Sending books to an inmate through Amazon is one of the more straightforward ways to get reading material into a facility, but it only works if you follow the facility's specific rules to the letter. Here is how to do it. Go to Amazon and find the book you want to send. At checkout, instead of shipping to your own address, enter the facility's address as the delivery address. The inmate's full legal name and ID number should appear in the...

Sending shoes from the outside directly to an inmate is rarely permitted. Most facilities, particularly federal prisons, do not allow personal footwear to be mailed or brought in by family. The security and contraband concerns around outside packages are tight, and shoes are rarely on the approved items list. The good news is that size 17 is carriable through the federal commissary system. The Bureau of Prisons commissary stocks larger sizes specifically because the inmate population includes people who cannot be...

A 214 number is a Dallas area code, and Wilmer sits just south of Dallas in Dallas County, so it feels like the logical choice. Local should mean cheaper. In the prison phone world, that assumption will cost you money. With Securus, which holds contracts across Texas facilities, including Dallas County, all in-state numbers are actually more expensive than out-of-state numbers. That is not a typo. It runs counter to everything you would expect, but it is how Securus structures its...

It is not common but it happens, and understanding how requires knowing what actually goes into a sentencing decision beyond the statutory maximum for the charged offense. In Florida and most other states, the statutory maximum for a specific charge sets a ceiling for that individual count. But defendants are rarely sentenced on a single count in isolation. Multiple charges can be stacked, each carrying its own sentence, and those sentences can run consecutively rather than concurrently. Two consecutive life sentences...

The confusion is understandable because there are a lot of services competing for your attention, and not all of them are straightforward about what they actually do. Here is how to think about it. GTL, now rebranded as Viapath, is the phone carrier contracted to your husband's facility. If GTL holds that contract, every call he makes goes through their system regardless of what number he dials. You cannot replace GTL. What you can do is change the number he dials...