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

Yes. If you know you are heading to jail and do not have family or friends on the outside who can put money on your books, setting up funds for yourself ahead of time is absolutely something you can do and it is smart planning. The process depends on which facility you are going to and which vendor they use for commissary deposits. Most jails and prisons use a third party provider like JPay, GTL, Access Corrections, or TouchPay to handle...

Understanding what counts against the $320 monthly commissary limit at Fort Dix helps families plan funding more effectively and ensures the inmate has access to both the goods and the communication services they need without one cutting into the other. Physical items purchased through the commissary, including electronics like radios and headphones, clothing items like sneakers, food, hygiene products, and other approved goods, all count toward the monthly cap. These purchases are tracked within the commissary system and spending stops once the...

Inmates at FCI Terre Haute receive 300 minutes of phone time per month under standard Bureau of Prisons guidelines. That works out to roughly 10 minutes per day if spread evenly across the month, though in practice most inmates bank their minutes and use them in longer calls rather than short daily check ins. The BOP does offer a holiday bonus during November and December, bumping the monthly allotment up to 400 minutes for those two months. That extra hundred minutes...

All federal inmates get 300 minutes per MONTH, in November and December they allow 400 minutes per month. Your inmate needs to take care in budgeting their time so that they do not use it all up in the first week or so like many new inmates tend to do.  If you are long distance from Terre Haute, we can get you a local number to bring the cost of the call to 6 cents per minute instead of 21 cents...

Visitation denials can be appealed and the decision on whether to grant an exception rests with the warden's office at the facility. The honest assessment of the odds is roughly 50/50, which means the appeal is genuinely worth pursuing but there are no guarantees regardless of how strong your case appears on paper. The strongest appeals are the ones that tell a complete and documented story rather than just arguing that the denial was unfair. In a situation where a felony...

When you have both an InmateAid account and a GTL account set up for phone service, the two work together rather than independently and understanding which one handles what makes the process straightforward. GTL is the phone provider that actually connects the calls. To add minutes or funds for your son to use when calling, that deposit goes into your GTL account at connectnetwork.com. That is where the call credits live and where you go when the balance needs to be...

Fort Dix is one of the largest federal correctional institutions in the country and the math on jobs versus population is a real issue. With close to 5,000 inmates and a limited number of formal UNICOR and facility work assignments available, not everyone is going to have a paying job at any given time. That is just the reality of a facility that size. What happens in practice is that job assignments get prioritized based on several factors, including sentence length,...

Being on probation does not automatically disqualify you from visiting someone held at an immigration detention facility but it does add a layer of complexity that requires careful handling before you show up at the door. ICE detention facilities operated by private contractors like CoreCivic, formerly CCA, run their own visitor approval processes that are separate from the standard state or federal prison visitor screening. Central Arizona Detention Center follows ICE's civil detention standards for visitation rather than the criminal corrections...

No. When an inmate places a call through the prison phone system and you do not answer, the call does not connect to voicemail the way a standard cell phone call would. The system simply registers that the call was not answered and disconnects. Your voicemail greeting does not play and the inmate hears nothing beyond the automated prompts of the prison phone system itself. This means leaving a new phone number in your voicemail greeting as a way to get...

Inmates do not have access to the Internet. They must respond with their own version of a postal letter. Inmates that 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...

Six moves in seven months is not normal institutional movement and the pattern you are describing points toward something specific that happens in the system and does not get talked about much outside of it. When an inmate has multiple charges pending in different counties, some movement between facilities is expected for court appearances and arraignments. Each jurisdiction needs the person physically present for certain proceedings and transport between county jails to accommodate those appearances is a legitimate part of the...