Pacific Telephone Company(TM) is registered with the (CAPUC) State of California Public Utilities Commission, Reg. No. #1110; the (FCC) Federal Communications Commission, Reg. No. FRN019494061, collects tariffs as required by the FCC Universal Service Fund and E911 regulations.
(BlackNews.com) -- While in the free world with the cost of long distance telephone calls as cheap as pennies a minute and local calls being free, inmates and prisoners in county jails and prisons must often pay a heavy price to call their loved ones.
Inmates in the Nevada Department of Corrections pay on the average of $17.00 for a 15 minute long distance call as well as over $5.00 for an in-state call. In Idaho it's $14.65 for 15 minutes, Ohio $13.58, with Tennessee inmates being charged $12.87 for long distance and over $4.00 for an in-state call .
So in addition to having to shoulder the burden of having a loved one locked up, families are forced to pay outrageous rates to speak to their loved one using money they usually can't afford. Most prisons defend their rates saying they must charge high rates to maintain security monitoring of the calls. While that may be true, an answer is at hand.
Inmate Toll Busters, a division of Pacific Telephone Company LLC in Los Angeles has found a way to help lower inmate phone calls home and still maintain a prison security of its calls.
It works like this: Lets say Duane, an inmate at an Arizona State Prison in Tucson calls his mother long distance in California for 15 minutes using the prison's phone system. Duane would be charged a $2.40 connection fee and pay an additional $0.40 per minute to complete the call, for a total cost of $8.40. Duane's mother, fed up with the high price of calls, contacts Inmate Toll Busters, who then installs a Foreign Exchange Tucson number local to the prison.
Duane now calls a local Tucson number that is installed to ring on his mothers phone back in California. Duane's total cost for the 15 minute local call is $1.84, with Inmate Toll Busters charging a $0.06 per minute fee or $0.90 to complete the call over its network, for a total cost of $2.74, resulting in a $5.66 savings per call.
Because the call originated from a prison telephone, it went through the same security monitoring that all outgoing calls due, with the only thing being compromised is the higher price.
