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

Refusing to take a urine test in an Arizona state prison is treated as disobeying a direct order, which makes it a major violation. The classification is intentional. Without the ability to enforce orders, staff lose control of the facility, so the punishment is designed to be severe enough to discourage anyone else from trying the same thing. The first consequence is placement in Disciplinary Segregation, which goes by several names: the SHU, the Special Housing Unit, solitary confinement, or just...

Inmates in hurricane areas are transported days ahead of the storm making landfall. In my case, we were in a federal camp in Miami FL when a couple hurricanes hit Dade County. They loaded all the inmates onto buses (shackled) and driven to downtown Miami where the Federal Detention Center is. This is a tall structure in the middle of all the government buildings. It is more like a skyscraper for inmates which can and did withstand several major storms...

Yes. The Fire Camps are minimum security facilities within the CDCR, the California state prison system. The inmates are absolutely allowed to make phone calls seven days per week. These inmates actually serve the counties that they are in by fighting fires and providing selfless forestry safety. They are trusted to be in the public domain while serving their sentence. Their model behavior is awarded by receiving all the privileges afforded inmates. The phone service is Global*Tel Link-Offender Connect. The calls...

Restricted housing is solitary confinement, known inside as the hole. It means he was cited for a rule violation and pulled out of general population as a disciplinary measure. The facility is not going to tell you much beyond confirming he is there, which is frustrating, but it is standard. How long it lasts depends entirely on what he did. There is no universal cap on restricted housing time. Some inmates serve a few days for minor infractions. Others spend weeks...

Inmates are not permitted access to text messaging through any authorized channel, so if you are receiving texts from your friend inside, it is almost certainly coming from a contraband smartphone that was smuggled into the facility. The contraband phone problem is significant and widespread across correctional facilities nationwide. Smartphones get smuggled in through visits, through corrupt staff, through food deliveries, and through creative methods that facilities work constantly to shut down. Once inside, they circulate and get used for exactly...

Yes, the call still runs through the facility's phone system and the cost comes out of the inmate's account just as it always has. What InmateAid changes is the price of that call. Here is how the system works. Every jail and prison has a single contract with one phone carrier. Securus, GTL, IC Solutions, Telmate, Paytel, Reliance, CityTeleCoin, and more than twenty others compete to win that contract, and once they have it, they are the only option at that...

The prison system never wants to get in the middle of the flow of mail from the US Postal Service. Inmate mail is considered sacred, the facility wants the inmates connected in some way to a loved one or more on the outside - postal mail is the most reliable and least expensive. They are more likely to be good inmates, quietly do their time and not come back. That is why they encourage and promote the flow of mail. Even...

A restraining order creates legal obligations for the person it is issued against, not necessarily for the facility housing them, and that distinction matters for both questions here. On the letter, the facility's mailroom staff have no access to restraining order information and no mechanism to screen incoming mail based on civil protective orders. A letter mailed to an inmate reaches them through the standard mail process regardless of any restraining order that exists between the sender and the recipient. The...

Not automatically, but the odds are stacked in a way that most people outside the system do not fully appreciate until they are inside it. Federal prosecution is not like what you see at the state level. The resources are different, the preparation is different, and the conviction rate reflects both. Federal prosecutors win roughly 97 percent of the cases they bring to trial. That number exists because federal agencies, whether the FBI, DEA, ATF, or any of the others, spend...