ConComCorp.com Blog

We are in the proces of putting together a piece about Supervised Release and Probation in the federal and state systems. Any contributions of favorable and/or horror stories is appreciated.

We have been asked numerous times why our company no longer accepts collect calls from prisons. Hopefully the following will satisfactorily resolve that question.
When we started this business, we thought of ourselves not as vendors of goods and services to those who are incarcerated, but rather advocates who have the ability to assist inmates and their families through what for most of them, is among the hardest, and most trying period of their lives. The goods and services we sell are intended to finance the other stuff we try to accomplish on behalf of our clients and their loved ones; not that we’d object to turning a bit of a profit now and then. Unfortunately, the results to date have been very disheartening. Firstly, our good nature, and attempts to provide incarcerated people with a means for reaching us quickly fell flat on its face after only a few months. Many, simply do not give a darn about their fellow inmates, or about the cost of what they do….as long as they aren’t the ones paying the tab. Until last month we accepted collect calls. The purpose of accepting collect calls was to allow inmates to get to us in emergencies when they needed to get a message to a family member quickly and/or for emergency purposes. We wouldn’t call forward nor third party a call but we’d relay and/or obtain and pass information family related information. We’d also accept collect calls for the purpose of an inmate placing an order with us. The New York and the CT inmates took our kindness for weakness, and rung up thousands of dollars in nonsense calls. We finally had to stop accepting the calls or risk going belly up as a very real possibility. Interestingly, after we stopped accepting collect calls and they were on their dime, very few of those who would call us two or three times a day found it important to call us ever again. Many thousands of dollars later we’ve stopped accepting collect calls, and these days we hardly receive prepaid calls from the NY, NJ, CT markets.
It has taken a long time for us to be accepted among our constituency as a company that is going to do what we say we are going to do, and within reason, when we say we are going to do it. Given the numbers of orders we handle every day our screw ups are few, and we really do endeavor to correct whatever mistakes we make. We really try to bend over backwards to the end of keeping our clients and their families happy with our services. If any one has any ideas with respect to how to make things better, we are always willing to listen.