It depends on where the letter was addressed when you sent it. If you sent the letter to the facility your inmate was leaving, it may not follow him. Facilities do not reliably forward mail to a transferring inmate's new location, and there is no postal forwarding system in place the way there would be for a regular home address change. Mail sent to the old facility after an inmate has been transferred often gets returned to sender.

Subscriptions do not automatically forward when an inmate is transferred. The postal system and the prison mail room are two separate things, and neither one is responsible for tracking down a subscriber who has moved facilities. Here is what typically happens: if your friend is transferred within the same state prison system, some mail will follow for a short window while the forwarding order is active. But that window is short, inconsistent, and not guaranteed for publications. Magazines and

Prison politics are real, but how much they affect your loved one depends heavily on a few specific factors: the custody level of the facility, whether it is state or federal, the nature of the charges, and the individual's age and background. The higher the security level, the more pronounced the group dynamics tend to be. At a maximum security state prison, racial and geographic groupings carry genuine weight and can affect where someone sits, who they associate with,

When you send a letter through InmateAid, we handle the printing and mailing on your end. Your letter is printed, properly addressed, and sent directly to the US Postal Service, which delivers it to the facility's mail room just like any other piece of mail. From there, staff opens and inspects it for contraband before it reaches mail call and gets handed to your inmate. The reply process is straightforward and works the same way regular mail always has.

It is a reasonable thing to want. Someone heading into jail or prison for the first time is walking into an environment with its own rules, culture, and unwritten codes, and getting it wrong in the first few weeks can create problems that follow an inmate for their entire sentence. The honest answer is that most books on this topic are not very good. The ones that do exist tend to be dated, and many carry a tone of

Your fiancé does not need any money on his books to receive what you sent. There is no charge to the inmate for incoming mail. When you send a letter or photos through InmateAid, you pay for the service on your end. That covers the printing, any attachments, and the postage to get it to the facility. Once it arrives, it goes through the mail room the same way any other piece of mail does, staff inspects it, and

A court-appointed investigator is a legal right, not a service you purchase. It falls under the same constitutional framework as the right to a public defender. If your son cannot afford to hire a private investigator to assist with his defense, the court can appoint one at no cost. The catch is that this right is rarely volunteered by the system. You have to ask for it. The process starts with a petition to the court. Your son's attorney

Your number does not expire just because it took a while to get approved at the facility. Once your account is active and in good standing, the number stays live on a monthly billing cycle regardless of whether your inmate has started using it yet. Facility approval can take time. Some jails and prisons process new numbers quickly, others take weeks, and in some cases the inmate has to submit the number through the proper channels and wait for

The difference lies in the type of prison and an inmate's custody level. USP is  United States Penitentiary and is a high level of custody; FCI is Federal Correctional Institution which is reserved for medium and low security; and finally FPC is Federal Prison Camp which is the minimum level where there are no fences and allow work detail and liberal movement.  There is no commissary "number", simply use their inmate number which would be formatted like this: xxxxx-xxx.

There are many good bits of advice shared on InmateAid, this is especially helpful as we have so many Arizona State Prison inmates using this service - with Securus charging families $7-8 just to deposit money, this is a great way to eliminate that extra charge from the cost of talking to your inmate. Use the ASPC calling cards which are in $10 increments - the calls cost only $1.84 each and there are no limits to the amount of