Inmates are not permitted access to text messaging through any authorized channel, so if you are receiving texts from your friend inside, it is almost certainly coming from a contraband smartphone that was smuggled into the facility. The contraband phone problem is significant and widespread across correctional facilities nationwide. Smartphones get smuggled in through visits, through corrupt staff, through food deliveries, and through creative methods that facilities work constantly to shut down. Once inside, they circulate and get used for exactly...

Yes, the call still runs through the facility's phone system and the cost comes out of the inmate's account just as it always has. What InmateAid changes is the price of that call. Here is how the system works. Every jail and prison has a single contract with one phone carrier. Securus, GTL, IC Solutions, Telmate, Paytel, Reliance, CityTeleCoin, and more than twenty others compete to win that contract, and once they have it, they are the only option at that...

The prison system never wants to get in the middle of the flow of mail from the US Postal Service. Inmate mail is considered sacred, the facility wants the inmates connected in some way to a loved one or more on the outside - postal mail is the most reliable and least expensive. They are more likely to be good inmates, quietly do their time and not come back. That is why they encourage and promote the flow of mail. Even...

A restraining order creates legal obligations for the person it is issued against, not necessarily for the facility housing them, and that distinction matters for both questions here. On the letter, the facility's mailroom staff have no access to restraining order information and no mechanism to screen incoming mail based on civil protective orders. A letter mailed to an inmate reaches them through the standard mail process regardless of any restraining order that exists between the sender and the recipient. The...

Not automatically, but the odds are stacked in a way that most people outside the system do not fully appreciate until they are inside it. Federal prosecution is not like what you see at the state level. The resources are different, the preparation is different, and the conviction rate reflects both. Federal prosecutors win roughly 97 percent of the cases they bring to trial. That number exists because federal agencies, whether the FBI, DEA, ATF, or any of the others, spend...

A mandatory minimum means exactly what it sounds like. It is a floor on sentencing that the judge is legally required to impose regardless of any mitigating circumstances, personal history, or preference for leniency. When a charge carries a mandatory minimum, the judge loses the discretion they would normally have to craft a sentence based on the individual circumstances of the case. The legislature has effectively made that decision for them by writing the minimum into the statute. A judge who...