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

Sending a postcard or photo through InmateAid is straightforward. Create an account, add your friend as an inmate by entering their name, inmate ID, and facility, and then go to the Letters or Postcards section to upload a photo or write a message. InmateAid handles the printing and mailing from their office in South Florida. The postcard typically reaches the facility within a day or two through the US Postal Service. After that, it goes through the facility mailroom where...

The money on his books is not the issue. The issue is the contact policy at juvenile facilities, and it works very differently from adult jails and prisons. Juvenile correctional facilities restrict communication to immediate family members only. That means parents, siblings, and grandparents. Girlfriends are not included in that category regardless of how serious the relationship is or how long you have been together. It is not personal and it is not about you specifically. It is a blanket policy...

The day to day risk of being actively hunted down is low, but the warrant does not expire and it does not care where she lives. Law enforcement agencies are not going to dispatch marshals across state lines to track down someone for failure to pay fines. The resources required for that kind of active pursuit are reserved for violent offenders and serious fugitives. An unpaid fine warrant, even one classified as a felony, is not going to trigger that response. What...

Once your inmate writes a response and mails it to the InmateAid return address, the letter typically arrives and gets processed within a day or two of InmateAid receiving it. The full round-trip timeline breaks down into two legs. The first is how long it takes your inmate to actually write and mail the response, which depends entirely on them and their access to mail call at the facility. Once they drop the letter, it travels through USPS to InmateAid. Standard...

No, there is no cost to the inmate on either end of the process. When you send a letter, postcard, or photo through InmateAid, the cost is covered on your end when you place the order. The inmate receives the physical mail at no charge to their commissary account. Nothing gets deducted from their books when a letter arrives. On the response side, your inmate writes a letter by hand and mails it back to the InmateAid return address the same way...

What you are thinking about doing matters more than you might realize. Inmates who have outside contact, people who write, who check in, who treat them like human beings worth communicating with, have measurably better outcomes than those who are completely isolated. A letter from someone who has no obligation to write but chose to anyway carries a different kind of weight than almost anything else that comes through mail call. Getting started is straightforward. InmateAid has over two million incarcerated...

The clock starts when he is picked up and taken into custody, not when the paperwork is signed. Signing the revocation papers on Monday set the legal process in motion, but time served does not begin until physical custody begins. The moment law enforcement or transport takes him into custody is day one, and that day counts as a full day regardless of what time it happens. If they pick him up at 11:55 at night, that entire calendar day counts...

By using an InmateAid number, you are lowering the price of the call. You can talk longer for a lot less money. Prisons contract with only one prison phone company to provide outbound inmate calling services for each prison, jail or detention center. The prison phone company has no competition. We don't replace the prison phone company, we are simply providing a number that makes their call price less (based solely on the telephone number). People that come to InmateAid are already...

The correspondence rules are similar for all detention centers (jails, prisons, penitentiaries), the letters may be and probably are read by the Correctional Officers. Unless this offender is on some mail restriction for things you should already know about (terrorist-type charges), mail is considered sacred and they don't censor much. You cannot speak of business issues like moving money around, buying/selling real estate, stocks or bonds. You cannot speak of escape or anything conveying surveillance of the institution. And you...

It is a very good sign, but it is not a guarantee, and understanding the difference matters as you prepare for what comes next. Meeting with reentry staff is a required step in the parole consideration process, not a rubber stamp that parole is coming. What the reentry team is doing is helping build the foundation of his parole application, specifically the release plan. They want to see that he has somewhere stable to go, a realistic path to employment, and...

It can be done, and it has been done. The process runs through the warden's office and requires your fiancée to take the lead on initiating it from the inside. The first step is for her to submit a formal petition to the warden requesting permission to marry while incarcerated. That petition needs to make a genuine case for why the marriage should happen now rather than after release. Wardens are not looking to approve these requests casually, so the petition...