Worcester County sheriff urges end to free inmate phone calls

Lina Portman4 weeks ago

0 3 minutes read

BOYLSTON WEST — Worcester County Sheriff Lewis G. Evangelidis Jr. is speaking out about what he perceives to be a well-intentioned but ill-conceived policy requiring free phone calls for inmates.

And Evangelidis, a Republican and former member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, hopes the Legislature will revisit the situation and remedy the situation.

The Worcester County Jail and House of Correction, located at 5 Paul Free calls are made available to individuals in state and county jails. There is no limit to the number of calls.

This legislation made Massachusetts the fifth state in the nation to offer free calls to inmates.

“Maintaining and fostering connections between incarcerated people and their loved ones advances rehabilitation by promoting successful reentry and reducing recidivism,” a DOC spokesperson said. “The Massachusetts Department of Corrections' implementation of the Free Call Initiative has eliminated barriers that prevent incarcerated people from staying connected with their outside support network and will promote community safety by improving outcomes for people incarcerated after their release. »

But Evangelidis says prisoners spend a lot of time on the phone and constantly call their families, to the point of harassing them. He said the new program costs taxpayers a lot of money and needs to be revisited.

“We all believe that people need to stay in contact with the outside world while they are incarcerated because we want to ensure that they can re-enter the world smoothly. We support this 100%,” he said. “We have direct contact visits permitted for certain programs. We have a parenting class that we allow children to visit with their parents, in almost direct contact. We do the same thing with the graduation of the music program and the culinary program.

However, the free phone call program is something entirely different, Evangelidis said, because taxpayers pay a large sum for free phone calls from inmates who abuse the program.

“You don’t get free phone calls in the real world,” Evangelidis said. “It seems this has gone too far.”

Before the new legislation took effect, the Worcester County Jail collected $240,000 a year from inmate appeals. That money would fund the prison's culinary program, music program, recreational programs and religious services, as well as sporting goods, furniture and microwaves for inmates, Evangelidis said.

Previously, inmates received about 10 minutes of free calls per week and then had to pay 14 cents per minute.

Now, officials expect the prison to pay $1.5 million this year for free phone calls, Evangelidis said. He said the 14 sheriff's offices that make up the Massachusetts Sheriffs Association could pay up to $15 million a year.

“We are seeing a major reversal and the number of minutes inmates are currently using is about a million minutes per month,” he said.

The House budget for the next fiscal year includes $35 million to fund free phone calls between sheriff's offices and the DOC. The Senate budget, however, does not fund free calls.

“They are not reimbursing us at the moment,” he said. “So we have a huge deficit to get there.”

Besides the added costs, Evangelidis said there were other “unintended consequences” with the new program.

He said access to unlimited calls meant some inmates were less involved in the therapeutic, substance abuse, job training, recreational and educational programs offered by the prison, he said.

Additionally, the additional number of calls that must be monitored for public safety purposes takes away work hours that could be put to better use, he said.

And finally, Evangelidis said, the sheriff's office repeatedly receives families of inmates who say they are being harassed by incessant calls.

“We hear (inmates') families say, 'We can't tolerate this many calls.' It becomes a nuisance. It hinders their ability to live their lives,” Evangelidis said. “They (inmates) have substance abuse issues, mental health issues, and families sometimes have a break from dealing with all of that, every day, all day. But now they are inundated with phone calls all day. And they are the ones who say to us: “Can you stop this? Can you make them have less availability on phones? »

The state DOC, however, said it has not received any official complaints from families about the frequency or timing of calls from incarcerated people. A person may request removal from an incarcerated person's approved calls list, and all calls made by incarcerated persons must be accepted by the person answering before the call is connected.

According to data provided by the DOC, in November, the last month before free phone calls were implemented, Securus phone revenue was $474,394.29, with Massachusetts inmates using 3,898,397 minutes of phone time. phone calls. With an average population of 6,029, the average number of call minutes per incarcerated person was 647.

Lina Portman

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