Oregon should allow inmates to make free phone calls, says prison ombudsman

Inmates in Oregon face “significant barriers” to contacting loved ones due to high phone charges and overly complicated registration requirements. These burdens jeopardize their bond with loved ones and endanger their “successful reintegration” into society, according to the Oregon Corrections Ombudsman.

Ombudsman Adrian Wulff recommended that Oregon follow the example of some states, including California, and allow prisoners to make free phone calls.

It is unclear how much such a move would cost Oregon taxpayers; Wulff's report does not provide an estimate.

“The current telecommunications system in prisons creates significant barriers to contact with families and disproportionately impacts low-income communities and people with limited digital access or literacy skills,” he wrote in his report, “Justice is Calling.”

Wulff, the first corrections ombudsman in decades, has been in office since 2021 and reports directly to Gov. Tina Kotek. Kotek's office has not yet publicly released the report, which was obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive.

Internal records had previously raised doubts about the ombudsman's overall effectiveness. Senior Kotek employees and prison officials had in the past blocked or ignored Wulff's efforts to investigate prison conditions and complaints, according to an internal memo obtained by the news organization.

In his latest project, Wulff focused on the prison telephone system. In May, he submitted a report, which he then revised after the leadership of the Ministry of Justice defended the system.

It is unclear when the revised report was completed. Wulff did not respond to a request for comment early Tuesday.

Kotek's spokesman also did not immediately respond to inquiries about whether the governor supports the recommendation for free calls.

The movement for free communication behind bars began in New York City in 2018, said Bianca Tylek, executive director of Worth Rises, a national nonprofit that advocates for prison reform.

“The goal from the beginning was to ensure that prisoners and their families can regain or maintain contact with each other and that the truly valuable, limited resources of families affected by incarceration are not exploited at extortionate prices,” she said.

In 2021, Connecticut became the first state to offer free phone calls, allowing prisoners to talk on the phone for up to 90 minutes a day. The state pays about $5.6 million to cover the costs, Tylek's organization says.

Free phone calls are available in the federal prison system. The idea is being discussed in about a dozen states, Tylek said.

The national average is $1.18 for a 15-minute call, or about 8 cents per minute, according to data collected by Tylek's organization in 2022.

In Oregon, a 15-minute call costs $1.35, or 9 cents per minute.

According to the data, telephone rates are lower in thirty states than in Oregon.

The cost of the phone calls is usually borne by the prisoners' families, says Aliza Kaplan, a professor at Lewis & Clark Law School. She plans to lobby lawmakers next year to offer free phone calls.

“Right now, the costs are falling on families, on people with children, on people in rural areas and on people who cannot regularly visit their loved ones in prison,” Kaplan said.

She said phone calls between prisoners and their families, especially children, were crucial to rehabilitation.

“We are doing a disservice to families across Oregon by not finding a way to offer it for free,” Kaplan said.

Wulff estimates that some families in Oregon spend nearly $1,000 a year on phone calls to their relatives in prison. That doesn't include emails, which cost 25 cents each.

“The prohibitive cost of these services undermines vital connections during a critical time for both the incarcerated person and their family,” he wrote.

Prisoners can help cover the costs with their jobs behind bars. In Oregon, prisoners are required by law to work. Wulff estimates that prisoners earn between $8 and $82 a month.

These earnings are often used to purchase toiletries and other basic goods in the prison canteen, leaving little money for telephone calls and passing the burden on to families, he wrote.

Wulff cited a 2015 study that found that about a third of American families with a family member in prison go into debt to pay for phone calls, with women bearing the majority of those costs. The study was led by the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, a nonprofit organization based in Oakland, California, that focuses on racial and economic justice issues.

In 2020, Oregon contracted with ICSolutions, one of the few prison telecommunications companies, to provide phone service to the state's dozens of prisons, which house about 12,000 inmates.

It's unclear how much ICSolutions earns from its contract with Oregon. Corrections officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

The company verifies a caller's identity in a 22-step process, which is a requirement for making and receiving calls from prison.

The system is designed to minimize the ability of prison inmates to coordinate illegal activities with those outside the prison, Wulff said. He noted that it is unclear whether the screening process has improved security because the state does not prosecute crimes related to cellphone use.

The prison service provided Wulff with several individual reports in which the review helped uncover problematic or illegal activities, including contacts between an inmate and a “vulnerable” minor and communications about contraband.

Wulff referred to examples from other states. California, for example, uses a “relatively simple” registration process for the telephone systems in its prisons and “solves the associated security problems as soon as they are discovered.”

The prisoners repeatedly described the burdensome screening system as a problem, wrote Wulff.

They say that in some cases their relatives do not have internet access and technical problems arise that make it impossible to complete the process. In some cases, family members refuse to provide ICSolutions with their personal identification information, Wulff noted.

Among Wulff’s recommendations in his report is that the state should immediately abolish the identity verification procedure.

Corrections warden Michael Reese and his deputy Heidi Steward responded to Wulff's initial report by saying that “very few users are having problems with the validation process,” noting that 88,000 users had completed the process as of May.

According to their letter, which is included in Wulff's report, ICSolutions pays nearly two dozen corrections department employees to maintain the telecommunications system, including staff in the prisons who can troubleshoot problems.

Reese and Steward said the state will not receive any additional revenue from the telecommunications company.

Wulff wrote that he also received complaints from prisoners about access to telephones.

At Coffee Creek Correctional Facility, the state's women's prison, there are about a half-dozen phones in each 120-person unit. He said Snake River Correctional Institution in Ontario has a similar facility. He said access to phones in Snake River is complicated by prison gangs, who impose their own unofficial restrictions on which phones can be used and when.

He noted that inmates complained about non-working phones that required them to “wiggle the cord” to make calls, and that “the most intimidating people within the unit” tended to claim “the best-functioning phones” for themselves.

Angie Ballantyne, 50, of Vancouver said she and her three daughters have stayed connected through phone calls with her husband, the girls' father, Brad Ballantyne, for 14 years.

She said her husband calls her several times a day to talk about their daughters and their own lives. She said her daughters talk to their father at least once a day, often in the evenings.

Brad Ballantyne, 50, was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2011 for killing 30-year-old Kimberly Jean Dunkin in Portland in 1993. He is serving his sentence at the Oregon State Correctional Institution in Salem.

The couple's daughters were still young when Ballantyne went to prison, Angela Ballantyne said.

She said the phone allowed her husband to remain an active participant in family life, recalling years of watching the clock and worrying that every minute that passed would drive up their bill.

Today, she said, her husband pays for the calls with money from his work in prison and a monthly donation of $100 from a family friend.

These calls not only help her daughters, who are now teenagers, but also her husband, who is coping with the challenges of prison life.

“He called me the other day because he was frustrated with a situation, and so he was able to call me and we talked about it,” she said. “We were able to pray together and then he went back to the situation and was able to work it out with the other inmates, and it worked out great.”

“There were so many things like that where he could call home,” she said, “and just be grounded and feel like he could talk to somebody about it.”

— Noelle Crombie is a business reporter who focuses on criminal justice. Reach her at 503-276-7184; ncrombie@oregonian.

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