Chali Pittman
The Dane County Public Safety Building.
On the other side of the Dane County Public Safety Building, construction is underway on the new jail. Next door in the City County Building, the county board will meet on May 14 to vote on a proposed jail telecom contract.
Over more than four decades, James Morgan has spent stints in the Dane County Jail while waiting to be transported back to prison, or when there has been an issue with his GPS monitoring system. On one such visit, he got a message that his mother had died from breast cancer.
"I didn't have immediate access to a phone. I could not call home. I couldn't talk to my siblings or to anyone else," says Morgan, a co-founder and organizer with MOSES, a Madison-based social justice organization organizing against a new proposed contract for jail telecommunications.
A chaplain allowed him space to grieve, but Morgan says the process would have felt much different had he been connected with his family and the outside world. Inmates only get access to phones at certain times and calls can be expensive for family members, who have to pick up the cost. Getting connected on the inside, Morgan says, is “costly in both dollars, and in mental, emotional, and sometimes spiritual health."
It’s an ongoing issue and one that is at the heart of a debate over whether the Dane County Board on May 14 should renew a contract for the company currently providing telecommunications services inside the jail. It’s the third time in roughly a year and a half that supervisors have faced this decision. If approved, the contract would settle a process that began in January 2025. If denied, the contract could kickstart a new round of proposals for more free or subsidized options.
On May 11, the county’s personnel and finance committee voted 6-1 to recommend denial of the proposed three-year contract with ViaPath, a national telecommunications company owned by private equity and the county’s current vendor; the contract includes the possibility of two one-year extensions. The county’s Public Protection and Judiciary Committee narrowly recommended the proposal in March, modifying the length of the contract to three years and including a clause to require sign-off from the whole county board if the contract gets extended.
The county has twice extended ViaPath’s contract since it expired in May 2025. The latest extension expires at the end of October 2026.
Under the current extension with ViaPath, phone calls cost jail residents, or their loved ones, seven cents a minute. Written messages and photos cost 25 cents, and using a tablet runs five cents per minute.
Under the proposed contract, jail residents would be charged six cents a minute to use the jail’s tablets. Message and photos charges would stay at 25 cents, and ViaPath would provide one free call of up to 10 minutes a day.
Supv. Keith Furman says a free option was offered at the county’s request, adding that ViaPath receives approximately $1.5 million dollars a year from Dane County Jail residents. That's according to numbers shared by Sheriff Kalvin Barrett last fall, when the board was considering a contract with a different vendor: Smart Communications Holdings Inc.
Then, the Smart proposal had been recommended for denial by both the Public Protection & Judiciary Committee and Personnel & Finance Committee. The contract would’ve provided phone and video visitation, tablets, and mail scanning, a controversial provision that was later dropped.
Financially, the contract was more favorable for the county. Smart would have paid $269,000 in the first year, with an annual fee rising to over $302,000 by the fifth year, to compensate the county for staff time spent administering the program. That came with tradeoffs: the contract had no protections to prevent data from being sold to advertisers and no free or subsidized options beyond offering two free messages a week.
Under the current proposal,ViaPath would pay nothing to the county for the exclusive right to charge its fees at the jail. Furman said at the May 11 committee meeting that shows how the county’s request-for-proposal process is “incredibly broken,” adding that the RFP didn’t adequately ask contractors to submit options for free or subsidized phone and video calls.
“Accepting stale results from a flawed process doesn’t protect the county, it just locks in the mistakes,” he added. He’s pushing to re-issue the RFP once again, and thinks the board could still make their October deadline.
A coalition of advocacy groups — including MOSES, Madison Area Democratic Socialists of America, EXPO, Just Dane and LGBT Books to Prisoners — oppose the contract, arguing that ViaPath and other industry providers exploit and surveil vulnerable communities.
According to a fiscal analysis prepared for Dane County by WorthRises, a national nonprofit prison industry abolition organization, providing fully free communication in the Dane County Jail could cost as little as $284,000. The report adds that ViaPath could offer cheaper options than are currently offered, pointing to other states with leading telecom providers where the cost to connect is a fraction of a cent per minute.
In a separate, national report released this month, WorthRises finds that correctional telecommunications is a $1.5 billion industry, and ViaPath is one of the three private-equity owned providers that together control nearly 90% of the market.
In 2024, after a rebrand to ViaPath Technologies, Global Tel Link Corporation was ordered to pay $1 million in penalties and another $2 million to incarcerated people’s loved ones by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which found that the company had “illegally taken millions of dollars from more than a half million accounts and block[ed] money transfers to consumers.”
The thin concentration of providers, according to the WorthRises report, is the result of private equity trades over the past four decades. But recently, “regulatory changes, legislative reforms, and corporate accountability campaigns have narrowed these margins, weakening the financial outlook for the providers and making it hard to refinance or sell these businesses.” Last year, Aventiv, another top provider, was restructured by creditors to avoid bankruptcy.
In 2022, Congress passed legislation to ensure “just and reasonable charges” for phone and other communications services in correctional and detention facilities. The act was named for Martha Wright-Reed, a grandmother who, decades before, had sued one of the largest private prison operators in the nation over pricey phone call arrangements — including with Global Tel Link.
In 2024, the Federal Communications Commission outlined new rate caps. For a medium-sized jail like Dane County’s, the cost per minute for audio went from a cap of 21 cents down to seven cents per minute. Video, which had no prior limit, was capped at 12 cents a minute.
Last fall, around the same time the Dane County Board was weighing another contract extension, the FCC — now under a different presidential administration, and a different FCC chair — raised the caps on an interim basis, faulting the “unintended consequences” of their first go. For a medium-sized jail, the cap for phone calls went up to 12 cents, and the cost for video calling went up to 19 cents. The new caps went into effect last month.
In Wisconsin, state lawmakers introduced a bill last December to provide some free telecommunications to state prisons, county jails, and juvenile correctional and detention facilities. The bill would have provided three hours a week of free phone calls, an hour a week of free video calls, and 100 free text messages a week — along with the funding to reimburse the Department of Corrections and counties. The bill did not get a hearing, and died in committee.
The Dane County Jail does provide some free telecommunications services already, says Dane County Sheriff Capt. Kelly Splinter. Phone calls in central booking are free. Phone calls to certain numbers, such as the Rape Crisis Center, are automatically free at any time.
In 2025, residents of the jail used 527,913 free minutes, and in the first quarter of 2026, residents had used 122,807 free minutes, says Splinter, adding that re-entry staff work with people coming in to the jail to communicate with employers, child care providers, and family.
But other Wisconsin communities are ahead in providing free phone calls to those incarcerated. In its 2023 budget, La Crosse County unanimously opted to allow every inmate up to 30 minutes a day of free phone calls. The county subsidized the $75,000 to do so from their general revenue.
Dane County, facing a pending budget deficit, may not opt to do the same. At the May 11 personnel and finance committee meeting, Supv. Yogesh Chawla argued that whatever contract moves forward needs to both work with the upcoming budget and avoid overcharging jail residents and their loved ones.
“I don’t think jail communication should be free. But I think jail communication should be cost-neutral. I think that’s an important nuance to have,” said Sup. Chawla. “Every time we have municipalities or private companies profiting off of jail communications, that sets a very bad precedent.”
Editor's note: This story was updated to correct the cost of tablet use.
