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That’s one reason why the is worth celebrating. The law, sponsored by Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., and co-sponsored by former Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, gave authority to the Federal Communications Commission to set rate caps for phone calls that prison inmates make or receive from relatives and other people.

The companies that control those phone calls — such as — have historically made massive profits off the multibillion-dollar privatization of prison services. Martha Wright-Reed was a blind grandmother who couldn’t write letters or visit her grandson thousands of miles away in a federal prison. She fought for a decade to reduce the fees charged for people to connect with loved ones in prison.

It’s a public safety issue, Wright-Reed argued. Lawmakers in both parties agreed, realizing that taking away vital connections, and exacerbating the financial hardships of prisoners and their families, would increase recidivism and make communities less safe.

In 2023, the bill passed in the Senate with unanimous consent, meaning not a single senator opposed it — not even Missouri Republicans Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt — who oppose nearly everything that has passed during the Biden administration. The bill similarly passed the House with a voice vote, with no official opposition. A unanimous FCC, including the two members appointed by former President Donald Trump, issued a rule earlier this year to lower the costs of prison phone calls, in accordance with the authority granted to it by Congress.

So why is Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey trying to block the implementation of the law?

Last week, Bailey and 15 other Republican attorneys general in the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals to block the rule by the FCC, which determined it would save families more than $380 million annually. In a social media tweet, Bailey called the lawsuit a matter of “public safety.” He and his fellow attorneys general argue that corrections departments would be less equipped to do their jobs because the technology companies sometimes share phone-call revenue with government agencies.

The issue does involve public safety, Duckworth says. But the lawsuit actually threatens to reduce safety, not enhance it.

“I’m disappointed that a small minority of rightwing State Attorneys General are seeking to sabotage our bipartisan progress toward lowering costs and reducing recidivism,” Duckworth said in an emailed statement.

The new rules would “end an unjust and unreasonable status quo that has forced American families to pay outrageous amounts to remain in contact with incarcerated loved ones,” she added.

There’s a reason why on both sides of the political aisle supported Duckworth’s bill and the FCC’s follow-up action. It serves no public safety purpose to allow massive corporations, owned by private equity firms, to profit on the backs of incarcerated people and their families. Among the conservative groups that endorsed Duckworth’s bill and understand this concept? Americans for Prosperity, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Right on Crime and the American Conservative Union.

For Bailey, who faces Democrat Elad Gross in the November election, this is business as usual. He spends a lot of time working to make the people in Missouri prisons poorer than they already are, even using an outdated law to seize their assets, often right before they are scheduled to be released into the community. The law, called the Missouri Incarceration Reimbursement Act, was passed during the “tough-on-crime” decade of the 1980s, at a time when Democrats and Republicans thought taking money from people serving time accomplished a noble purpose.

That narrative has changed in both parties, as conservative groups are now working with the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP, among others, to decrease fines and fees and various other costs in the criminal justice system. The goal is to erase financial penalties that serve corporations or governments, not the cause of public safety.

Last week, attorney William Mauer of the Institute for Justice published a paper in the Journal of Law & Civil Governance at Texas A&M that to erase financial penalties that have been part of the criminal justice system for decades.

“America’s current system of fines and fees is irrational, counterproductive, and deeply harmful to the concepts of individual liberty and limited government. It harms innumerable people while producing no identifiable benefits to society,” Mauer wrote. “Conservatives who believe that the government should be limited, fair, and rational should strongly and vocally oppose it.”

Bailey and his fellow Republican attorneys general have a choice. They can try to make it more expensive for men and women in prison to talk on the phone to their families, while using government power to worsen those people’s financial straits. Or they can call themselves conservatives.

They can’t do both.