The Issue

How the Commission Model Works

When a county jail signs a contract for phone and video services, it typically works with a single company that holds exclusive rights to provide those services to everyone inside. In exchange for that exclusivity, the company often agrees to pay the facility a portion of the revenue it earns from calls. This arrangement is called a site commission.

Because families have only one option for staying in contact, there is no market pressure to keep prices affordable. The rate that families pay ends up being closely tied to how the contract between the county and the vendor is structured, particularly how large a commission the county receives. When the commission is high, rates tend to be high. When the commission is removed, rates tend to come down significantly.

The Michigan Department of Corrections renegotiated its contract with the same vendor that currently serves Kalamazoo County Jail and brought the per-minute rate down to $0.0735. Kalamazoo families currently pay $0.18 per minute for the same service. The difference is not the cost of the technology or the vendor. It is the structure of the contract.

The Current Contract

In November 2020, Kalamazoo County signed a five-year telecommunications agreement granting one company exclusive control of all jail phones and video calls. The contract was extended by one year and is set to expire November 9, 2026. It is now being prepared for renewal through a new Request for Proposal process.

As part of the original agreement, the county received a one-time payment of $325,000 upfront. Since signing, the county has collected more than $158,000 in ongoing commissions on top of that. Together, the county has received nearly $500,000 since 2020, all of which has gone into the General Fund. Sheriff Fuller confirmed both of these figures on the record.

It is also worth noting that in-person visits at the Kalamazoo County Jail have been banned since 2013, several years before the current contract was signed. The visiting room was physically converted into a space with wall-mounted video tablets. That history is part of the context for why phone and video communication costs matter so much to the families of people who are incarcerated here.

What Families Pay Right Now

The rates below come directly from the contract document that NowKalamazoo obtained through a public records request in September 2025. These are the rates that are currently in effect.

It is worth paying attention to the fees at the bottom of that table. The deposit fees, transaction fees, and live operator charges are kept entirely by the vendor. They are not part of the revenue-sharing arrangement with the county, and removing the commission structure would not automatically remove them. Without explicit language in the new contract addressing these fees, they remain.

Federal regulators have also confirmed that these fees have not always been disclosed clearly to families, meaning people have often been charged amounts they did not know about until after the transaction was already complete. That is a separate problem from the rate itself, and it is why we are asking for the new contract to address ancillary fees as a distinct issue.

The Same Vendor. Different Rates.

One of the clearest ways to understand the rate question is to look at how other jurisdictions have approached the same vendor. The table below shows what families pay in a few different places. The technology is not what is different between these places. What is different is how the contracts are structured.

It is worth noting that the federal FCC also moved to address this issue nationally. The current rules, which went into effect April 6, 2026, set interim rate caps for jails and reinstate bans on site commissions and ancillary fees at the federal level. Kalamazoo's current rate of $0.18 per minute is at or near the top of what federal rules now allow for the smallest facilities. The county's upcoming contract decision is an opportunity to go further than the federal floor.