Officials of the Hamilton County Community Bail Fund said they are participating in the nationwide 2022 Juneteenth campaign, Breaking the Silence. Breaking the Silence is a two-fold campaign focused on "connecting incarcerated people and their loved ones, and bringing awareness to the expense of jail calls placed on those same people."
Donations to a fundraiser will be used to buy an hour of phone time for every person incarcerated at the Silverdale Detention Center on June 19, it was stated.
Officials said, "Hamilton County Community Bail Fund calls for the following set of actions:
"1. We call for the Hamilton County Sheriff's Department to end their contract with Securus.
"2. We call for the Hamilton County Commission to make communication free for every person incarcerated in the county jail, and to ban corrupt kickbacks to jail officials.
"3. We call for the FCC to cap in-state and interstate phone calls at 0 cents per minute, making phone calls free for every incarcerated person in America.
"Securus, a billion-dollar company, charges 19 cents per minute to speak to a loved one in Hamilton County Jail. Families are charged many kinds of extra fees - one-time fees for individual calls, transfer fees for adding money through money services, fees for adding money to an online account, making every part of the process generate profit.
"When families pay for a jail call, they are also paying for Securus to bribe local officials using "commissions" - a portion of the price of each call that the company pays to the county. These kickbacks are legal, and counties often contract with the company that will pay them the most.
"In March of this year, the TN Department of Corrections’ monthly point-in-time jail summary showed that in the Silverdale Detention Center, 82 percent of people were being held pretrial. That means that they have not been convicted of the crime they were arrested for, but cannot afford to pay a cash bond to be released. For many people, money is the only thing holding them in jail, and because they don't have it, they can't even call a family member to ask for help."