Annalyse Gosselin would like a new coat. Hers is ripped, and its zipper doesn’t work anymore. 

She’d also like a new phone and to eat at a restaurant one of these days—the last time she dined out was in May, on her 20th birthday—but can’t afford those things either. Gosselin works two jobs, at a grocery store and part-time as a nursing assistant, but she says that nets her less than $20,000 a year. That isn’t nearly enough to thrive where she lives in Boston, where the median one-bedroom apartment rents for about $3,000 a month.

Fifteen months ago, she started a relationship with an imprisoned man she’d been corresponding with through a pen pal program that connects incarcerated people with concerned strangers. Now budgeting is even harder: her boyfriend, Syrelle, is held in Norfolk, 30 miles from her home, and keeping in regular touch with him is enormously expensive. It costs about $2.50 to talk with him for 20 minutes on the phone, and twice that if they do a video call. Emails cost 25 cents apiece. The private company the prison system uses to run communications takes a $3 surcharge every time she adds money to her account. 

Gosselin says she’s spent about $5,000 just to talk with Syrelle since the start of their relationship, and roughly the same amount on purchases for him at the prison commissary: an extension cord, a small television, chicken, vegetables, medicated protein shakes.

“I go broke, literally. I make my bank account negative,” Gosselin told Bolts. “I don’t do much for myself; I just do for him. My mom and everybody always tells me, ‘You can’t keep making sacrifices for your relationship.’ But who else is going to do it?”

Massachusetts is now poised to ease that financial burden for Gosselin, as well as for the thousands of people held in the state’s prisons and jails, and their loved ones. Lawmakers just approved reforms on Monday that would eliminate charges for communicating with incarcerated people. It would also limit commissary markups in all jails and prisons to 3 percent above an item’s purchase price.

Gosselin says making communications free would change her life. She’d be able to speak with her boyfriend without watching the clock or her wallet. “It will honestly be the best thing,” Gosselin said. “It just feels like a burden taken off my back once it happens.”

The reform, which is part of the state’s annual budget, now awaits the signature of Governor Maura Healey, a Democrat who has expressed support for the change and is expected to approve it. Her predecessor, Republican former Governor Charlie Baker, denied a similar proposal last year. 

If Healey does approve this change, Massachusetts would be the fifth state to make prison phone calls free. Connecticut in 2021 became the first to do so, followed by California in 2022 and Colorado and Minnesota earlier this year. Several large U.S. cities have also mandated free phone calls for people in jails, starting with New York City in 2018 and followed by Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Miami, among others. Last year, Congress also passed a law granting the Federal Communications Commission new and greater authority to regulate the high cost of calls to and from incarcerated people.

The Massachusetts reform would be among the most wide-reaching: The state would join only Connecticut in making communications of all kinds free for all incarcerated people—that is, not just phone calls, but also video, email, and messaging. Massachusetts would pay for the communications out of a $20 million state trust fund meant specifically to cover those costs.

The changes were guided in large part by the advocacy of people directly harmed by the exorbitant costs of communicating with loved ones in prison. For instance, many of those people expressed worry that some facilities would respond to free communications by further restricting the amount of time people can spend on phone or video calls—indeed, Healey’s initial budget proposal called for just such a cap, and also excluded jail communications. Advocates told Bolts that incarcerated people helped add a provision to the current budget prohibiting jails and prisons from limiting communication access beyond their existing policies as those services become free.

“We’re feeling extremely happy with the language that came out of the legislature,” Jesse White, policy director at Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts, told Bolts. “Not only will phone calls be free, but also access should not be reduced.”

Many people now cheering the prospect of free prison phone calls once thought such reforms would never happen. Jarelis Fonseca, whose partner is incarcerated in Norfolk and who says she spends more every month on prison communications than on her car insurance, rent, and groceries combined, told Bolts she long ago accepted that extreme costs come with the territory of having a loved one in prison. 

“It’s something we feel like we just have to deal with, and deal with by ourselves,” she said. By becoming active in advocating for the Massachusetts change, she added, she’s come to understand how common her struggle is. 

“I was like many families: in the dark. I knew what I knew from what I pay and how much it cost for me. Many people are not able to talk about it,” she said. “We’re all deciding what we’re going to go without, putting things off, to add money to continue to speak to our loved one. It’s stressful.”

In recent years, a groundswell of activism has coalesced around cutting the high costs of communicating with people behind bars. Bianca Tylek, executive director of Worth Rises, an abolitionist organization helping lead a nationwide movement for free prison and jail communications, says organizers wanted to help incarcerated people and their loved ones while also chipping away at the network of private companies that profit off them. 

“Our strategy, when we started this work in 2017, was that we had to start somewhere,” Tylek told Bolts. “If we’re going to dismantle an industry—one that very few people know anything about—we have to start somewhere that feels accessible.”

Worth Rises estimates that prison telecommunications companies make nearly $1.9 billion annually from contracts with jails and prisons. That money goes mostly to a small group of private equity-owned corporations, but those corporations typically send kickbacks to governments who award them exclusive contracts. For instance, before Colorado made prison phone calls free, the state received up to $800,000 per year from the company Global Tel*Link for rights to run the prison system’s phone program.

Tylek says organizers highlighted the exorbitant cost of prison phone calls because they thought it would resonate with others. “I don’t think there’s anything more accessible than a simple phone call,” she said. “A phone call to your mom, to your child, to your partner. That seemed like something we could explain to people: that children deserve to hear ‘I love you’ whether or not their parent can afford a phone call.”

Tylek says there’s legislation planned for next year in Hawaii, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin, and that advocates are actively organizing for reforms in a half dozen other states. She says organizers hope to make at least prison phone calls free in every state by 2027.

Free communications may well enable even more advocacy from incarcerated people in Massachusetts, who could participate remotely in policymaking at no cost if prison calls are free. As this reform nears the finish line, organizers are already working on other legislation to loosen restrictions on in-person visitation that the prison system implemented in 2018. 

James Jeter, director of Connecticut’s Full Citizens Coalition, said he’s been able to dramatically expand his advocacy network since his state made calls free in 2021. That reform led to an immediate doubling of both total phone calls by incarcerated people in Connecticut and of average call duration, CT Insider reported. 

“We had this idea that once the phone calls went free, we could actually start in the prisons, educating guys in there on how to be advocates to their families, to run a phone-banking campaign through the incarcerated and their families,” Jeter, who is formerly incarcerated and whose organization is working toward full enfranchisement for all people in Connecticut with felony convictions, told Bolts. He added that his coalition now sends about 400 emails into the state prison system every day.

“We’re having conversations with people that we would otherwise have no access to,” Jeter said.

In this way, Tylek said, the movement to make communications free is already building on itself.

“We plan to get people from talking about prison telecom to talking about how we get into financial services or food or health care or commissary. Talking about telecom has allowed us to talk about exploitation more broadly,” she said.

For now, in Massachusetts, those most closely affected by the big business of calling home are hoping for financial relief and also closer connection to their loved ones behind bars. Research has consistently shown that maintaining close ties with family and friends is critical not only in improving outcomes for people while incarcerated, but also in giving those people a better shot at success once released.

Fonseca says she calls the prison about five times a day to talk with her partner in hopes that he feels connected to home. “For him and for anyone incarcerated, we know that when people feel incorporated still to their family and friends, they’ll do better when they’re in there and they’ll do better when they come out,” she said. “It’s about him knowing he’s supported, that sacrifices are being made for him, because he’s worth that.”

Joanna Levesque has also been stretching her budget to keep in touch with her partner, who is incarcerated in a prison in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. “It’s amazing what the consistency of having someone to talk to does for someone’s mental health,” Levesque said. “Nobody wants to be alone.” 

“It makes little sense to me that the cost of phone calls for inmates is so insanely high when the vast majority of us are indigent,” Levesque’s partner, Christopher O’Connor, told Bolts by email. “I often feel so bad for being a financial burden to my friends and family.”

Levesque says she hopes free calls allow them to remain close and also enable her to live more comfortably, including by eating breakfast and lunch more often. At the moment, she told Bolts, she works multiple jobs and prioritizes communication with her O’Connor over her own wellbeing—which, she says, means long stretches of fasting.

“I am so beyond excited,” she said.

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Most sheriffs in the state are still longtime cops. But this year there are several candidates running without a police background, and some are proposing a different approach to the job and arguing for better treatment and care of incarcerated people and their families. 

Virginia Leigh, a social worker who is challenging incumbent Essex County Sheriff Kevin Coppinger in the Sept. 6 primary, told Bolts she would try to make the county jails into “clinical, trauma-informed” spaces, where family contact is free and happens more often. She has worked closely with incarcerated people in both Massachusetts and Mexico.

The Essex sheriff “is responsible for prisoners’ care, treatment, well-being, rehabilitation and ultimately successful re-entry into the community,” said Leigh, who seeks to run one of the state’s largest jails. “This is human services work.” 

Some states require their sheriffs to have backgrounds in law enforcement, which boxes out candidates who may want to take over the office from outsiders. This has been an impediment to reform in California, advocates have argued. 

But even where statute allows greater candidate pools, as a general rule, non-cops don’t win these seats.

Out of some 3,300 sheriffs in the U.S., “you could probably count on two hands” those without law enforcement experience,” said Max Rose, executive director of Sheriffs for Trusting Communities, an organization fighting jail expansion and racist, anti-immigrant policies within sheriff departments. 

“The status quo of the sheriff, as we see with a lot of sheriffs in Massachusetts, is regressive and incompetent, and uses their power at the legislature to fight things like free phone calls” to and from people in jail, Rose said. 

Massachusetts has for years debated whether to make phone calls free, amid a body of research showing that restricting phone contact—a service that, in many parts of the country, currently produces revenue for profit-driven telecommunications companies and kickbacks for government agencies—inhibits successful re-entry to free society after jail and prison. 

These calls are now capped at 14 cents per minute in Massachusetts, which adds up; one woman told the Boston radio station WGBH that she works three jobs and spends $300 a month on phone calls to her incarcerated husband. She said her family has “cut back” on calls to limit spending.

The latest legislative effort to fund free calls from prisons and jails fizzled in July at the end of this year’s session. Some sheriffs raised concerns about the costs of the proposals.

Leigh said that as sheriff she would not wait on lawmakers to make phone calls free.

“If you have somebody who has major mental illness and you look at what one of the most important factors is in determining whether that person is able to live a full and successful life … it’s whether or not that person has family in their life,” she told Bolts.

Leigh noted that her incumbent opponent, Coppinger, accepts campaign donations from representatives of Securus Technologies, the company that provides and profits off of these calls in her county and many others. A recent report by the nonprofit Common Cause documents the contributions by Securus representatives to multiple state sheriffs. (Coppinger did not respond to multiple interview requests for this story.)

Coppinger, a Democrat like Leigh and most elected officials in Massachusetts, has been slow to modernize his office. He initially resisted medication-assisted treatment (MAT) for people incarcerated in his jail, until he was sued for denying it and a judge forced him to allow methadone for a man serving a minor sentence. In his re-election campaign, Coppinger now praises the treatment option a court forced him to permit. 

Leigh says her priority in office would be to improve rehabilitation efforts, promising to dramatically increase treatment, educational and professional programming options inside the jails. She also wants to strengthen support for people who’ve already re-entered free society after being incarcerated in Essex County. 

Massachusetts reformers in recent years have pushed to repeal a state statute that enables courts to involuntarily detain people in a jail or prison to receive substance use treatment, making the case that incarceration is harmful to public health. Leigh agrees with harm-reduction experts who say treatment should be free and widely available in communities, not something to be accessed once a person has been locked up. But she also said she has to work with the system that exists. 

“I’m a social worker, so my training is to not try to force a system to be something that it’s not,” Leigh told Bolts. “My clinical training tells me I need to meet people where they are.” 

Jail can be a dangerous place for someone struggling through withdrawal, with some dying while receiving little medical care. A jail or prison stint can also carry a higher risk of overdose upon release because of lowered opioid tolerance.

Caitlin Sepeda, a nurse with many years of experience working in jails, is challenging incumbent Hampshire County Sheriff Patrick Cahillane in Tuesday’s Democratic primary. She says that local lockups need to revolve around treatment so long as they continue to be a dumping ground for sick and vulnerable people. She pointed to state data showing that 60 percent of the more than 100 people incarcerated in Hampshire County receive a substance use diagnosis. Nearly half are diagnosed by the jail as having severe mental illness; 70 percent self-report severe mental illness.

“Those are not law enforcement issues,” Sepeda told Bolts, “Those are nursing issues. Those are social service issues.”

Sepeda also argued that in addition to comprehensive health care, people locked up in Hampshire County need greater connection to the outside world. That means modernized vocational and educational options to better position people for employment after incarceration, which she says are currently lacking at the jail. 

Also running in Hampshire County’s Democratic primary is Yvonne Gittolson, who worked as education coordinator in the local jail until last year, and is now proposing to reinforce educational programs to facilitate re-entry. No Republican is running for sheriff in either Essex or Hampshire, so the Democratic primaries on Tuesday are virtually certain to decide the next sheriff.

Anyone in the state trying to unseat an incumbent sheriff this year faces steep odds in part because of how little attention people pay to the office. Eighty-three percent of respondents couldn’t name their sheriff in a poll conducted by Beacon Research and released by the ACLU of Massachusetts this spring. Ninety percent didn’t know that sheriffs in that state serve six-year terms, and 41 percent didn’t even know that sheriffs are elected in the first place.

“People just aren’t paying attention,” said Laura Rótolo, field director for the ACLU of Massachusetts. “They know very little about the position in general, and even less about the candidates.”

In 2016, the last time the state’s sheriff offices were up for election, only four of the 10 incumbents who sought reelection faced challengers and none lost their seat. State elections data show the average margin of victory for Massachusetts sheriffs in contested races has never been lower than 33 percent in any of the last three major cycles.

But things have changed this year, with eight races contested in either or both the primary election or the general. The uptick in challengers follows protests over law enforcement accountability, Trump-era political activation and, more recently, the state ACLU launching a  “Know Your Sheriff” educational campaign.

Tuesday evening marks the close of the Massachusetts primary, one of the last in the country this year. Five sheriff candidates are women, and, given that all Massachusetts sheriffs and some 98 percent of sheriffs nationwide are men, it would be statistically and historically significant if even one were to win.

Even if this isn’t their year, Leigh and Sepeda hope, at minimum, that the public is starting to wake up to the critical role that sheriffs play. Recent advocacy has also targeted Massachusetts sheriffs’ power in denying ballots to eligible voters in jail and their cooperation with ICE. 

“I think for so long—particularly in Massachusetts, where the sheriff is a long-term position, six-year terms—there’s very little oversight to the job,” Sepeda said. “The sheriff is accountable pretty much only to the voter. And usually the voter doesn’t hear what goes on at the facility and only hears when something is drastically wrong. I’d argue that hearing nothing doesn’t mean everything’s OK.”

The article has been updated with more information about the candidates.

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