Part
01
of one
Part
01
Video Call Rates For Incarcerated Americans
Key Takeaways
- All prices displayed in the project spreadsheet are without any of the applicable taxes.
- Most prices for video calls with attorneys and with friends and family are the identical for each incarceration facility. However, a number of facilities charge less for contacting attorneys, while some charge more.
- In some cases, contacting an attorney via remote video calls is entirely free. These cases have been labeled with "$0" in the project spreadsheet.
Introduction
A dataset containing the video call rates for incarcerated Americans per facility per state are provided in the Video Call Rates tab of the project spreadsheet. All data was sourced from the pricing page of Securus Technologies.
Research Strategy
In general, pre-compiled datasets related to the cost for incarcerated Americans to communicate with those who are outside of incarceration are not available in the public domain. However, the research team identified the pricing page of Securus Technologies. Since Securus Technologies claims that it is "the largest incarcerated individual communications provider" in the US, the research team concluded that this source is a good proxy for prices charged to incarcerated Americans wishing to communicate with the people outside of incarceration.
After identifying the pricing page, the research team went through each US state listed in the drop-down menu. For each state, the research team accessed the page related to each incarceration facility and provided the pricing for remote video calls with attorneys (column C) and remote video calls with friends and family (column D).
For incarceration facilities where prices for one or both of these options did not exist, "N/A" was entered in the appropriate cell.