Free Phone Calls Saved Incarcerated People and Their Loved Ones $622.5 Million

Kwaneta Harris is one of the thousands of Americans charged with supporting both her aging parent and her own children. Her mother is in her early 70s. She also has three children; the youngest is finishing high school.

Harris is also incarcerated, which means that she relies on phone calls and electronic messages to stay on top of family responsibilities. Each month, she spends over $400 on calls and over $150 on electronic messaging.

“My children and parent’s needs don’t stop because I’m incarcerated,” she told Truthout. Harris, who was a nurse before her incarceration, calls her mother daily to assess her health needs as she ages.

“I must know her blood sugar, blood pressure, what meals she consumed,” she said. “I wish I could afford to spend more time asking her about fun stuff, taking time to laugh.”

She speaks with her children less frequently — weekly or biweekly. “If cost wasn’t an issue, I’d love to talk to them daily. My oldest daughter often says that she wishes we could have a semblance of normalcy, and I call her daily to say have a good day or ask how was her day [and about] things she saw with her friends,” she said.

Carceral telecommunications is a $1.5 billion industry. According to Worth Rises, a national nonprofit that tracks the finances behind carceral systems and their contractors, one in three families with an incarcerated loved one goes into debt over the cost of prison phone calls. Advocates, including family members and formerly incarcerated people, have long fought for regulations capping the cost of prison calls, resulting in the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, legislation that directed the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to regulate the cost of jail and prison calls. (In 2025, the FCC voted to increase price caps on phone and video calls.)

One in three families with an incarcerated loved one goes into debt over the cost of prison phone calls.

Five state prison systems — Connecticut, California, Massachusetts, New York, and Minnesota — and the federal prison system have made phone calls free, affecting over 330,000 behind bars as well as their loved ones outside.

“Critical Connections: The Power of Free Communication in Prisons and Jails,” a new report by Worth Rises, examines this impact, conducting dozens of interviews with incarcerated people, their family members, and carceral staff as well as analyzing call volume and cost data. The report found that free communication policies have resulted in nearly 600 million more calls and 6.4 billion more minutes to date. The report also found that the average call usage per person per day increased substantially from 25.1 to 44.8 minutes in prisons and 26.7 to 56.7 minutes in jails.

“U Feel Like U Have a Thread to the Outside World Again”

The report found that free communications saved incarcerated people and their loved ones $622.5 million. Savings ranged from $172 to $1,801 per incarcerated person per year.

But, noted Bianca Tylek, executive director of Worth Rises, “It’s not just the minutes that matter. It’s what’s in the minutes that matter.”

Free communications saved incarcerated people and their loved ones $622.5 million. Savings ranged from $172 to $1,801 per incarcerated person per year.

Mindy, age 71, knows this all too well. She has been imprisoned for the past two decades. Her family lives seven hours from the California Institution for Women. (Mindy asked that her full name not be published to avoid retaliation.)

“We always made phone calls our priority no matter the cost. It was about $1.30 per call and only family could pay. This caused me no small amount of guilt, but they insisted it was no problem. They actually kept the cost from me because they needed to know I was OK every day,” she told Truthout.

California lawmakers made calls free in 2022.

“Now I start each day by talking to my 94-year-old dad and special needs niece followed by a beautiful conversation with my daughter. It is safe to say these connections saved my sanity,” said Mindy.

At the Central California Women’s Facility, the state’s other women’s prison, Tien Mo observed that free calls have bolstered family bonds for many around her. “The connections and outside support for everyone here [have] been amazing. People who haven’t connected with their families for years and years have reconnected,” she told Truthout.

Mo used to call her mother once a week. Now they speak several times each week. She also reconnected with her brother, whom she had not spoken with for over a decade. “U feel like u have a thread to the outside world again,” she wrote in an electronic message.

New York’s prison system passed a policy making calls free in August 2025. Sara Kielly, an incarcerated journalist at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, says these free calls are a “godsend.”

Phone calls had previously cost $0.024 per minute. Although the cost seems insignificant, the accumulated price still put families like hers in a bind. Now, Kielly told Truthout, “my mother doesn’t have to decide whether to put money on the phones or not be able to talk when her finances are tight.”

“People who haven’t connected with their families for years and years have reconnected.”

In the jurisdictions that made calls free, the prisons or jails cover the cost. The report also found that every system that made communication free was able to negotiate a significant discount for themselves compared to the rate that incarcerated people and their families had been paying. Across state prisons, the average discount was 62 percent. Across jails, the average discount was 68 percent. The discounts showed that prison telecommunications systems had been overcharging incarcerated people and families for years.

Sally is incarcerated in Massachusetts, which made calls free in 2023. (Sally asked that Truthout not publish her legal name.)

“I used to spend $40 a month to call three or four people regularly. Now I’m able to speak with my elderly aunts in two different states once a week. I’ve been here since 1995 and went decades without hearing their voices,” she said. “The free emails allow me to stay in regular contact with people I would not have been able to afford to do otherwise.”

She’s not the only one. In the year after Massachusetts made calls free, call volume doubled. The sheriffs’ association said that jails averaged nearly 1 million calls per month, or a 133 percent increase, once the law passed.

Worth Rises also interviewed jail and prisons staff, who noted that violence and operational disruption have decreased since calls became free and recommended that other jails and prisons adopt free communications policies.

“The free phone calls have reduced the stressors greatly,” Justin Oles, deputy warden at a Connecticut prison, told Worth Rises. “It’s brought a calming effect to the [incarcerated] population.”

Charles Mitchell, a sergeant in a New York state prison, had the same observation. “I’m always security minded. If you keep incarcerated people busy, whether it be with the free phone calls or anything else positive and constructive, it is less likely they get involved with negative or violent behavior,” he told Worth Rises.

Free call implementation has often gone hand in hand with the rollout of prison tablets, allowing people to make calls from their cells rather than compete for the handful of phones lining the day room walls.

“Why Couldn’t I Call More?”

Nearly half of people in prison are parents to minor children, according to the report. Many, like Harris, have children who were young when they were first imprisoned and have grown into adults without their parents.

Michael Tineo spent over 21 years in the New York prison system. His incarceration began when his daughter was 5 months old. “I literally raised my daughter from prison,” he said on a press call. “Ninety-five percent of our engagement was over the phone.”

At first, calls cost $9 each. Even when the price decreased over the years, the cost still posed both a financial strain and an emotional roadblock. “Before the free calls, I could maybe get 15 minutes with her.” Although Tineo was charged the full amount each time, often the calls didn’t connect until halfway through those 15 minutes.

“It opened up a whole new life for us. I could be present for moments that, before, were just not possible because of the cost of the calls.”

“I remember one day in particular, my daughter said to me she was sad,” he recalled. “Why couldn’t I call more? Why couldn’t I speak to her more?”

Free calls, he said, opened up a whole new life. “I suddenly could call to say good morning,” he recalled. She would often just be waking up.

“She wouldn’t say anything. She would just mumble, Mmmm,” he said. “We would have these moments that we wouldn’t have [had] before. It opened up a whole new life for us. I could be present for moments that, before, were just not possible because of the cost of the calls.”

They grew closer, building their relationship by doing homework together, reading together, telling jokes, or talking about other things happening in her life. “Just things that we wouldn’t be able to cover or talk about,” he recalled. Tineo is now out of prison and says that, without free calls, his transition might not have been as smooth.

That’s what Kwaneta Harris, incarcerated in Texas, wants for her family as well.

Currently, there is no campaign for free prison calls in Texas. But if they were free, Harris said, “I could freely call daily to check in on my daughters and learn about their first heartbreak, first time they’re fired from their job, and other things I can guide them through. I would’ve been able to console them when their father died.”