Connection: Phone Safeguards

Washington state corrections officials have introduced two safeguards to limit excessive or random phone calling by prison inmates. Instead of unlimited length calls, inmates now have 20 minutes.

“They can dial again immediately, but they have to stop one call to make the other,” said Cly Evans, an Airway Heights Corrections Center spokesman.

Washington now also assigns each inmate a personal identification number specifically to track phone calls. Long-distance phone calls generate money for Washington’s corrections budget through rebates from the phone company. The state gets a 45 percent rebate of all the long-distance revenue the phone companies get from inmates making calls.

Calls by Airway Heights Correctional Center inmates generated a rebate last year of about $417,000. The next rebate will be higher, but not because the rebate has increased. That rate remains at 45 percent for long distance calls.

Idaho officials have no plans to restrict calls made by prisoners. Calls in most Idaho prisons are limited to 30 minutes, but there’s no restriction on how many calls an inmate can dial.