Advocates are urging the City Council to pass a bill that would let inmates make phone calls from city jails for free.

Currently, jails charge a 50 cent initiation fee and 5 cents for each minute after that. While those appear to be modest amounts, they can be burdensome for low income families, advocates say. 

Former inmate Dwayne Lee said his family spent close to $3,000 during the year when he was jailed at Rikers Island so that he could stay in touch and fight his case. Lee said he had been the family breadwinner; without his income, his children's mother would sometimes sell her food stamps to pay for the calls. 

"Public assistance is not that much money to take care of the family," said Lee, a member of the advocacy group VOCAL-NY, prior to a City Council committee hearing on the issue Monday.

The Department of Correction offered tepid support for the measure, saying City Hall was open to making calls as inexpensive for inmates as possible.  

A private company currently runs the phone system on Rikers. The company, called Securus, records all calls and monitors a certain percentage of them. Advocates said Securus gives the city $5 million annually from its profits. The Department of Correction said inmates are notified the calls will be recorded. 

"Why is it that you don't need a subpoena to wiretap or record a phone call of somebody who has not yet been convicted?" asked City Councilman Daniel Dromm from Queens. 

The correction department said it was able to record the phone calls for security purposes and if prosecutors want access to the calls, they need a subpoena. 

"We have used the phone call recordings because...we have had an increase in the percentage of our population that is gang affiliated and [are] using the phone calls to coordinate activities," the department's chief of staff, Jeff Thamkittikasem, said.

But Jared Chausow from Brooklyn Defender Services said those subpoenas may be issued without a judge's approval. 

"It adds no due process and does not begin to address the serious questions raised by the phone surveillance of tens of thousands of people detained on unaffordable bail," Chausow wrote in an email to WNYC.