According to a draft regulation from the FCC, the restrictions would save prisoners, their families, friends and attorneys about $386 million.

“It’s no secret that the prisoner communications market has long been plagued by predatory fees and practices,” FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks said in a statement Thursday. “Today’s actions put an end to these abuses.”

Advocates for prisoners and their families praised the decision, saying it ended a “cruel” practice.

“The FCC’s decision is a huge victory for prisoners, their families, and their allies who have fought for decades against the exploitative prison telecom industry,” the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit that opposes mass incarceration, wrote in a published brief.

Opponents expressed concern that the rate cuts could prove costly for telecommunications companies that serve smaller prisons and strain state budgets. FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, who approved the measure, wrote in a statement that he was nevertheless concerned that The ceilings were not high enough to cover some of the security costs for the companies, and there was concern that some companies would stop serving smaller facilities as a result.

The pressure to lower rates began around twenty years ago, when a retired nurse in DC filed a petition asking the FCC to reimburse the costs. Martha Wright-Reed, who died in 2015, wrote that she spending hundreds of dollars a month to call her prisoner grandson, Ulandis Forte. She felt it was wrong that Forte had to pay more than non-prisoners to stay in touch with family, she told The Washington Post in 2012.

“She was right,” FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement celebrating Thursday’s decision. “For those in prison and their loved ones, talking isn’t cheap.”

Rosenworcel added that the price of a single call can be as high as an unlimited monthly subscription for people who are not incarcerated. She also noted that regular contact with family members can also reduce recidivism among prisoners, a finding supported by several studies.

Correctional facilities often have an exclusive agreement with one company, meaning inmates and their families must use that provider no matter how much the company charges. Those companies then share a portion of the revenue with the facilities, known as “site commissions,” which some local officials say helps pay for staff to monitor the calls. The FCC’s vote Thursday also banned most of those payments.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit had struck down similar rate caps in 2017, finding that the FCC had exceeded its authority in implementing them. But the bipartisan Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, signed by President Biden last year, broadened the FCC’s authority to cap call rates, setting the stage for this week’s vote.

In statements supporting the decision, FCC commissioners recounted stories they had heard from relatives of prisoners. One father said he could not afford to call his young children during his first two years in a Colorado prison, one commissioner wrote. An incarcerated mother in Illinois said she took a job cleaning bathrooms so she could collect bars of soap to save money on sanitation and use more of her money to call her children, another commissioner said.

Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), who defended the Martha Wright-Reed Act, applauded the FCC’s decision as one that would “put an end to the predatory status quo.”

“For far too long, too many families have been forced to spend exorbitant amounts of money just to call their incarcerated loved ones, depriving children of the comfort of hearing their parents’ voices and spouses of the ability to say a simple ‘I’m here for you’ to their partners,” Duckworth said in a statement Thursday.

The change at the federal level follows the implementation of several stands laws that drastically reduce the cost of talking to relatives and friends of prisoners, including in Connecticut, California and Colorado.

In Denver, Colorado state Rep. Mandy Lindsay (D) told a state House committee last year that she learned about the high cost of jail phone calls when one of her relatives was incarcerated. Because of the charges, Lindsay testified, “the amount of time we were talking was based on money.”