Description of the Agreement

Pursuant to the settlement agreement, MCI will make a one-time payment of $522,458.33. The settlement agreement nominates three potential recipients for this amount:

(1) "Friends Outside," a nonprofit corporation whose mission is to assist families, prisoners, and ex-prisoners with the immediate and long-term effects of incarceration. The MCI payment would fund a program to provide low and very low-income family members with transportation and lodging costs to allow familial visits to prisoners. Family members are defined as those persons who have or are caring for the minor child of an inmate.


(2) Future users of the inmate telephone system. The amount would be distributed by implementing a small reduction in the per minute charge all persons pay who receive collect calls from inmates until the entire amount is disbursed.


(3) General Fund of the State of California.

The parties have not recommended any one of these three alternatives but rather have left the selection to this Commission.

The parties also state that it is economically infeasible to determine the exact amount of the inaccurate charges due each customer for the relevant time period without reviewing hundreds of thousands of billing records and the performance of costly and protracted customer-specific financial calculations. In the settlement agreement, the parties have developed a methodology for calculating a reasonable estimate of the amount MCI improperly obtained.