Opinion: Prison phone restrictions sever D.C. residents from their loved ones

To incarcerated D.C. residents, who are sent into federal prisons across the country, communication with the free world is sustenance for the soul – and one of the most powerful and underused methods of rehabilitation at the disposal of our captors, the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). The spiritual and emotional intimacy shared between the condemned and their significant others, though transmitted via closely monitored 15-minute phone calls or hostile visiting rooms, is as imperative to us as food and water.

The BOP’s limit on every aspect of our communication never sat well with me but I just went along – until the most recent group of bureau policymakers suddenly enacted a psychologically catastrophic change, including a drastic reduction in the number of minutes we can use on the phone per day.

The new policy restricts us to 300 minutes per month (down from 510), and 30 minutes per day – typically two, 15-minute phone calls. Thirty minutes isn't nearly enough time for us to adequately communicate with our spouse, lover, children, parents, private investigators, etc. 

The BOP has always defined phone communication as a privilege that it can take away or restrict at will. However, in my view, healthy personal communication between incarcerated men and women and their family members should be a legally protected right.

Pro-hardcore-punishment politicians and BOP administrators want the public to believe prisons are bursting at the seams with people in the mold of DC Comic villain Lex Luther, Pablo Escobar, John Gotti and El Chapo – with the goal of fomenting cross-country criminal conspiracy. But here’s the truth: Most people in federal prisons are low-level, bottom-of-the-barrel, small-time criminals. The era of the big-time kingpins is long dead; federal prisons are no longer full of wealthy heroin dealers from the ‘70s, or ‘80s crack dealers. To understand the difference between then and now, read "S St. Rising,” by former Washington Post journalist Ruben Castaneda, and “Street Legends” by Seth Ferranti, who served 21 years in federal prison. Yet the BOP continues to use out-dated, repressive tactics from the crack chapter in the ongoing War on Drugs.

Another rationale the BOP uses to ration our phone time is that we are all immature, irresponsible and prone to eruptions when we don’t get what we want – thus resorting to violence to get to one of the limited number of phones after a long lockdown. Imagine 120 men from one unit forced to use just four phones when we’re finally let out for a few hours after days in our cells. So, yeah, fights can break out, but other ways to prevent them are to increase the number of phones and stop locking us down for so long for the most ridiculous of reasons. But also, violent scuffles are not the norm and certainly don’t warrant punishing all of us with such close monitoring and aggressive restrictions.  

The BOP has several effective methods for dealing with problematic individuals. The agency’s intelligence division has a security system/database called SENTRY that flags them if they are guilty of conflict over the phone. And if they repeatedly use violence to control prison phones, they are listed as in the Security Threat Group – resulting in sanctions such as the loss of phone privileges and good-time credits. When phone abuse is extreme, they are sent to a “no-communication” unit in Indiana’s Terre Haute prison complex. They are prohibited from both telephone and email access.

Thus, this excessively punitive 30-minute total per day is unwarranted; the vast majority of us who are positively and productively serving out our sentences do not deserve this collective punishment for the actions of a few. The policy is also out of step without our technologically advanced, mobile,  instant messaging society. Technology has completely reshaped the way in which American society shares information, yet the BOP refuses to deploy it to actually solve problems. For example, the mad rush to the phones could be immediately eliminated if we could make calls from our tablets.

We are sold cheap, low-grade SCORE 7T tablets made by the Keefe Group for a whopping $137.80 (that’s a lot when you consider that most of us don’t have jobs, and if we do, we make 12 to 40 cents an hour). And the device doesn’t allow us to do anything but rent movies (think Mission Impossible and Batman) and purchase music and limited, simple video games. All the BOP has to do is remove the PG-13 limit (nobody is asking for PornHub) and give us access to online documentaries, books and services like Khan Academy, and overnight the packed and potentially volatile prison phone and email lines would disappear; fights and stabbings over the TV, phones and computers would be a thing of the past. Two phone calls a day is not the answer. Add the ability to make calls and have video visits from our tablets, and the difference would be dramatic.

Consider what the state of California is doing. Using services offered by an organization called The Last Mile, the California prison system is deploying technology to train prisoners in truly marketable skills, such as app development for both start-ups and established brands like AirBnB. California also converted one of its most notorious prisons into the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, now also the host of the only podcast produced inside prison, Ear Hustle. (I want to give a shout out to Voices Unlocked, the podcast produced by More Than Our Crimes, for recording interviews with DC residents inside. But the producers must do it the low-quality way, recording our voices over the phone.)  In DC, jail “residents” can take self-help programs and college/university classes on their laptops. But once we’re sent to federal prisons, it's like going back in time. We’re left completely out of the technological loop.

Communication with friends and relatives is vital to advancing our rehabilitation as well as the nation’s public safety. Visits are very expensive, since we are sent hundreds or even thousands of miles away from home. Although House Delegate Eleanor Holmes-Norton once again reintroduced a bill this year that would require the BOP to house us within 250 miles of D.C., many of us – including me, at the Hazelton complex in West Virginia – are well over that limit. So, we must settle for the sound of our loved one’s voices over the phone. 

Those phone calls remind me of my value to my family and community. I am continuously taught lessons on the depth of forgiveness from family and friends, who demonstrate this powerful act every single time they press 5 to accept our prepaid or collect calls. And when they do, I am reminded that my life is not the sum of my worst mistakes.

Askia Afrika-Ber is a D.C. resident currently incarcerated at USP Hazelton in West Virginia. He is a staff writer for the More Than Our Crimes network.