Prisoners' Fragile Lifelines to the Outside World

The official end of the COVID pandemic means there may be a return to paid phone calls for federal prisoners and their families. In this episode, DC resident incarcerated in a Kentucky federal prison explains all the ways the Bureau of Prisons makes it hard to maintain connections.

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Transcript

SHAKA LONG: Welcome to Voices Unlocked. This is your comrade Shaka, and I'm here with my co-host, Pamela Bailey, co-founder of More Than Our Crimes. How're you doing today?

PAM BAILEY: Great. And today we're gonna be discussing President Biden's recent decision to end the public health emergency for COVID. There's been a lot of discussion because some people out here are still getting sick. But the ending of the public health emergency had a particularly dramatic impact in federal prisons for a reason some people might not expect. So, since March 2020, phone calls have been free in federal prisons, because during the pandemic, personal visits weren't allowed. So phone calls are all they had. But there's an expectation -- it hasn't happened yet --but there's an expectation that at some point soon, they'll start charging for phone calls again. And we're going to be talking about just what kind of an impact that's going to have on prisoners. 

I interviewed one of our More Than Our Crimes network members; his name is Askia Afrika-Ber. And he is currently incarcerated, and has been for the last two decades – more than two decades – in the federal prison in Inez, Kentucky, which is called Big Sandy. So, I interviewed him and I started off with asking a sort of obvious question maybe about just how important communication with the outside world is to somebody in prison. And it may seem obvious, but it's important to hear his perspective on this.

[RECORDED] ASKIA AFRIKA-BER: If you want to, you know, maintain a degree of sanity, you're gonna have to communicate with people in the outside world. Because in here, everything is repetitious and so monotonous, you're doing the same thing, day in and day out. The conversations become extremely limited. So, when you communicate with people in the outside world, it allows you to live vicariously through people, you know, and just keep up to date with what's going on out there. And to just make you feel valued, and make you feel loved and liked and supported. Because you need that. In here, if you just have absolutely no one to communicate with in the outside world, some prisoners have a tendency to just constantly relive their shame over and over again, you know. Just constantly thinking about what you did to get in here. That can be pretty awful. So, you need distractions, and you need people on the outside, emotionally, spiritually and psychologically. [This call is from a federal prison.]

SHAKA: Wow, just hearing Askia talk about how important communication is, especially to the outside world... You know, sometimes that is your only buffer from the insanities, the, you know, the absurdity of being incarcerated, in a carceral space. You know, having that line of communication with the outside world. I remember...hearing this, it just brings me back. I'm not that far removed from being incarcerated myself. I think about how the role has been reversed now: from being the one who struggles to get the telephone, the means of communicating with the outside world, to actually being in the outside world and being the recipient of these phone calls. And, you know, no matter where I go, whether I'm at home, or I'm at work, training or school, I keep my phone on and I keep it in my pocket. And I let everyone know that if I have a jail call come, I gotta take it. Even if it's only to say, "hey, listen, I can't talk right now." But I always try to ask, "how you doing?" Even if I can just give him two minutes. Because you know, in that two minutes, you never know what a person's mind state might be. And that two minutes...just having somebody in the outside world who's willing to press five to accept your phone call, to honor your presence, reminds you that you are still relevant in this world. That means a lot.

PAM: Yeah, I relate to that. Because I'm the same way. I'm constantly getting calls from prison. And sometimes the other person I'm with doesn't understand that I actually will stop when I'm doing to take that call. Because I know that, very often, they have these short periods of time, they have to wait in long lines, they can't predict when they can call. It's not like I can tell them to call back. They can't. So, I'm the same way. 

Obviously, when it comes to communication, the best thing is personal visits, you know, human touch. But not only was that not possible during the pandemic, but it's also really expensive. People don't think about that. Most of the families of people in prison have low incomes themselves. So, if you live in DC and you're going to visit a DC resident, they're in the federal prison system and they're scattered all over the country. You may have to go to Florida or California even. And that means you have to buy airfare. You have to rent a car when you get there because these prisons are always in rural areas, you have to get a hotel room. So, not only is it a big chunk of time if you're a working person, but really expensive. So that's really not realistic. Most of the friends I have in the network don't get many personal visits. 

The next best thing is phones. Federal prisons don't have video visits yet. I know some of the states do They don't have them in the feds. So the next best thing is the phone. And that's the next thing I talked to Askia about, what that looks like. Because they often have very few phones, for a lot of people. So, he's going to talk about that now.

[RECORDED] ASKIA: If you don't receive visits, telephone calls are what allows you to keep up to date with what's going on in your loved ones' or relatives' lives, or your children, who you might not see regularly at visits. You get to talk with them and discover who their best friends are, their favorite teachers, how they're doing in school. You know, just trying to maintain that relationship between you and your wife or your lover, to maintain some degree of intimacy and connection. That's what the telephone calls and emails allow us to do.

SHAKA: I agree 100% with him. Those telephones are a lifeline for us, especially mentally and spiritually, because every day, you gotta realize, we're constantly observing, absorbing, absorbing, absorbing negative thoughts and negative attitudes and, you know, misery in this environment. Sometimes our only escape from that reality is through 15-minute intervals of conversations, of intimate moments, that we can share with a loved one or friend, and that becomes so invaluable. You know, you got all these men, and this limited resource through phones that aren't accessible to everyone. And sometimes, you do have to take creative measures to create ways to communicate. 

I remember when I was in the DC jail. There were like 120 guys in my unit, and we only had eight phones, and just five were operable. This was just prior to the pandemic, but the DC jail, at that time, was operating under modified recreation, which means one side of the tier come out for five hours, and then when that tier was done, for the next 18 hours or so, you're locked down in your cell. So, I made a bad decision for a good cause. I found someone who was smuggling in cell phones and I bought one. And, honestly, that cell phone was more precious to me than the food that they served. Because this was spiritual nourishment. And mind you, I hadn't seen a phone in 15...almost 20 years. They had pagers when I got locked up. And they had just come up with the flip phone. But now, you got phones, with a screen, a smartphone. I had these young guys telling me how to operate a smartphone. This was my first exposure to social media, the internet. 

Actually, I think the moment when it really hit me was when I saw my grandmother through FaceTime. I called my sister and she FaceTimed my grandmother. People need to understand, they had sent me to Virginia. and I'm from DC, right? I went to Jonesville Virginia -- USP (federal penitentiary) Lee County. Some people will say Virginia isn't far. But that's eight hours away from DC, in the mountains, the Appalachian Mountains. I hadn't seen my grandmother in over 20 years. So, to see her on that screen...Prior to then, I'd seen pictures, of course, through letters, but it's not the same. And to see how my grandmother had aged over the years, you know, like wow. That really like created a sense of urgency that, man, I've got to come home. It also gave me an appreciation that I still had a grandmother to call, because so many other people lost their moms and grandmothers. So, the telephone is a fundamental tool for your sanity.

PAM: Yeah, I remember when that came up in your court hearing, the fact that you had had a contraband phone, breaking the rules. It represents the risk that people will take just because that communication is so important to their sanity. During the next soundbite we're going to hear from Askia during our interview, he talks about the other ramifications, that people will do foolish things that can get them hurt, just to get to those few phones. It's one of the biggest problems, as you mentioned actually, that there aen't enough phones for all those people, especially if you've been locked down and you're all let out out at one time. Fights are going to happen and that's what you'll hear about.

[RECORDED] ASKIA: The free phone calls were an absolute blessing. However, a lot of confusion came along with it because guys simply didn't know how to respect the phone sessions. Listen, nobody really governed the phones properly, so the guys constantly disrespected the next prisoner [in line] because they were so eager to take advantage of that 15-minute free phone call. For example, you'd have the buddy system in effect. And what I mean by buddies is that one guy would allow his friend to get on the phone after him, and then the next friend and the next associate and so forth. So, yeah, some guys were unable to get on the phone. And the unit that I'm in, which is not the program unit, what they did was they switched the phone calls from 15 minutes to 10 minutes to shorten the phone call so everybody could get on the phone. You had guys doing things like literally jumping off the top tier trying to get to the phones. One guy I particularly know jumped over the tier and he broke his damn leg in the process of trying to get to the phone. But the [other] guys were completely indifferent to it. They just simply walked around him, and proceeded to get on the phone. And there have been several knife fights and fist fights over the phone. 

PAM: Well, what about adding more phones? 

ASKIA: It's highly unlikely. We've got just six phones in our unit, and they expect us to be men and govern ourselves, and allow everybody to get on the phones. Now, when we were paying for the phones, that wasn't an issue. Sometimes, the phone bank would be open. But once they became free, guys were selling phone calls...you know, guys who didn't have money coming in from the street. Plus we don't have UNICOR (a for-profit prison factory) here, so if they want to buy things from the commissary, guys who don't have any money sell their phone minutes. 

PAM: My next question to Askia was all about the cost. And it's important to remember that it's often not the prisoner who is paying the cost, because they don't have any money if they don't have a job. So what often happens is it's the family members, or their friends [who send them money]. I do this all the time. I can remember back when there was still a charge for phone calls. So it actually affects the whole family when they have to return to paid calls. Now, in this bite, we're going to hear from Askia again. He he talks about the wages from prison jobs, and how small they are. That is, if you have a job; a lot of them don't. But he's gonna mention UNICOR. What many people don't realize is that there's a prison industry, a company that is operated by the Bureau of Prisons. And it's for-profit. They make uniforms....What else do they make?

SHAKA: Military, electronics. They break down electronics from old computers and things of that nature.

PAM: Right. And those are the highest paying jobs, but it's still not much. So when he talks about what kind of money you have to make be able to afford phone calls, he says if you don't have a UNICOR job, it's really a hardship. And that's what he's talking about. So let's take a listen:

[RECORDED] ASKIA: I want to say the cost of phone calls was probably $60 a month. It's a phone bill, it's literally a phone bill. You know, it's an additional bill that the prisoner has to pay, if he doesn't have a UNICOR facility to work in, that the prisoner maybe can't pay if he just has a simple prison job or detail. Because he might get paid, for his prison detail, maybe $50 a month, unless he has one of the better jobs in the commissary or somewhere exclusive in the kitchen. And that won't even cover the phone calls for the entire month. 

SHAKA: Wow. Yeah. I was thinking about the cost of living and using the phone. You know, $60 may not seem a lot out here now. But for the guys who are in [prison], they have to budget, you know, for commissary, mailing expenses, phone calls, and such and such. And now that I'm out here, I really think, you know, it is very expensive, especially when you're not making much money. But at the same time, it's a small price to pay just to have the connection, that meaningful connection with people. And I'm so appreciative to be home now, where I can have conversations with these people, when my brothers are still there. Yeah, you know, just thinking about it, t's very disheartening. You gotta realize, I'm hearing his story and I'm reliving the trauma. I know the feeling. And you know, it is very expensive...something that should be a fundamental right: being connected with your loved ones. It's important to be reminded that you're not just an inmate. You're a son, you're a father, you're a brother, you're an uncle. You're still a contributing member of society. And sometimes this is our only lifeline, the telephone.

PAM: Yeah, you know, some of the guys aren't good at writing. I don't know, you can tell me if you think this is right. But I sort of picture sometimes when they're at the computer, they're in a rush, you know, so I may just get a couple of lines from them. I can't really get a sense of the person that way. They feel much more comfortable talking, rather than having to write everything out. And for me, after I've been reading all these short emails, to hear the voice, to match a voice to a person, that's where their personality comes out. It's essential to be able to make somebody more than just a word flashing on a screen. So, I certainly hope that they can keep affording these calls because it's critical for us to get to know them. 

These are the kinds of issues we're gonna be talking about going forward, which are critical our here and critical in the prisons. Please go to our website, MoreThanOurCrimes.org and subscribe to this podcast.