By Bianca Hall
In Paul Kelly’s Christmas song How to Make Gravy, the protagonist, Joe, calls his brother, Dan, from prison, yearning for the familiarity of family and “all the treasure and the trash”.
Amy*, who was released from prison six months ago, after seven years’ inside, knows the feeling well.
Amy says the high costs of phone calls is keeping prisoners and their families apart at Christmas.Credit: Paul Jeffers
“It’s very, very lonely, especially around Christmas and birthdays and Easter…it becomes really depressing,” she said. “I’ve got four children and Christmastime was very difficult to keep in contact with them and other family.”
Calls from public phones around the country are free, but calls in Australian prisons are prohibitively expensive. In most Victorian prisons, calls cost between 60¢ and 90¢ a minute, plus connection costs. They are capped at a maximum 12 minutes in medium and maximum security prisons, and 15 minutes in low-security prisons.
“At DPFC [Dame Phyllis Frost Centre] the phone calls are $12 for 10 minutes, and at Tarrengower they’re $8 for 12 minutes,” Amy said.
“You only earn approximately $40 to $45 a week in prison, and if you’ve got more than one or two children, just calling them on a weekly basis is taking a huge chunk out of your weekly pay.”
According to Corrections Victoria, the prisoner pay rate is between $3.95 and $8.95 per day, with people on remand earning just $3.30 per day. This means a prisoner on remand would have little left over for toiletries and other essentials after one short phone call.
Lawyers from the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service and the Human Rights Law Centre have issued a joint appeal for phone calls in the state’s prisons to be made free.
Human Rights Law Centre managing lawyer Monique Hurley said that when phone calls in the community were approaching zero and payphone calls were free, it was unacceptable for calls from prisons to be so expensive.
“We have engaged with review after review in Victoria calling for the government to stop prioritising profits and punishment over people,” she said.
“The exorbitant cost of phone calls means that too often mothers and fathers are having trouble being able to afford to call their children and siblings and friends, and aren’t able to maintain really crucial social connections that are so important to support people in prison and help them exit prison.”
Sarah Schwartz, principal managing lawyer of the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service’s Wirraway police and prisons accountability practice, said access to free communication with family and community was particularly important for First Nations people.
“For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, who are already over incarcerated, connection to community is particularly important and there are so many negative impacts of that disconnection from community and culture that people are stripped from when they enter the prison system.”
A Victorian parliamentary committee last year urged the Victorian government to investigate a free prisoner telephone system to allow parents to call and video call their children free of charge.
Meanwhile, private companies such as Engine Numbers have entered the market, offering unlimited phone calls for $34 month.
A spokeswoman for the Victorian government said video and audio calls via Zoom were available at no cost to prisoners, and there was no limit to the number of these calls that could be made during the year.
She did not say how many tablets were available to prisoners, but said Corrections was working to make devices more accessible to people in custody.
“Corrections Victoria encourages people in custody to maintain ties with family while in custody,” she said. “This helps with reintegrating back into the community after completing their sentence.”
*Not her real name
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