The FCC banned the prison-phone kickback. A year later, it brought back a 2-cent version.

The Martha Wright-Reed Act told the FCC to fix a market where a 15-minute call from a state prison could cost more than a night's motel room, and where facilities picked telecom vendors by which one paid the biggest kickback.▸ In July 2024, the FCC's implementing order did exactly that: it cut the audio rate cap for prisons to 6 cents a minute and banned "site commissions" — the per-call payments providers had made to win facility contracts — outright. Before that rule reached most of the country, the FCC changed its mind. The 2025 IPCS Order, which became enforceable on April 6, 2026, raises the caps and reopens a per-minute fee that flows straight to the facility — capped this time at 2 cents, but functionally the same payment the 2024 order had just outlawed.

Compliance with the 2024 order was staggered — facilities with existing telecom contracts got extensions of up to a year — so much of the country never actually saw 6-cent prison calls.▸ By the time the rule was set to take full effect everywhere, the FCC had already begun rewriting it. On October 29, 2025 the Commission adopted new "interim" rate caps and, over the objection of prison-reform groups, revived a uniform per-minute additive so facilities could recover costs without a site commission changing hands. Providers called it overdue relief from the 2024 order's "unintended consequences." Worth Rises, the advocacy group that has tracked the industry for a decade, called the additive "duplicative at best and a way around the ban on commissions at the worst" — a characterization the Commission's own order quotes and then rejects, arguing the fee is capped at 2 cents and limited to "used and useful" costs, so it isn't legally a site commission. Whatever it's called, the numbers move the same direction commissions always moved them: up.

Every tier moved the same direction.▸ Small jails, which already charged the most per minute, still went from 9 cents to 13 cents. The smallest lockups — under a new tier the 2025 order split off entirely — can now charge up to 19 cents for audio and 44 cents for video, more than the 2024 order allowed for any facility in the country.

The FCC didn't just move a price.▸ Its own order estimates the effect on how much incarcerated people actually talk to the people they call. In a footnote, the Commission reprints and relies on Worth Rises' calculation that lower rates drive higher call volume — and that the 2025 caps will produce a fraction of the growth the 2024 caps would have:

That's 1.4 billion fewer minutes of projected family contact a year — phone time researchers and the FCC's own record link to lower recidivism, better mental-health outcomes, and fewer children pushed into foster care while a parent is incarcerated.▸ The Commission's rebuttal is that its 2025 caps still beat the rates people were actually paying before this order — most facilities never got to 6 cents in the first place — and estimates the order nets nearly $14 million a year in caller welfare, or $64 million over five years. That's a real number, but it's a comparison against the status quo the delayed 2024 order left in place, not against the reform Congress ordered the agency to deliver.

The people paying these rates are disproportionately not yet convicted of anything.▸ At midyear 2024, local jails held 657,500 people in custody, per the Bureau of Justice Statistics — and 69%, or 450,600 of them, were unconvicted, awaiting trial or held for other reasons. State and federal prisons held another 1,254,200 people at yearend 2023. Combined, roughly 1.9 million people are the customer base for a rate the FCC just raised — and it's their families, not them, who mostly fund the calls.

Rate figures are FCC-set interstate/intrastate/international caps, not what every facility necessarily charges; some contracts run below the cap. The 2¢ facility fee and the 2025 base rates listed here were interim, not permanent — the FCC's Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on permanent caps was still pending as of this writing.