CALLS

more than $40,000 calling her former husband, who has been incarcerated on and o for more than 20 years.

When their daughter was born 7 years ago, when calls ran 12 cents a minute, Jenkins started making more 20-minute calls to her child’s father, because she needed support as a new mother. She also wanted to maintain a relationship with her ex-husband to also help foster a positive relationship between him and their daughter.

“It has taken a lot of stress and strain o of me that he can continue parenting regardless of his situation,” she said last week. “His daughter needs him and he needs his daughter.”

Jenkins said people have criticized her for going into debt to keep her daughter in touch with her dad. “What else was I supposed to do? People need to be able to vent and I don’t want him to be in there creating another crime because he has no place to release his emotions,” Jenkins said. “I was just trying to help.” e Colorado rate of 8 cents per minute is moderate in comparison to other states, according to Federal Bureau of Prisons data. According to data from the Prison Policy Initiative, the cost of calls to and from Colorado prisons has ranged from a high of about 40 cents a minute in 2008 to the low of 8 cents today.

Jails and prisons are supposed to be a place where people in custody can rehabilitate and start to rebuild, she said.

“You can’t say you want to help somebody and then cut them o from everything that would be bene cial to their well-being mentally and physically,” Jenkins added.

In 2021, about 15,000 people in Colorado’s prisons were spending just over 7 minutes on the phone each day, according to Colorado Department of Corrections data given to Worth Rises leaders. e corrections department expects that number to double to about 14.4 minutes daily when calls become free in 2025. In December 2021 alone, people in Colorado prisons made about 3 million minutes of calls, according to the data.

If people who are incarcerated don’t have nancial support from loved ones, they must pay for phone calls with their prison wages, Worth Rises’ Executive Director Bianca Tylek said.

“It’s quite a crazy thing to think about when you consider that somebody can be paid per hour what a phone call costs per minute and that’s if they have a job,” she said. If they have a job inside prison, “it’s usually a few cents per hour, so they have to work hours, potentially even days, to have a single 15-minute call — or they just don’t have calls. And that’s exactly why we’re doing this because the reality is many people don’t have support and don’t have any other way of communicating with people because they can’t a ord to.”

Colorado joins a growing list of cities and states that have made prison calls free. Connecticut was rst, in 2021, followed by California in 2022. Calls from jails are free in several cities, including New York, San Francisco, San Diego, Miami and Louisville, Kentucky. Worth Rises, an organization that says it’s working to rein in the $80 billion prison industry, is supporting other campaigns to make phone calls free in Minnesota, Michigan, Rhode Island and New Jersey.

Some departments of correction are more willing than others to work with advocacy organizations aiming to make prison calls free, Tylek said. For example, the Minnesota Department of Corrections has hoped to get a similar bill passed to make phone calls free, she said, while the Virginia Department of Corrections has fought against such a bill.

“In Colorado, I would put the DOC