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Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Mom, the inmate is calling again…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
My apologies to Chris.
I don’t know Chris - at least I don’t think I do. But according to an MCI phone recording, he is an inmate at an out-of-state correctional facility.
Chris has been calling my home phone “collect” for more than a week — several times on some days. We never accept the call; we always hang up.
We would have told Chris he had the wrong number. But to do that, we would be billed a $3-plus minimum charge in addition to per-minute charges plus various and sundry fees.
I found that out the hard way months ago when another inmate by another name that escapes my memory somehow found our number and began calling. I tried to ignore those calls, but when I finally heard the inmate’s plea, “You could at least pick up,” my heart got the better of me, and I accepted it to tell him he had the wrong number. He thanked me and hung up.
I called MCI after that first encounter to see if they could waive that fee (a request they emphatically and enthusiastically denied). I also suggested that MCI’s recording could give people a “wrong number” option, for instance: “Press 1 to accept charges, press 2 if this is a wrong number; hang up if you do not wish to accept charges.”
The customer service reps saw no merit in the idea.
So when Chris started calling, we just hung up, hoping he would figure it out.
Tuesday night, however, after receiving one call after another, I called MCI and had them block my phone number from correctional institution calls.
This decision did give me pause. Although correctional institution rosters are currently free of my relatives’ names, you never know when a colorful family member might stray from the straight and narrow. Were that to happen, would I want my number blocked? Yeah, probably so.
Plus, the vision of my phone number etched on a prison wall was disturbing.
Paul Czachowski, public affairs officer for the Georgia Department of Corrections, said Georgia’s 39 correctional facilities are among those that contract with MCI for phone service. The population of those facilities is closing in at 60,000, so “that’s a whole lot of calling going on.” he said.
Anyone receiving repeated calls from an inmate in a Georgia facility can call the Georgia Block Manager for MCI at (toll-free) 1-877-269-9175 to block their phone from calls from state correctional institutions.
If it’s just a wrong number, though, you hate to do that.
A representative of my own phone company mentioned that inmates often know they have the wrong number but call it anyway. I asked Czachowski about that.
There may be rare cases in which an inmate does that, hoping you will forward his call to a number not on his approved call list, Czachowski said. “But most of the time, they have just copied the number down wrong.
Too bad we can’t tell them that.
Have you received misdirected inmate calls? Should an inmate be notified that he’s dialing the wrong number?
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