Families Protest High Cost Prison Calls

New York, NY —

A group of inmates' families are traveling to today's MCI shareholders meeting to question executives over the high cost of calls made from New York State prisons.

REPORTER: Currently, a prisoner must place a collect call, which MCI charges three dollars to initiate and sixteen cents a minute from then on. Marianne Rodriguez says when her daughter's father was in prison upstate, her whole family was punished, not just him.

RODRIGUEZ: I could not maintain my car payment, I could not maintain - my daughter was in Catholic school for a number of years -we tried that and it wasn't successful due to the fact that we had to maintain these phone bills for her to have a relationship with her father.

REPORTER: Advocates say the average bill for an inmate's family is about 4-hundred dollars a month.

A bill being considered in Albany would require the lowest bidder provide telephone services to inmates when the current contract with MCI expires next March. MCI has not returned a request for comment.