Charges for phone calls from prisoners in state jails and prisons are
excessively high. In order to promote reintegration of prisoners into
society, and in recognition of the fact that most prisoners and their
families are poor, those calls ought to be free. Connecting Families New
York <https://nyconnect.org/> is an advocacy group that opposes high charges
for calls from prisoners.

Excepts from the <https://nyconnect.org/> website:

As a coalition we fight to connect families by making phone calls free for
incarcerated people and their loved ones.

We're fighting to end a million-dollar industry. Phone calls are a lifeline
for incarcerated people and their families. We are fighting for legislation
that would end the extraction of wealth from families - disproportionately
Black, Brown, and Indigenous and low income - by making phone calls free
for all incarcerated people in New York.

1 in 3 families go into debt to stay connected to their incarcerated loved
one.

Over 50 percent of families struggle to meet their own household needs
while a loved one is incarcerated. This often means that families are
required to make unfathomable choices about whether to answer the phone to
speak to an incarcerated loved one or buy groceries.

Women bear 87 percent of the costs related to staying in touch with
incarcerated family members.

The stress of limited phone calls and exploitation of families is felt most
acutely by Black and Latinx communities, who are disproportionately
impacted by targeted over-policing, racist sentencing matrices, and mass
criminalization.

1. The high cost of phone calls in prisons generates $1.4 billion a year,
disproportionately driving women and people of color into debt, Rosalie
Chan and Belle Lin, June 30, 2021, Business Insider

https://www.businessinsider.com/high-cost-prison-communications-driving-debt-racial-wealth-gap-2021-6

2. It's all about the incentives: Why a call home from a jail in New York
State can cost 7 times more than the same call from the state's prisons,
Katie Rose Quandt and Andrea Fenster, March 23, 2021, Prison Policy
Institute

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2021/03/23/ny-jail-phones/