I remember refusing a number of collect calls "from Westville" a few years back. As I do not practice criminal law, I assumed some inmates must have had a list of Indiana attorneys and were making calls at random.
In San Francisco the phone company charged for these unaccepted calls, according to this very interesting story today in Law.com. (Note - You may have to register.) Some quotes from the story:
Mysterious, one-minute calls popped up on Bicka Barlow's phone bill a few years ago. After she did a little detective work, the San Francisco criminal defense attorney figured out why. The phone company was charging her for jailhouse collect calls that she didn't accept -- and in some cases, the phone company billed her when no one answered her law office's phone.This part is particularly interesting:"It made me very irritated and upset," Barlow said. While Barlow was eventually credited for the charges, she spent a year disputing the calls, which added $15 to $20 to her monthly bill. Criminal defense attorneys are the star plaintiffs in Condes v. Evercom, 2002054255, an Alameda County, Calif., case that seeks class action certification.
At the center of the dispute is how collect calling works at prisons and county jails. However, the technology used to run jailhouse phone systems is a closely guarded secret. As a result, many case documents in Condes have been put under seal. In addition to a protective order, some documents have been marked for "attorneys' eyes only" to prevent defense attorneys, for example, from passing along a rival phone company's trade secrets to a client. In fact, plaintiffs attorneys declined to describe how the collect calls work because doing so might violate protective orders in the case.Posted by Marcia Oddi at May 28, 2004 07:55 AMA 2001 annual report by defendant T-Netix sheds a little light on the inmate phone service industry. T-Netix, which provides "inmate calling services" to 1,400 facilities, estimated that there were 10 major competitors in the field. Jailhouse calls are lucrative because most inmates may only make collect calls. Since the calls are limited in length, inmates make a high number of calls. T-Netix, which is no longer a public company, made $120 million in revenues in 2002, according to the last annual report available. And T-Netix isn't even the largest company in the suit. Evercom serves 2,000 correctional facilities.