![]() ![]() ![]() In addition to its phone services, CenturyLink provided prisons with video visitation services. For example, the company gave 93.9% of the price of calls back to the Arizona Department of Corrections. Such commissions were written into many of CenturyLink's contracts. Some of this overcharging became the company's profit, while some of it was funneled back to the prison authorities as commissions or kickbacks. Prior to a 2018 reduction in the cost of prison phone calls in Texas, CenturyLink's prices for the Texas prisons it serviced were set at $4 per 15-minute phone call. When CenturyLink was the sole provider of telecommunication services to state prisons in Arizona, communicating with an incarcerated person could cost up to $180 per month. In most states, individuals are charged for creating and adding money to "inmate telephone accounts," in addition to being charged monthly account maintenance fees. The costs associated with prisons phone calls vary by state and contract. ![]() It provided phone services to prisons holding more than 300,000 people as of 2015. In 2020, at the time it sold most of its prison phone business to ICSolutions, CenturyLink held contracts with prison authorities in Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, North Carolina, Oregon, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. Until 2021, CenturyLink provided phone and video services to prisons and jails in at least 14 U.S. Lumen's divestment furthers the consolidation of the prison phone industry into the hands of a few private equity firms. The FCC permitted the transfer in August 2021, stating that with it, the company "would completely exit the inmate calling services market." In June 2021, Lumen requested the transfer of its remaining contract with Texas to Securus, its subcontractor there. The FCC approved the sale in August 2020. At the time, the company held contracts with prison authorities in 14 states, with ICSolutions as the public-facing subcontractor on all but one Texas Department of Criminal Justice contract. In May 2020, Lumen requested consent from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to sell CenturyLink Public Communications to ICSolutions. In 2020, while rebranding as Lumen, the company began selling off its prison phone business to ICSolutions and Securus, a process it completed in 2021. The company's business model was to provide prisons only with telecom infrastructure and to subcontract other prison phones companies, i.e., Securus Technologies and Inmate Calling Solutions (ICSolutions), as its public-facing partners, to provide the software, handle payment collection, etc. prisons until 2020, when it started divesting from the prison industry. It was the third-largest provider of phone services to U.S. The company entered the industry in 2008 by acquiring Embarq Corporation and setting up CenturyLink Public Communications as its prison phone subsidiary. Until 2021, Lumen was one of the leading providers of telecommunication services to U.S. Lumen Technologies, formerly CenturyLink, is a Monroe, Louisiana-based telecommunications and technology company that provides voice, broadband, and video services to residential, business, government, and wholesale customers.
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