Telephone calls made by prisoners to their families may only be placed through a monopoly that the state has contracted with selected telephone corporations. For collect telephone calls, the prisoner's family must pay about $7 for a 15 minute conversation. Prisoners' families are discriminated against, bilked, gouged and exploited. Corporations and the state prey on the most impoverished people in the Commonwealth. A prisoner may open an account with the telephone corporation and give them money in advance. That way there is zero risk for the greedy corporation. In that instance the prisoner pays about $6.16 for a 15 minute conversation. Comparable service for persons not in prison costs about 75 cents. Somebody's getting rich on the backs of prisoners and their families. T-Netix, Inc., a Texas corporation with no real Pennsylvania office (2155 Chenault Drive, Carrolltown, TX 75006) provides the computer system which not only eavesdrops, censors and records prisoners' phone calls, but also times them, bills them and seriously screws them up. Sandra Feigley, the publisher of this website along with her imprisoned husband, George, filed formal complaints with the Public Utility Commission against T-Netix, Inc. They alleged numerous offenses by the corporation: The rates are grossly too high Habitual overcharging and misbilling The calls are incorrectly timed, causing customers to pay for time they don't get Calls are interrupted with messages which are charged to the customer Calls are disconnected for no reason incurring additional reconnection fees Customers get double bills and are billed fraudulently Customers are intimidated and pressured into opening accounts with T-Netix to benefit the corporation Long distance service is improperly blocked The system is unreliable and frequently doesn't work There is no local and expeditious way of correcting the many problems encountered with the system Telephone calls for help/adjustment directly with T-Netix are put on hold for an hour of more Bills are intentionally cryptic and impossible to interpret and go through layers concealing corporate responsibility The whole system is a fraud because it simply doesn't operate properly. A hearing on the complaints was held before Administrative Law Judge Louis G. Cocheres. T-Netix, Inc. presented the kind of defense we've come to expect from corporations obsessed with greed. Their attorney, a woman from Virginia, not Pennsylvania, Andrea Edmonds blundered along with her well coached witnesses for three and half hours! Her object appeared to be that the corporation was faultless while the customers were fools, liars, misinformed and whiners. This in spite of an avalanche of complaints from prisoners and their families. She offered three witnesses, all corporate management lackeys. Wayne Johnson, the Vice President and Chief Counsel thought that the rates were fair. He didn't say how much he pays for phone calls. You can bet it ain't $7 for 15 minutes. Robert Comstock, Vice President of Business Development offered alibis, excuses and evasions for almost everything. He'd been through a number of these hearings. There are a lot of complainants. Tammie Carpenter, a functionary with one of the corporation's interlinked subsidiaries, Budget Connections "site administrators." Their job seems to be to make sure the computer is turned on. They work for T-Netix, not the Department of Corrections. A decision is pending in this case and in many others. We urge anyone with a complaint against the prison phone system to complain to: Pennsylvania Public utility Commission Box 3265 Harrisburg, PA 17105-3265 717-772-7777 We've all become familiar with the cheating and abuses of disreputable American corporations. Enron, Worldcom and Pennsylvania's own Adelphia are but three examples of how greedy corporations have exploited the public. Billions of dollars have been chiseled from overcharged customers. In Pennsylvania, the state has given a monopoly to telephone companies to operate a telephone system for use by prisoners' families. The whole business reeks of graft, exploitation and greed. The crooked corporations hide, or try to hide, what they are doing with layers of interlocking subsidiaries and contractors. Everyone who suffers under the system should file formal complaints.

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