Civil grand jury questions steep prices for Sonoma County Jail phone calls

Sable Rose Guerrero felt her life had been put on pause for several months in 2018 and 2019, when she was held at the Sonoma County Jail for a felony vehicle theft case.

Her occasional phone calls to family and friends and in-person visits were a lifeline as the long periods in her cell took a heavy mental and emotional toll on her, she said.

But while the visits were free, the cost of phoning her loved ones from the facility created a financial obstacle that Guerrero’s relatives and boyfriend had to help her shoulder, she said.

“That phone call is that touch with the outside. It really takes your mind off of being out there,” Guerrero, 21, said. “Next thing you know, you have to put more money on the phone card.”

Now, the prices Guerrero and other inmates in Sonoma County have paid to phone friends and family — calls that criminal justice experts say help inmates rejoin society and avoid ending up back behind bars — are under scrutiny.

An investigation by the Sonoma County civil grand jury found the price the Sheriff’s Office places on calls from the jail — where inmates often are awaiting trial and haven’t been convicted of any crimes — far outstrips prices in state and federal prisons.

The report, which one Sonoma County Board of Supervisors member called “shocking,” was released last month and calls for the supervisors and Sheriff’s Office to reform the system, which charges inmates more than 20 cents a minute for calls.

The county’s phone service is provided by a multinational company that has been accused of predatory practices elsewhere by inmates and their families and, in at least one case, state regulators. The company charges its own fees, and jail and prison operators, in this case the Sheriff’s Office, tack on commissions.

The civil grand jury also questioned the sheriff’s use of much of that money, which is designated for inmate programming and welfare but has been used to pay jail staff salaries and feed a growing trust fund.

Federal facilities charge inmates about 10% of what Sonoma County charges, the grand jury found. State prison phone calls were reduced to 2.5 cents a minute from 7.6 cents a minute in March, when California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation officials announced they had renegotiated their contract with Global Tel Link, the same provider Sonoma County uses.

The Federal Communications Commission has tried to rein in inmate phone charges for almost a decade, but the agency’s reach extends only to interstate or international calls.

“Local county jails, including ours, represent the last refuge in the State for these commission-based contracts,” the grand jury said.

Even as the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors and Sheriff Mark Essick review the grand jury’s investigation, the California Public Utilities Commission is working on issuing rules that will ensure “just and reasonable rates” for inmates statewide.

The utility could issue those rules as early as this year.

Last summer, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and that county’s sheriff aligned to make phone calls for inmates free by switching to a contract where the county paid a flat rate to GTL every month.

The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office has gone the opposite direction, increasing the price inmates had to pay to call loved ones and friends by 10% in 2019, the investigation found.

Essick initially declined to comment on the investigation specifics before his agency crafts an official response.

“I feel I have an obligation to the (grand jury) to provide an answer to them first,” Essick said, adding that his staff worked closely with the grand jury on their investigation.

After this story was published online, Essick stressed that the jail staff salaries the fees funded were for employees who worked for inmates’ benefit, specifically an inmate program manager and commissary staff.

Essick said he was not opposed to a policy change, but wanted “buy-in” from the public and supervisors. He suggested the jail might need more funding to cover the loss of phone revenues. “The commitment to make a change is not the concern here,” he said. “It’s the finances behind it and how are we going to pay for it.“

Essick’s use of the phone revenue was a focus of the grand jury’s concern.

Revenue from the phone system is generally supposed to be spent on programming that benefits inmates. Much of it has gone to help pay for jail staff salaries and has piled up in a trust fund — the Inmate Welfare Trust — that as of the grand jury’s report held $1.6 million.

The sum, which is also swelled by steep markups on commissary items, is enough to pay for the next two years of phone calls, the investigation concluded.

The grand jury focused on two years of the trust fund’s revenues and expenditures, fiscal years 2017-2019. Over those two years, the Sheriff’s Office spent more than $566,000 on salaries. It spent a little more than $1 million on educational programs for inmates and put an unspent $274,037 into the trust fund.

The Sheriff’s Office price increase came at the end of the 2019 fiscal year.

For the grand jury, a price hike even as the trust fund swelled called into question the purpose of the steep prices on the county’s incarcerated.

“Our jail should not be a profit generating entity,” the grand jury concluded.

Global Tel Link is a private-equity-backed operator with a big footprint in the lucrative prison business ecosystem. During the company’s last sale, in 2011, investment banking giant Goldman Sachs sold the company to a hedge fund, American Securities Capital, for $1 billion.

Prison activists have accused GTL of monopolizing the inmate phone market, and the company has faced class action lawsuits in multiple states. In 2017, GTL paid $2.5 million to settle a racketeering and bribery case in Mississippi.

The company denied any wrongdoing in the case and said it settled to focus on “innovation.”

In Sonoma County, GTL sells phone cards that carry 90 minutes at a cost of 7 cents a minute. From there, the Sheriff’s Office tacks on a 15-cent surcharge, bringing the price up to 22 cents a minute, according to the grand jury. The company and the Sheriff’s Office also leverage steep commissions on families transferring money online to their incarcerated loved ones’ phone accounts, charging $3 on every $20 transferred. The Sheriff’s Office collects 70% of those fees, according to the grand jury.

According to the investigation, the Sheriff’s Office has complete control over how much of a commission it places on top of GTL’s prices.

Recent annual budget proposals the sheriff presents county supervisors do not contain a detailed accounting of the phone fees, appearing to lump it into a line item for agency revenues that includes donations and fines.

Supervisor Lynda Hopkins, the current board chair, called on Essick to bring changes to the Board of Supervisors based on the recommendation of the grand jury report, which she called “shocking.”

“It’s important for the sheriff to step forward and take action on this issue,” Hopkins said.

If Essick does not offer changes, the board may be able to act without him, Hopkins said. The grand jury cited San Diego County, where, in March, supervisors rejected the sheriff’s proposal to fund programming through phone and prison commissary fees.

Sonoma County Supervisor David Rabbitt said he agreed that the jail’s contract with GTL deserves review.

“I don’t know what the contract’s negotiations were, but it’s something that we would look into to make sure we got the best all-around deal, and that would be for the sheriff, the county and the inmates,” Rabbitt said.

Rabbitt questioned why the price of the calls increased in 2019, he said. He also wanted to know how much the jail was spending in overhead to run programs under the Inmate Welfare Fund, and how that amount compares with the money being pulled from the fund to pay for jail staff salaries, Rabbitt said.

But Rabbitt warned against comparing a much larger county like San Francisco’s new free call system to Sonoma County’s.

“Just because San Francisco leveraged one solution, it doesn’t mean we have the same capacity to leverage the same solution,” Rabbitt said.

Supervisors got some insight into the phone system earlier this year, Rabbitt said, when inmates on a hunger strike put free phone calls on their list of demands after coronavirus-related restrictions cut off in-person visits at the facility.

After the strike, and the involvement of Sonoma County’s Independent Office of Law Enforcement Review and Oversight, the jail began giving inmates 10 free phone call minutes a day. The grand jury questioned whether those calls were really “free,” given that the Sheriff’s Office paid for them out of the inmates’ own trust fund.

During the pandemic, the educational programs the trust fund is supposed to support were canceled, but the steep charges on inmates’ commissary items and phone calls remained.

“The result is a phone charge that serves mainly to enlarge the $1.6 million (trust fund) surplus,” the grand jury concluded.

Though in-person visiting has resumed at the jail, the committee that manages the Inmate Welfare Trust is maintaining the free phone calls, Essick said. “They decided there was plenty of money available to continue,” he said.

Offering 10 free minutes a day for the inmate population has been running around $4,000 a month, Essick said.

You can reach Staff Writer Andrew Graham at 707-526-8667 or andrew.graham@pressdemocrat.com and Staff Writer Nashelly Chavez at 707-521-5203 or nashelly.chavez@pressdemocrat.com.