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

Sending shoes from the outside directly to an inmate is rarely permitted. Most facilities, particularly federal prisons, do not allow personal footwear to be mailed or brought in by family. The security and contraband concerns around outside packages are tight, and shoes are rarely on the approved items list. The good news is that size 17 is carriable through the federal commissary system. The Bureau of Prisons commissary stocks larger sizes specifically because the inmate population includes people who cannot be...

A 214 number is a Dallas area code, and Wilmer sits just south of Dallas in Dallas County, so it feels like the logical choice. Local should mean cheaper. In the prison phone world, that assumption will cost you money. With Securus, which holds contracts across Texas facilities, including Dallas County, all in-state numbers are actually more expensive than out-of-state numbers. That is not a typo. It runs counter to everything you would expect, but it is how Securus structures its...

It is not common but it happens, and understanding how requires knowing what actually goes into a sentencing decision beyond the statutory maximum for the charged offense. In Florida and most other states, the statutory maximum for a specific charge sets a ceiling for that individual count. But defendants are rarely sentenced on a single count in isolation. Multiple charges can be stacked, each carrying its own sentence, and those sentences can run consecutively rather than concurrently. Two consecutive life sentences...

The confusion is understandable because there are a lot of services competing for your attention, and not all of them are straightforward about what they actually do. Here is how to think about it. GTL, now rebranded as Viapath, is the phone carrier contracted to your husband's facility. If GTL holds that contract, every call he makes goes through their system regardless of what number he dials. You cannot replace GTL. What you can do is change the number he dials...

Life without parole, without hesitation. The death penalty means the state controls the end of your life, and the timeline is out of your hands. Executions in the United States are rarely swift. The average time spent on death row is well over fifteen years, with many inmates waiting two decades or more through appeals, stays, and legal proceedings. That is fifteen to twenty years of living under a specific kind of psychological weight that is different from any other sentence....

Yes, and this is one of the less talked-about benefits of the service. When an inmate makes calls through the facility's phone carrier, every number they dial has to be submitted and approved in advance. That approval process requires the person on the outside to register their phone number with the carrier, which means your name, number, and in some cases your address go into that system. For people on a family plan, a work phone, or any situation where the...

The honest answer is that the provider matters less than the number, and the number matters because of how the BOP prices calls. Local calls in the federal system run $0.06 per minute. Long-distance calls run $0.21 per minute. That $0.15 per minute difference is where the money goes, and if your inmate is on the phone regularly, it goes fast. Three hundred minutes at long-distance rates costs $63. Three hundred minutes at the local rate costs $18. Same conversations, same...

InmateAid cannot disclose who created a specific inmate profile, and that policy applies without exception regardless of the circumstances. Inmate profiles on InmateAid come from two sources. The first is the platform's automated database, which pulls publicly available inmate information from correctional systems across the country and incorporates it into the site. The second is individual users who create profiles manually when setting up their accounts to send letters, photos, or other services. Because inmate information is drawn from public records, anyone...