Struggling with mounting prison phone bills, Wright reached out to the DC Prisoners’ Project, a nonprofit organization, to ask for help. So did others. Forte says he spread the word around the CCA, and inmates and their kin compared notes. It became apparent that families were being charged exorbitant phone rates.

"As [the issue] got raised and we found out more about it, we went to other prisoners and family members and said, ‘Is this true? Is this a problem?’" says Elliot Mincberg, senior counsel at the Washington Lawyers’ Committee, a group that absorbed the DC Prisoners’ Project in 2006. A group of inmates and their families coalesced with legal representation from the organization.

"I thought they had dropped it and forgot about it."

Thanks to her tireless work and early involvement, Wright was the group’s figurehead: her name became synonymous with their efforts. In 2000, the group brought a class action suit against inmate phone companies and Corrections Corporation of America, the company that ran the prison where Forte was incarcerated. The suit alleged that the exclusive contracts they’d entered into had unjustly escalated phone prices and in turn violated inmates’ constitutional rights. Wright became the lead petitioner, and the case was styled as Martha Wright, et al vs. Corrections Corporation of America, et al.

But in 2001, the judge hearing the lawsuit decided that the group would have to seek relief with the Federal Communications Commission. After two years of mandated negotiations, the plaintiffs, now known as the Martha Wright petitioners, requested new rules for inmate phones.

The request started a bureaucratic procedure so sluggish it would take years to work itself out. The FCC had no deadline to act, and the petition moved into an evidence-gathering period where it languished for years. The docket grew and grew, but produced little more than paperwork. "I thought they had dropped it and forgot about it," Wright would later tell The Washington Post. So in 2007, the petitioners at the FCC attempted a different tactic.

Rather than tackling the question of exclusive contracts, the group asked the FCC to confront rates with a new set of rules that would cap the cost of cross-state debit calls at 20 cents per minute and collect calls at 25 cents per minute. But the commission showed little interest in pushing the petition forward, and it failed to gain momentum. In the meantime, phone companies and corrections departments across the country argued that a cap would push them off a fiscal cliff. Then, in 2009, President Barack Obama appointed Mignon Clyburn to the FCC.

In March, I traveled to DC to meet with Clyburn at FCC headquarters. Her windows overlooked sterile government buildings, and her desk was covered in documents. In the middle sat the centerpiece of her office: a Motorola DynaTAC cellphone — a hulking, brick-sized relic from the 1980s, gifted to her by its creator, Martin Cooper.

Clyburn first met Forte, who was paroled in the summer of 2012, a decade after Wright had started the process at the FCC. That September, Clyburn invited him and Wright to FCC headquarters for a screening of Middle of Nowhere, a film from Selma director Ava DuVernay that chronicles a woman’s life after her husband is sent to prison.

In 2013, Clyburn was made interim chairwoman of the FCC. For Clyburn, a former publisher of a Charleston newspaper, the rates were a matter of justice — another strike against the poor, whether they were guilty or not.

Though she only held her position for less than six months, she made changing the rates a priority. In a two-to-one vote that year, the commission passed new rules that capped cross-state phone rates: anywhere in the country, one minute on a collect call would cost one quarter. "This all began with one Washington, DC grandmother, Mrs. Martha Wright, who spoke truth to power in 2003, and reminded us that one voice can still spur a movement and drive meaningful change," Clyburn said in a statement on the FCC’s decision. But the phone companies and facility operators wouldn’t accept reduced rates without a fight.