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The telephone service provided to prisoners is notoriously expensive and of poor quality. Prisoners’ Legal Services and the firm of Stern, Shapiro, Weissberg and Garin, LLP, filed a petition before the Department of Telecommunications and Cable (DTC) on behalf of prisoners, their families, attorneys, and other users of prison telephone service, asking the DTC to limit telephone rates and to investigate the poor quality of prison telephone service. Our firm is one of the petitioners.
We are a civil rights firm that brings lawsuits, including class action lawsuits, on behalf of prisoners. We have numerous clients incarcerated across the state. The telephone is the most practical way for us to communicate with our clients. Our work depends upon reliable phone service with prisoners. Prisoners depend on the phone to inform us of important developments and to seek legal advice in a timely manner. However, the service we pay for—and we pay extravagantly—is not reliable. Calls are occasionally dropped. The connection is frequently poor. Sometimes our clients sound impossibly quiet. Other times there is constant static on the line. We often ask prisoners to hang up and try calling again. Sometimes this solves the problem, sometimes it doesn’t.
The high cost of prisoner phone calls places burdens on attorneys, prisoners, and in some instances all taxpayers.
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