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Ask a former inmate questions at no charge. The inmate answering has spent considerable time in the federal prison system, state and county jails, and in a prison that was run by the private prison entity CCA.

Ask your question or browse previous questions in response to comments or further questions of members of the InmateAid community.

Subject: Release questions

The typical guideline to follow is that most sentences come with built-in "good-time credits".  This is normally 15% of the total. Assuming this is available to you, 85% of 120 months is 102 months. Then there is halfway house (if available) which might carve another 3-9 months off the sentence. Be mindful that the halfway house is still a form of incarceration but reserved for inmates with no conduct problems or incident reports.  

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Subject: Send inmate mail

He will most likely not get the mail, most institutions will not forward the mail to transferred inmates. If you send us an email to aid@inmateaid.com with the new location, we will make the change in the inmate profile and resend the letter for you at no charge.

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Subject: Inmate phone calls

Yes, but it is limited to the initial booking period and it is not quite the unlimited free call that popular culture suggests. Upon first being taken into custody, inmates are generally entitled to make at least one phone call. The purpose of that call is primarily to contact an attorney or arrange for legal representation, though in practice many people use it to reach a family member who can then help with finding legal help or posting bail.

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Subject: Sentencing questions

This is one of those counterintuitive quirks of the federal sentencing system that most people outside the legal world never hear about. A straight one-year sentence and a sentence of one year and one day sound almost identical but they produce meaningfully different outcomes in terms of actual time served. The difference comes down to how federal good time credits are calculated. Under Bureau of Prisons rules, good time credits apply to any federal sentence that exceeds one

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Subject: Send inmate mail

Inmates who have money on their inmate trust accounts can purchase stamps and envelopes at the weekly commissary. If they do not have money on their books, the prison will provide indigent inmates with all the materials necessary to send out mail to their loved ones. If your inmate writes to you directly, using your address, the cost of the mailing is a 49-cent stamp. Many of our members use the Inmate Response Mail service through InmateAid. Your inmate

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Subject: Family services

Serving legal papers to an inmate is a routine process and prisons are set up to handle it. Here is how it works. Most correctional facilities have a notary public on staff. If your husband is willing to sign a waiver of summons, that waiver can be notarized right there at the facility. He would be called to the administrative offices by the unit secretary to accept service and sign any required documents. You do not need a court

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Subject: Prison violence

It depends on the level of custody the prison where your cousin is headed as the higher security has longer term sentences with inmates who have little to lose when they fight. However, the conduct inside a prison is nothing like what you see on television. But, fights could occur in any level prison or jail if there are conflicts. The same could happen on a street corner, a restaurant or a store. The likelihood of altercations will depend

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Subject: Release questions

Not likely, transfers happen but with such a short out date, we are doubtful that they will move him.

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Subject: General prison questions-terminology

Turning yourself in voluntarily rather than being tracked down and arrested is genuinely meaningful and it is the right thing to have done. Whether it translates into reduced time is a harder question and the honest answer is that the options are limited once the violation has occurred and the warrant has been served. The fact that he contacted his parole officer and made arrangements to surrender rather than waiting to be caught is the strongest argument in his

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Subject: Survive prison

We have answered this questions many ways in previous questions. It depends on what survival means to the specific inmate.  Prison is what you make of it. It can serve as a beneficial learning experience or it can be a living hell. Every inmate has a choice. An inmate can survive prison by simply following prison administration rules and respecting both officers and fellow prisoners. Offenders can make life harder on themselves by refusing to follow the direct orders of

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