How does the phone work

There are over 18,000 prisons and jails and about 25 separate phone carriers that contract with individual facilities. In almost every case, there is a wide price variance depending on your location. In federal prison, the rates are six cents per minute for a local number, 21 cents per minute for a long-distance call. Any local number will help a federal inmate save money. We issue the local line, they give it to the inmate who has to initiate the call. The inmate is debited from their account based on the minutes used. The provisioned number forwards seamlessly to the customer's cell phone. In many other cases (state prison and county jail), the in-state number is more expensive than an out-of-state number. We have an algorithm that tells our software system what number is the lowest priced. We use all of the carrier's own rate calculators to determine if we issue a line or not. As an example, here is a link to the Securus' Rate Calculator(https://securustech.online/#/rate-quote) which contains the pricing data to find out their lowest rates.