only on moral grounds but because it’s a better outcome when those who are incarcerated can keep in close contact with family and loved ones.

“I’m by no means excusing what my son has done, but the amount of money they charge, and it’s just a lot of stress,” Heston said. “But people are going to pay whatever they can to talk to their loved ones.”

New York, Ohio and Rhode Island outlawed site commissions for correctional facilities and technology communication services, according to the Urban Institute, and California, Colorado, Connecticut and Minnesota have made prison calls free of charge.

It can be done.

It should be done.