Round Up of Jail Phone Coverage and Refuting Sheriff's Misinformation
As the campaign for free phone calls at the jail has been ramping up, Sheriff Dustin Heuerman has responded by spreading half-truths and falsehoods in the media.
An article I wrote about the campaign for Smile Politely was published this week, you can read it here:
At the Champaign County Board meeting on Thursday, September 21, 2023, several members people showed up, many of them from a recent teach-in held at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Urbana organized by Barbara Kessel, longtime community activist.
There was some good coverage from WILL reporter Farrah Anderson. She featured Tamika Davis, who spent time in the jail when she was younger. The high cost of phone calls at the jail, Tamika told the county board during public comment, made it difficult for her to talk to her children.
“How am I in the same county, in the same city,” Tamika said with incredulity, “down the same street and I'm paying $6 for a phone call using the same area code?”
Two local TV stations, FOX and WCIA, interviewed the sheriff but failed to fact-check his comments (although I sent accurate information to WCIA).
Sheriff Heuerman told both TV stations that the current cost is 13 cents-a-minute for a 20-minute phone call, which would total $2.60. When I reported on a hunger strike at the jail earlier this year, I personally received five phone calls that cost me between $6.72 and $4.67. Either the sheriff doesn’t know the price of the phone calls, or he is deliberately trying to deceive the public. The problem is also with Securus who includes no clear pricing in the most recent contract with the county.
In an interview with WCIA, Sheriff Heuerman spread further misinformation about community members’ appeals for free phone calls:
“And when we say two free phone calls a day, it’s not meaning the company is going to give the inmate two free phone calls a day. It means the county is going to have to pay for those two phone calls.”
What the sheriff failed to say was that Champaign County taxpayers are already paying Securus $66,750 a year, on top of what the company is making from overpriced calls paid by those with a loved one at the jail.
These are the kind of scare tactics the sheriff is employing to privilege Securus and protect the status quo.
Lastly, one of my fellow organizers Sandra Ahten published a Letter to the Editor in the News-Gazette this past weekend that put the decision in simple terms:
“The sheriff and the county board have the opportunity to either do what’s right and follow the trends of jails and prisons across the nation by prioritizing free phone calls (calls for inmates in the Illinois Department of Corrections are just a penny a minute) or insist on this new, sometimes-inaccurate and possibly unconstitutional voice-print technology as a priority.”
If you haven’t already, please sign our petition for free calls at the jail:
Keep Families Connected: Support Free Phone Calls at the Champaign County Jail (google.com)
Meanwhile, another person died at the jail this past weekend, Ray Gwin, 33, due to what the sheriff is calling a “medical emergency.” Of course, the jail is not a hospital. Guards will often avoid sending people to Carle hospital because of the additional medical costs the county will have to incur.
It hasn’t even been a year since Tillie Dietz died at the jail on October 13, 2022, as I reported on in my first Substack story. Again, jails can never be a solution to our social problems.