Niagara County Jail

Telephones

Interview with Karl


JM: Did you have regular access to telephones?
Karl: Yes. Unless you were "locked-down" for some misbehavior, collect-call telephones were turned on from about 9:00 am until just before lock-in at 11:15 pm. If you were "locked-down" you were permitted to have a 5 minute phone call each day, upon request to your wing officer.

JM: What types of charges applied for calling people?
Karl: if you made local calls, I believe they charged $1.63 for the first minute and .09 for each additional minute. I overheard some inmates talking about long-distance calls, which were fairly expensive, more on the order of $50 to $60 for an hour or so.

JM: Did you need to buy phone cards to call out?
Karl: No, but your called party had to accept the call. Some inmates would call and try to leave short messages on answering machines, which was not always successful.

JM: Did the jail screen your calls?
Karl: As far as I know, the calls were monitored randomly, and the information was used to initiate various prosecutions, but nothing untoward happened on my block, "H" block, during the time I was there.