Criminal (phone) Charges. Prison phones are a predatory monopoly. See the rates in your state.
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"People can’t afford you anymore."
Every Sunday, while he was locked up in prison, Ulandis Forte would call his grandmother, Martha Wright. She would answer her old rotary, relay news from their church, and pass the phone to his sisters or to his nephew. Wright’s glaucoma made it difficult to stay in touch through letters, and apart from the rare in-person visit, the phone became Forte’s primary link to his former life. In his lowest moments, Wright would pray over her grandson through the receiver.
Other inmates, Forte remembers, made calls much less frequently. Over time, he identified a trend: the longer they’d been inside, the less likely they’d be to call anyone.
Forte was incarcerated when he was 20 years old, and by the time he was released, he was pushing 40. Over and over, Forte was relocated — from Virginia to Ohio to Arizona to Kentucky to Pennsylvania — but the Sunday calls remained a constant. For Wright, who eked out a living on the fixed income of a middle-class retiree, the calls became a fiscal burden costing her thousands of dollars. Worse, those costs were unpredictable, running on an inscrutable math that seemingly turned without reason. "Up and down, like the stock," Forte says. "It just had a mind of its own." Wright, perpetually worried about how her grandson was faring, took some time before she could tell him the calls were cutting into her budget.
Once she did, Forte decided that he simply wouldn’t call. But Wright wouldn’t stand for that, even as she faced financial choices that would test her resolve: pay for her medication, or talk to her grandson.
Forte saw that other families had confronted similar dilemmas. For many, the calls petered out and isolation set in. "The longer you’ve been in prison, the more distant you become to the outside world," he says. "People can’t afford you anymore." For years, Wright paid the bills, until she and Forte decided to challenge the system.
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