Ask The Inmate. Real answers from people who've been there.

The cost is closer than most people expect. When you send mail yourself, the expense includes the stamp, envelope, paper, and any printing costs for photos. By the time you add up supplies, the per-letter cost is not dramatically lower than what a service charges, and that math does not account for your time in assembling, printing, and mailing everything. The real reason people use InmateAid when they could just as easily send mail themselves is privacy. When you send a...

Happiness is not a switch that flips on release day. It is something that gets rebuilt piece by piece, and it looks different than it did before. The expectation that everything immediately returns to normal is one of the most common and painful traps people fall into after release. It does not work that way, for the person coming home or for the people who waited. What does work is focusing on the things you can control. A routine, a purpose,...

The money you put on your account covers the letters you send to him, not the other way around. For him to write back, all he needs is a postage stamp on his end. He writes a physical letter, addresses it to InmateAid's office in Florida, and mails it the old-fashioned way. That stamp is the only cost on his side. When his letter arrives at InmateAid's office, it gets scanned and posted to your account dashboard. You retrieve it for...

The career criminal label under the law is not based on danger level or whether rehabilitation was ever offered. It is purely mechanical. Three felony convictions trigger the designation regardless of the nature of those felonies, the person's character, or what opportunities they were or were not given inside. The law counts convictions, not context. That is the frustrating reality of how three strikes statutes and career criminal enhancements work. A person who committed three non-violent drug offenses and never had...

A hundred dollars a month is a meaningful and generous contribution. It will cover a solid range of commissary basics, phone time, postage for letters, and small personal items without leaving him feeling like he has to ration everything. For most facilities, that amount lands comfortably in the range of what allows an inmate to stay connected, reasonably supplied, and not dependent on others for basic needs. Whether it is enough or too much really depends on the facility's commissary prices,...

You can try, and the fact that you are willing to is meaningful. But the honest answer is that if he does not want help, there is very little you or anyone else can do to make treatment happen. Mental health treatment in the prison system, like outside of it, requires the person to voluntarily engage. Someone who is not ready to acknowledge they need help or does not want to participate cannot be forced into a treatment program in...

n most cases, sex offenders are neither placed in standard general population nor in traditional protective custody. Virginia, like most state systems, typically houses sex offenders in dedicated special housing units alongside other inmates with similar charges. This serves a dual purpose: it protects them from the hostility they would face in general population, where sex offenders are consistently at the bottom of the inmate social hierarchy, and it addresses the management challenges that come with mixing them into the...

The magazine subscriptions come directly from the publisher, a rule set by the prisons and jails. Depending on the individual publisher the first issue arrives in about 8-12 weeks and then is repeated month after month until the total amount of issues are delivered. This is similar to any magazine subscription for anyone that takes a subscription postcard from a magazine and mails it to the publisher. If you are still in the "delivery window", have no fear InmateAid has been...