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

On the grillz question, yes, they come out. Anything that is not a natural part of your body gets surrendered during the intake and booking process before you are assigned to permanent housing. That includes grillz, hair extensions, wigs, toupees, and similar items. The facility holds them with your other personal property, and in most cases you get them back upon release. Permanent grillz that are genuinely fixed to the teeth are a gray area that gets handled on a...

Questions about who else is supporting someone on the inside are natural, especially when you are one of the people investing time, emotion, and money into helping them through their sentence. Incarceration strains every relationship surrounding it, including marriages. Some spouses show up fully and consistently. Others disappear. Many fall somewhere in between, present in some ways and absent in others. There is no single pattern, and what an inmate tells you about their marriage may or may not reflect the...

The process is straightforward and keeps your personal address completely private throughout. Your inmate writes a physical letter and mails it to InmateAid's postal address, which they can get from any outgoing envelope you have sent them through the platform. When the letter arrives at InmateAid, it gets scanned and uploaded directly to your account dashboard. You receive an email notification with a link letting you know there is a letter waiting for you. To read the letter you unlock it for...

The time he already spent in county counts. Every day from his August arrest date forward is credited toward his sentence, so he walked into Oakdale and then Newton with those months already on the board. Iowa operates under a determinate sentencing structure with good time provisions. For most felony sentences, Iowa inmates are eligible to earn good time credits that can reduce the actual time served. The standard in Iowa is that inmates can earn up to 1.2 days of...

In most fundamental ways, prisons are prisons. The basics, the counts, the routine, the boredom, the commissary, the mail system, do not vary dramatically from one facility to the next. The walls are different but the daily rhythm is roughly the same wherever you are. What does vary is who is running the place. Otero is a privately operated facility, and privately managed prisons tend to run tighter than state-operated facilities in some respects. The staff at private prisons are generally...

Homemade cards are increasingly being rejected at facilities across the country, and the reason has nothing to do with the sentiment behind them. Correctional facilities have discovered that hand-made cards and letters have become a delivery method for drugs. The technique involves saturating paper or using ink that has been laced with synthetic drugs. When the paper or dried ink is licked or touched, the drug activates. It sounds extreme but it is real, documented, and widespread enough that facilities have...

Both matter, but if you are asking which one to prioritize when resources are limited, the answer is financial support, and here is the reasoning behind that. Money on the books is tangible. It buys food from commissary that makes the daily reality of being locked up more bearable. It covers phone time so the connection between you stays alive. It pays for hygiene items that the facility provides at the bare minimum. Every dollar on that account is a concrete...

He would have to have a lawyer file the motion with the Clerk of the Court. It would be difficult (but not impossible if he is sharp) to write a motion and mail it to family court. If he does this, you as the opposing party will be notified by mail of the motion and the allotted time to respond. The whole process could take months to accomplish. The judge might be reticent to rule on it until your husband can...