BY JENNIFER CABRERA

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – The Alachua County Commission’s initiative to provide free phone calls for inmates is imposing an annual financial burden of approximately $819,000 on taxpayers. Alarmingly, many of these complimentary calls have been linked to further criminal activities.

Free Jail Phone Calls Implemented by Commissioners in 2023

In a move initiated in 2023, the Alachua County Commission embarked on a plan to eliminate charges for jail phone calls, fully implementing this policy by March 2024. Prior to this change, inmates were charged $0.21 per minute, resulting in a cost of $3.15 for a 15-minute call. This system used to generate about $375,000 annually for the county.

With the new policy in effect from March 2024, the county began incurring costs, paying Securus an average of $37,000 monthly for nearly 1.2 million minutes—or 20,000 hours—of calls. Monthly bills fluctuated slightly, from a low of $31,847 in June 2024 to a peak of $40,103 in December 2024, though overall, the expenses remained relatively stable without any significant upward or downward trend.

The transition from generating $375,000 in revenue in 2023 to bearing an annual cost of $444,000 for inmate phone calls effectively impacts Alachua County’s budget by $819,000 each year. This figure is derived from multiplying the monthly average expense of $37,000 by 12, totaling $444,000 annually. The first year of free calls, from March 2024 to February 2025, totaled $441,000, while the subsequent year, from November 2024 to October 2025, amounted to $450,000.

Inmates make thousands of illegal calls, subsidized by taxpayers

Since calls became free, at least six inmates have been charged with illegally calling their victims or otherwise violating their pre-trial release conditions. (Defendants are typically prohibited from contacting their victims until the case is resolved, whether they are in jail or out on bail; regardless of where the inmate is located, these prohibitions are referred to as “pre-trial release conditions.”)

• Kenneth Woodridge Jr. allegedly called his victim 1,464 times.
• Joel Foster allegedly called his victim 429 times, was convicted in that case, and then called the same victim 532 more times.
• Ellis Ezeb Jr. allegedly called his victim 245 times.
• Cedric Owens allegedly called his victim 54 times.
• Jimmy Spears allegedly called his victim 187 times.
• Charnavis Queen allegedly called his victim 15 times.

According to the arrest reports, these calls are made directly to the victim or to a third party, with the intention of persuading or threatening the victim to drop the charges or change their story. Inmates sometimes use their own PIN for these calls, but they also use other inmates’ PINs in an attempt to disguise the source of the call.

Free phone calls have also been used to coordinate the activities of alleged drug dealers, resulting in at least two arrests.

It is impossible to know whether additional illegal activity is going undetected due to the loss of Securus’s voice biometrics software, which was discontinued in March 2024 at the request of the County Commission. Due to the loss of this tool, it is now more difficult for investigators to detect these calls and identify the inmates making the calls; removing this software also made it more difficult to block calls to victims and witnesses.

Free calls enable inmates to harass victims

If the first defendant above had had to pay for his calls and each one was only 3 minutes long, it would have cost him over $900 at the 2023 rate of $0.21/minute; instead, there was no cost to him for his use of the phone for the illegal calls, and taxpayers paid the bill at the current rate of about $0.03/minute (about $131.00).

Former Sheriff predicted problems with free phone calls

Former Alachua County Sheriff Emery Gainey told Alachua Chronicle, “These trends and the resulting increase in monthly costs to County taxpayers were anticipated and documented during my time in office, following the Commission’s decision to implement unlimited free inmate phone calls. Under the previous system, inmates always had free phone access to their attorneys to ensure proper and effective communication. In addition, each inmate was allowed a limited number of paid calls with family members at no cost to taxpayers within each 24-hour period. This approach also helped ensure fair access for all inmates to the limited number of phones available in the housing units.”

Gainey told the County Commission in December 2023 that the change had led to an increase in fights at the jail and said that gangs were controlling access to the phones.

Financial cost was also predicted

When Commissioners first asked for free jail phone calls, former Sheriff Clovis Watson Jr. gave them four options:

• Option #1: Seven free 15-minute calls per week for each inmate (total cost to the County: $580,000 per year)
• Option #2: Five free 15-minute calls per week per inmate (total cost to the County: $375,000 per year)
• Option #3: Two free 15-minute calls per week per inmate (total cost to the County: $75,000 per year)
• Option #4: Unlimited phone calls per week per inmate (total cost to the County: approximately $1.3 million per year)

The County Commission chose the most expensive option of unlimited phone calls. While the budget impact ended up being less than anticipated ($819k vs. $1.3 million), the Commissioners’ focus on the well-being of inmates did not take into account the toll on the victims who received hundreds of illegal phone calls.