Jail Bypasses Phone Companies for Inmate Calling

Managed phone systems can offer more revenue for your facility.
By Morgan Jones

WAUKESHA, Wis. – Waukesha County’s 306-bed main jail operates without a phone company contract. Instead, a management consulting firm provides the equipment and personnel needed to earn revenue from inmate calls.

“For years, we had a traditional turnkey system…and we were not treated like a customer,” says Waukesha County Jail Administrator Michael Giese. “We were getting a fairly small commission rate. After many years, we negotiated a slightly higher rate, but we didn't get upgrades in software, and we would have problems with the validation system.”

Disconnections proved time consuming. “Instead of the phone company handling it when the inmate's family contacted them to complain, they would say it was a jail problem,” recalls Giese, noting his phone company rep only came around every few years – when it was time to renew the contract.

Back then, La Follette & Associates Inc. was doing brisk business auditing jail records, sometimes recouping millions of dollars from phone companies on behalf of jails. When one of Barbara La Follette's clients asked if it was possible to manage their own inmate phone system, La Follette looked into it.

After doing some research, she sought a prototype facility to test the idea. “I liked the concept right off the bat,” says Giese. Having worked with a contract-managed inmate phone system for two years, he still does. Today, when an inmate claims he's been cut off, a full-time on-site worker employed by La Follette evaluates the claim's legitimacy and issues a credit if warranted.

La Follette's staff member provides billing and collection services, tracks trouble reports, retrieves call data and recordings, and can explain any shifts in revenue with a clear audit trail. The phone manager provides detailed information to jailers, and can even tell them when an inmate is creating an unnecessary expense by making calls to persons who don't accept them.

“My staff were taken out of it,” Giese reports. In addition, he now has far greater flexibility in setting the rates charged to inmates and their families. “What made it interesting to me in the beginning was the ability for the county to set the rates,” says Giese. “Our county is wealthy, but extremely conservative, so we decided not to lower rates for the first term of the contract.”

Waukesha County currently charges an average of $5.25 for local calls lasting 10 minutes. Rates also remain higher for out-of-state and other toll calls, but they could come down if Giese so decides. “Jails get more from my system than they would on a commission from a phone company,” says La Follette. “They can say, 'We don't need 60 percent, we can lower the rates.'”

Giese watches a changing regulatory climate. Public outcry over costs to inmates and families, as high as 75 cents per minute for local calling with an $8.00 operator-assistance fee, has litigation pending in 18 states. “There have been class-action lawsuits across the county, and a couple in Wisconsin,” says Giese, whose jail is not among the litigants.

Many state legislatures have studied the matter, with proposed solutions ranging from mandating lower rates, experiments with debit cards, to outright bans on prisons profiting from inmate calls. “The problem is, when they rule that that state can't take commissions, it just means more money for the phone companies,” says La Follette.

“Debit cards would also increase phone company profits, because that would reduce their billing and validation expenses,” she says. As it happens, Waukesha County is now planning to issue their own debit card, but under a contract-managed phone system, the jail reaps the benefits. “It also gives the inmate families and inmates a lot of flexibility in terms of how they manage their calling,” says Giese.

As an added incentive, the jail can offer a 10 percent rate discount to inmates joining the new debit system.

The advanced monitoring system is another improvement. “A detective can set up the system so that, when an inmate call is made to the number of a suspected drug house, it can either alert his pager, his computer, or ring his cell phone with the real-time conversation,” says Giese. Surprisingly, the only infrastructure needed to provide all these services is one tower of equipment.

According to La Follette, many jail administrators have a hard time believing they can manage inmate calling without a phone company. “You don't need to have the business entity of a phone company to provide all the services,” she replies. “It requires out-of-the-box thinking. I also kept it quiet for a while. I haven't promoted it, primarily because I wanted to make sure it works. And it does.”

It should be noted the phone companies don't take this lying down. “Because Barbara was the only one offering a managed system, the Purchasing Department had to tweak the RFP to make it so we were comparing apples to apples,” Giese explains. “Some of the companies didn't feel the process was fair, partly because they knew deep down they just couldn't compete.”

Phone companies continue to lobby the county's Purchasing Department to issue a new RFP, but Giese says this is unlikely. “We have a system that gives you everything that's left. Once you pay your bills for the local calls, the validation process, the billing and collection process, the software, and our management fee, everything else is profit, rather than getting a commission from the left-over pie.”

E-mail lafolletteassoc@tds.net.