Prison inmates have used smuggled cell phones to run drug operations, threaten witnesses, and order killings. The Federal Communications Commission’s answer is to let prisons and jails jam the signals. It votes on the proposal November 19. No evidence shows that blanket jamming reduces crime. Evidence does, however, show that it would hand the prison phone companies a windfall, because every call it blocks pushes a prisoner onto the official phones, a monopoly with the most captive customers in America. The better course is to make legal calls cheap, jam only where the dangerous inmates are, keep the prison phone companies away from the jammers, and measure whether it works.
Smuggled cell phones are so ubiquitous in prisons and jails in part because using the official phone system is so expensive for inmates. As recently as 2024, a 15-minute call from some jails cost more than $11. Even under the FCC’s current prison rate cap, talking for an hour each night costs about $200 a month. In its October 29 draft order, the Commission dismissed any link between the price of official calls and the demand for contraband phones, calling rates a separate matter. Jamming does leave the rate per minute alone. It changes the bill. Jamming moves calls onto the metered system, so families pay more at the same rate and the phone companies collect more. Within a month after Mississippi’s Parchman penitentiary blocked smuggled phones in 2010 with a system its phone company arranged at no cost to the state, calls on the official phone system rose 15 percent and the state’s cut of phone revenue rose 16 percent.
High prices create demand for contraband cell phones regardless of whether they are used for illegal activities. Owners rent out cell phones by the call or by the night, and many of their customers are inmates who want more contact with family than they can afford using the official system. Cheaper legal calls could shrink that market, leaving fewer phones worth smuggling and letting investigators focus on the ones that remain. When Connecticut made prison calls free in 2022, monthly calls roughly doubled.
Prices are high because prisons and phone companies both gain from charging more. Inmates and families have no say in which company holds the prison phone contract, so they cannot shop elsewhere. In principle, competition for the contract could still hold down prices, since facilities rebid it every few years. It fails here because the facility choosing the company does not pay the bills. For decades phone companies competed by offering facilities a larger share of every dollar families spent. Bids that paid the facility more usually charged families more. The FCC acknowledges that these payments, known as site commissions, push rates up.
Congress responded in 2022 with the Martha Wright-Reed Act, which directed the FCC to ensure “just and reasonable” rates. In 2024 the FCC capped prison calls at 6 cents a minute and banned site commissions. Last year it kept the ban but raised the ceiling to 11 cents, including a 2-cent surcharge paid to the facility. Prison phone companies say monitoring and recording raise their costs, and they do. But Minnesota, which made prison calls free, pays its phone company 4 cents a minute. Much of the gap comes from the surcharge and from the Commission’s decision to count every security cost the companies reported. Every call that jamming pushes onto the official system pays the surcharge.
The Commission should keep and enforce the ban on site commissions and drop the facility surcharge. That removes the facility’s reason to prefer high prices. Giving the facility a reason to prefer low ones is trickier. Minnesota and Connecticut created an incentive to want lower prices by paying the phone company themselves. But asking most states to take on another expense in strained budgets is unrealistic. States can at least require that the contract go to the company offering families the lowest price. Where they do neither, the rate cap is the whole game, and the Commission should peg it to prices like Minnesota’s rather than to costs the companies report.
Lowering prices would reduce demand for contraband cell phones, making them scarcer on the inside. But it doesn’t address the inmates who smuggle phones precisely because they don’t want anyone listening to their calls. For them, limited jamming may make sense. The draft order instead lets a prison jam everything inside its perimeter and rejects limits by security level. Nobody has shown that jamming every facility and cellblock stops more crime than jamming the high-security facilities and units that hold the most dangerous inmates, but blanket jamming does send every other inmate’s calls to the monopoly’s phones. The Commission should confine jamming to those facilities and units.
The draft also lets any contractor the prison hires hold the jamming license, including the prison’s phone company. The prison phone companies support jamming cell phones. A phone company running the jammers profits from every call they block, so it wants jamming where the revenue is rather than where the crime is. Barring prison phone companies from paying for or operating jammers leaves whoever runs them with one goal, stopping the dangerous inmates. The Commission should also require facilities that jam to report whether contraband and crime fall. Nobody has that evidence now, and the rule is a chance to get it.
The draft has the order backwards. It eliminates the monopoly’s only competitor first and leaves prices for another day, under a rule that lets the monopoly run the jammers. Narrow jamming, kept out of the phone companies’ hands and measured against results, would address the crime. Cheap legal calls would shrink the market that feeds it.
Scott Wallsten is President and Senior Fellow at the Technology Policy Institute, a Policy Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), and a senior fellow at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy. He is an economist with expertise in industrial organization and public policy, and his research focuses on competition, regulation, telecommunications, the economics of digitization, and technology policy. He was the economics director for the FCC's National Broadband Plan and has been a lecturer in Stanford University's public policy program, director of communications policy studies and senior fellow at the Progress & Freedom Foundation, a senior fellow at the AEI–Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, an economist at the World Bank, and a staff economist at the U.S. President's Council of Economic Advisers. He holds a PhD in economics from Stanford University.
