NEW YORK, NY May 16, 2005 —A group of inmates' families are traveling to today's MCI shareholders meeting to question executives over the high cost of calls made from New York State prisons.

REPORTER: Currently, a prisoner must place a collect call, which MCI charges three dollars to initiate and sixteen cents a minute from then on. Marianne Rodriguez says when her daughter's father was in prison upstate, her whole family was punished, not just him.

RODRIGUEZ: I could not maintain my car payment, I could not maintain - my daughter was in Catholic school for a number of years -we tried that and it wasn't successful due to the fact that we had to maintain these phone bills for her to have a relationship with her father.

REPORTER: Advocates say the average bill for an inmate's family is about 4-hundred dollars a month.

A bill being considered in Albany would require the lowest bidder provide telephone services to inmates when the current contract with MCI expires next March. MCI has not returned a request for comment.