FCC Releases Final Version of Order Gutting 2024 Phone Cap Regulations
As reported in PLN, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had postponed a 2024 rule poised to reduce the financial burden for incarcerated people throughout the country. [See: PLN, Aug. 2025, p. 19] The June 30, 2025 pause was followed by a draft proposal in October that significantly raised prices to nearly double those in the 2024 rule. When the finalized document was released on November 6, it surprisingly contained further changes, which included even more substantial price hikes. Through this new rule, the FCC effectively reversed course on nearly every major provision of the 2024 rule.
The 2024 rule would have saved millions of dollars for people incarcerated in jails and prisons, as well as their friends and families who have been known to pay in the vicinity of $500 per month for the right to communicate with them. Instead, the November final draft slipped in an additional 6.7% inflation factor over the October draft price hike with no public notice.
At issue is the profiteering off of incarcerated people and their loved ones. FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez made the point well in her critique of the June decision to pause the rule, saying they were “now stalling, shielding a broken system that inflates costs and rewards kickbacks to correctional facilities at the expense of incarcerated individuals and their loved ones.”
FCC Chair Brendan Carr wasted little time in overturning what had been a bipartisan rule. When he announced the October draft, he said the 2024 price caps had led to “negative, unintended consequences.” He claimed the fees were too low to cover “required safety measures” and that the states had not been given enough time to find other revenue sources.
The claim that the previous rate caps were too low to sufficiently compensate providers is challenged by multiple factors. An analysis published by Worth Rises in mid-October found that about three quarters of U.S. prisons were already operating at rates lower than the 2024 caps. In contrast, the new caps will be higher than 94% of all U.S. prisons currently have; only Florida, Kentucky, and Oklahoma are higher. Securus had told the FCC that the 2022 data used to establish the 2024 caps needed an 11.6% adjustment to offset cost changes. They got that and more from the FCC without ever having to show any justification.
Providers such as Securus and ViaPath Technologies have also claimed the 2024 price caps and ban on kickbacks would lead to widespread losses of services, and that this had already happened at a handful of facilities. Yet, we have only seen evidence of that at a single jail—the Baxter County jail in Arkansas, which received a “commission” kickback from Securus, canceled all calls for detainees in March 2025 in response to the now-abandoned rate caps. And while the rules seem to say the same things as the 2024 ban on commissions, Commissioner Gomez claimed that Footnote 278 leaves open the possibility of commissions in excess of “facility cost additive[s].”
The order went into effect on December 5 and raised the effective rate cap to 11 cents per minute at most prisons and between 10 and 19 cents per minute at jails, depending on the size of the facility, with jails detaining less than 50 people subject to the latter rate. Providers have until April 6, 2026, to implement any changes.
Commissioner Gomez remains critical of the changes: “[Incarcerated Persons Communication Service] Providers have these data but fail to submit them, and claim the FCC lacked the data necessary when the decision is not in their favor,” she said. “In their Order, rather than requesting providers to provide sufficient data before setting the new rates, the Commission fulfills their requests without any new data. Again, the Commission rewards bad behavior.”
Source: Filter
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