Legal prison phones start ringing

BUT NOT FOR DEATH ROW  !!!!


By Mike Ward | Friday, April 3, 2009

For the first time in Texas history, convicts can now legally phone 
home from their cellblocks.

Not from those smuggled cell phones that caused such a stir a few 
months ago, when a state senator got a call and then a threat from a 
death row prisoner, but from new equipment that’s been approved by 
The Boss.

For every call, state taxpayers will be making money.

Officials today announced that the first seven prisoners — all women 
— made calls Monday from the 576-bed Henley State Jail in Dayton, 
northeast of Houston.

During April, 13 additional prisons are expected to get working 
inmate phones, and 31 more are expected to be added in May, said Paul 
Cooper, director and general manager of inmate phone systems for 
Embarq, the company hired to install and operate the new system.

By September, all of Texas’ 112 state prisons and jails should have 
inmate phones ringing.

Texas is the last state in the nation to allow an inmate phone system.

Only outgoing calls are to be allowed. And those calls can be made 
only to friends and relatives approved in advance by prison officials.

For years, as other states installed inmate phone systems, Texas 
prison officials resisted such a move. But two years ago, lawmakers 
changed state law to allow for prison phones as a way to generate 
revenue for state coffers and the Victim’s Compensation Fund — 
probably tens of millions of dollars, officials said.

More than a million people are expected to register to receive calls 
from the 140,000 convicts who will be eligible to make them, Cooper 
said. So far, 400 people are registered to receive calls — although 
Coper said he expects that number to grow steadily as additional 
prisons get working phones.

Project manager Wendell Stewart and Cooper said the system will work 
like this:

- Convicts must be approved to make calls, and the numbers they are 
calling must be pre-approved by prison officials to ensure that no 
victims or their families are included.

- Each time they make a call, the system will validate the convict’s 
prison number, their “biometric voice print” — verify their voice — 
and the number they are calling.

- People who answer the calls will hear a recorded voice message 
alerting them that the call is coming from a prison, and giving them 
the option of accepting the call, declining it or blocking all 
further prison calls.

Stewart said the system will allow for collect calls, or for calls 
pre-paid from an account into which family members can transfer money 
or convicts can transfer funds from their prison accounts.

Inmates’ family members will be able to sign up online at 
www.texasprisonphone.com.

The new system features a number of security measures to allow 
officials to monitor calls to block any planning of crimes, to keep 
crime victims from getting called and to protect people who do not 
want to get phone calls, prison officials said.

http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/
politics/entries/2009/04/03/prison_phones_start_ringing.html