Our Five Asks

We are asking the county to commit to publishing all contract terms, per-minute rates, fee schedules, and any revenue the county receives from the telecommunications contract, updated publicly every year without requiring anyone to submit a formal records request to find it. The full terms of the 2020 contract, including the payment structure and commission rates, were only made public through a records request filed by NowKalamazoo in 2025, five years after the contract was signed. We think the community deserves to know how their government is generating revenue from public infrastructure, and that information should be easy to find.

When someone is released from jail, they often still have money remaining in their jail phone service account. What many people do not know is that prepaid account balances on jail phone systems are subject to inactivity policies. If an account goes unused for a certain period of time after release, the remaining balance is typically forfeited to the service provider. This policy is not always clearly communicated, and people regularly leave the jail without understanding that they are at risk of losing money their families put in. This is not a hypothetical concern. A decade-long federal class action established that this practice, applied broadly across the industry, resulted in approximately $96 million being collected from prisoners and their families through inactive account forfeitures over a ten-year period. A federal settlement resolved that litigation, but local implementation of protective policies varies. We are asking the county to address this directly by establishing a formal release procedure. When someone is being released, jail staff should either help them retrieve any remaining account balance before they leave, or at minimum sit down with them, explain clearly that their balance will be forfeited if the account sits unused for a certain period, and have them sign a written acknowledgment confirming they received that information. This is a low-cost, practical step that would directly protect people in this community from something that has caused real financial harm nationally.

We are asking the county to move away from a contract structure where it receives revenue from jail phone calls. This means no percentage-based commissions on calls, and no upfront signing payments in exchange for awarding the contract. The current arrangement, where the county receives 80 cents of every dollar families spend on phone calls, is the primary reason Kalamazoo families pay more than twice what families at Michigan state prisons pay for the same service from the same vendor. The Michigan Department of Corrections renegotiated its contract to remove the commission, and the rate dropped significantly as a result. That same path is available here. We understand this represents a genuine financial tradeoff for the county, and we think the community case for making that change is strong.

We are asking the county to include a rate ceiling as a written requirement in the new RFP, at or below $0.10 per minute. Removing the commission is an important and necessary step, but it does not automatically produce lower rates. Under a commission-free structure, a vendor could still propose a rate of $0.15 or $0.16 per minute, and if that were the lowest qualifying bid, the county would be obligated to accept it. Putting a specific rate ceiling into the RFP as a qualifying requirement is how you ensure the savings actually reach families. The Michigan Department of Corrections renegotiated its contract to $0.0735 per minute. A $0.10 per minute ceiling is a reasonable and achievable benchmark that would cut the current Kalamazoo rate nearly in half.

We are asking the county to include explicit language in the new contract prohibiting deposit fees, transaction fees, and live operator surcharges. These fees are a separate issue from the per-minute rate and from the commission structure. They are retained entirely by the vendor and are not addressed by removing commissions. Under the current contract, a transaction fee alone can more than double the real cost of a phone call. Federal regulators have confirmed that these fees have not always been clearly disclosed to families before they are charged. Without explicit language in the new contract banning these fees, they can continue under the next agreement regardless of what happens to the commission structure.