FCC Vote Hikes Prison Phone Rates in Win for ViaPath, Aventiv

The Federal Communications Commission voted along party lines Tuesday to raise the limit on what prisons and jails are allowed to charge for communications services, backtracking on rules signed last year that drastically reduced the price of phone calls from correctional facilities.

The 2-1 vote raises the current cap for calls in prisons and jails by at least two cents per minute for voice and video calls, a boon for telecom providers such as ViaPath Technologies and Aventiv Technologies.

In the past, jails and prisons earned a large share of the telecom companies’ incarceration-related revenue in the form of ...