Parenting From Prison in Massachusetts

Parenting From Prison in Massachusetts

On December 1, 2023, Massachusetts made phone calls from its state prisons free. Not reduced. Not capped at a certain number of minutes per month. Free, with no limit on how many calls can be made. The legislation signed by Governor Maura Healey extended that zero-cost policy across all 14 Massachusetts DOC facilities and the county Houses of Correction as well.

That is the headline for Massachusetts, and it is worth sitting with for a moment before moving to how the system works. Because the significance of free calls is not just financial, though it is financial too. It is the removal of the calculation that every incarcerated parent in a paying-call state has to run before picking up the phone: can I afford this call today? In Massachusetts, that calculation is gone. The call is there. You can make it. Every day if you want.

The question that replaced it is the one this guide is actually about: what are you going to say?

What Free Calls Actually Changed

Before December 2023, phone calls from Massachusetts state prisons cost money the way they do in most states. The incarcerated person or the family receiving the call paid per minute, and for families already stretched by the financial weight of incarceration, the cost of regular calls was a real barrier to staying connected.

The no-cost call program removed that barrier. The call procedures remain the same under 103 CMR 482.00, Massachusetts's Telephone Access and Use regulation. Calls are still recorded and monitored except for attorney calls. Three-way calls and conference calls are still prohibited, and the system disconnects automatically if an attempt is made. No calls are made to the facility from outside. But the cost: zero. The number of calls: no cap.

For a parent with multiple children, this is transformative. You are no longer rationing calls based on the account balance. You can call your eight-year-old on Tuesday evening, your teenager on Wednesday after school, and your youngest on Thursday morning if the schedule allows. The constraint is the telephone window and access to the phone within the facility, not the cost per minute. Work within those constraints and use the access you have.

The Phone Call in Massachusetts: How to Use Unlimited Access Well

Free access does not automatically create good parenting by phone. A parent who has unlimited calls but spends each one venting about their situation, running through logistics, or fighting with the co-parent is not better connected to their children than a parent in a paying state who made every minute deliberate. The tool got better. The skill still has to develop.

The skill of the phone call to your child looks like this: before you dial, you know which child this call is for and what you are going to ask them. Not how is school in general. Something specific. The name of the project that was due. The friend situation that was unsettled last week. The thing they mentioned in the last conversation that you have been turning over since. That specificity tells the child immediately that this call was prepared for them, that their parent has been paying attention between calls.

With no cap on calls, you can afford to call each child separately. Not one call that gets divided among three children where each gets four minutes and nobody feels like they had enough. One call per child, per day or per week depending on what the schedule supports. A focused call that belongs entirely to one child does more for them than a longer call split five ways.

End every call with I love you. Every single one, whether the call lasted five minutes or fifteen, whether it went well or it got stuck on something hard. The consistency of that close matters more than almost anything else about the call.

Platform Setup: Securus and What Your Family Still Needs to Do

The calls are free, but your family still needs to be set up in the system to receive them. Massachusetts DOC uses Securus Technologies as the platform provider for phone calls and video visits. Your family should create a Securus AdvanceConnect prepaid account, which is the standard setup even for facilities with no-cost calls, because it verifies the phone number and registers the family member in the system.

For video visits, which are not covered by the no-cost call legislation in the same way, Securus handles scheduling and billing. Video visits remain a paid service. If your family wants to video visit, they set up through Securus and fund the account for that service.

For phone calls: the free calls go through the same Securus system but do not charge. The account still needs to exist to receive the call. Make sure your family does not skip the setup step because they assume "free" means "no account required." The account is the door. The free calls go through the door.

County Houses of Correction: Massachusetts's Dual System

Massachusetts has 14 counties, each with its own sheriff-run House of Correction. The no-cost call legislation extended to county facilities as well, which means a parent in the Middlesex County House of Correction or the Suffolk County House of Correction also benefits from zero-cost calls. County facilities use various vendors, including Securus and GTL depending on the county's contract.

The county jail system in Massachusetts is where pretrial defendants and people serving sentences of up to two and a half years are housed. For parents who are serving shorter sentences or are awaiting trial, the county system is where the parenting window exists. The no-cost calls at the county level are genuinely valuable for this population, and the same principle applies: use the access to build the daily rhythm of contact with your children.

Confirm which vendor your county facility uses. Even with free state calls mandated by law, the specific setup at each county House of Correction may differ. The sheriff's office administers the facility, and families should contact the specific facility to confirm the current phone setup and scheduling.

Visitation in Massachusetts: Close and Usually Reachable

Massachusetts is a small, dense state. Most of its major correctional facilities are within a reasonable drive of the Boston metropolitan area. MCI-Norfolk is in Norfolk, about 30 miles southwest of Boston. MCI-Shirley is in Shirley, about 45 miles northwest. Souza-Baranowski is in Shirley as well. MCI-Cedar Junction is in Walpole, about 25 miles southwest of the city. MCI-Framingham, the women's facility, is 25 miles west.

For families in eastern Massachusetts, the visit is usually possible. The barrier is not distance. It is the administrative process, the scheduling, and the sustained decision to make the trip.

Visiting requires being on the pre-approved visitor list. The visitor application is downloaded from the specific facility's page, filled out, and submitted. Photo ID is required at the time of the visit. Facility-specific hours govern when visits happen. Contact the facility directly at 508-422-3300 (MADOC HQ) for general information, and check the specific facility page for current visiting schedules.

For families in western Massachusetts, the drive to the state's facilities adds time, and the county House of Correction may be closer. For those families, the county system may be the primary contact point for visits alongside the no-cost phone calls.

What a Free Call Still Cannot Do

The phone call, even a free one, is not everything. It is a voice. It is real-time. It is yours. But there are things it cannot do that the letter can.

The letter is an object. It arrives in the mail with your handwriting on the envelope and your handwriting on the pages. For a child, especially a younger child, a letter is proof that a human being sat down and addressed the day around them. The drawings you include are yours. The questions you ask are thought through over time, not improvised in a 10-minute window. The letter can say the thing that the phone call got too busy to say.

Write to each child separately. One letter per child, their name at the top, their world inside it. Ask the question that only a parent who has been paying attention would know to ask. Give them something to respond to. The child who writes back is in a relationship with their parent, not just a recipient of contact, and a relationship carries across distance and time in ways that the call alone does not.

For young children who cannot yet write well on their own, ask the caregiver to read the letter aloud and help the child dictate or draw a reply. The correspondence does not require perfect literacy. It requires the habit of engagement, and that habit can be established early and kept alive through the whole of a sentence.

School in Massachusetts: Where the Contact Lands

Massachusetts has a dense and competitive school culture, particularly in the suburban districts around Boston and the major cities. Children are often under real academic pressure from middle school onward, and an incarcerated parent who acknowledges that pressure specifically is doing something that a parent who asks generic questions about school is not.

Ask by name. Ask about the teacher. Ask about the subject. Ask what the next deadline is and whether they are prepared for it. Ask what they wish they understood better and offer to think through it with them in a letter. That offer, coming through a free phone call, is a gift that no financial barrier prevents you from making anymore.

If the co-parent or caregiver is willing to share progress reports and notes home, ask them to. The parent who references a specific grade or a specific teacher in a letter is a parent whose child feels seen in a specific way, and that specificity is what makes parenting feel like parenting rather than correspondence from a distance.

The Tablet-Based Tool and Reentry Planning

Massachusetts DOC has deployed a tablet-based tool that helps incarcerated individuals track release timelines and prepare for reentry, per an announcement on the mass.gov DOC page. For parents who are approaching a release date, this tool is also a parenting tool: knowing your timeline with precision allows you to communicate it to your children in concrete terms rather than vague ones.

A child who knows "Dad gets out in eight months" is managing a different emotional reality than a child who knows only that it is "someday." Concrete timelines are not always possible to give, because legal and administrative realities change. But when you have access to accurate information about your own timeline, sharing it with your children in age-appropriate terms is a form of parenting that preparation makes possible.

For the Family Holding Massachusetts Together

Massachusetts removed the financial barrier to phone calls. What remains is the human work of using the access well.

Keep the Securus account active even for free-call facilities, because the account is how the call reaches you. Register as an approved visitor at the facility. Make the drive when you can. Read the letters when they arrive, and when they arrive for your child, read them aloud if the child cannot yet read well on their own.

And hold the line on keeping the incarcerated parent present in the children's lives without making every call or visit an occasion for adult pain to fill the room. The free call is a gift the state of Massachusetts gave this family. The human decision to use it well, to hand the child the phone, to let the call happen without editorial comment about the situation that created it, is the gift the caregiver gives. Both are necessary. Neither is sufficient without the other.

Federal Prison in Massachusetts: Devens

The federal complex at Devens in north-central Massachusetts includes a Federal Medical Center and a Federal Correctional Institution. Devens is about 35 miles northwest of Boston. If you are in federal custody at Devens or assigned to another BOP facility, the national BOP standard applies.

**Phone.** Three hundred minutes per month, each call capped at 15 minutes at $0.06 per minute under the FCC's 2025 rate caps, plus 100 additional minutes in November and December. Unlike Massachusetts state facilities, federal calls are not free. The contrast with state free calls is real. Every federal minute costs money. Make each call count: one child, one real question, I love you at the end.

**TRULINCS and CorrLinks.** The BOP email platform costs $0.05 per minute to compose on your end and is free for the family. Up to 30 approved contacts, text only, no attachments. Use it for the things the 15-minute call could not hold: the school check-in, the letter to your teenager, the message that needed three days to get the right words.

FAQ

**Are phone calls from Massachusetts state prisons really free?** Yes. Since December 1, 2023, all phone calls from Massachusetts DOC facilities are free of charge, with no cap on the number of calls. The legislation signed by Governor Healey extended no-cost calls to both state DOC facilities and county Houses of Correction. Calls are still recorded and monitored, and the Securus account setup is still required to receive them.

**How does my family set up to receive free calls?** Massachusetts DOC uses Securus Technologies as its phone platform. Your family creates a Securus AdvanceConnect prepaid account even for free-call facilities, because the account registration is what allows the call to be received. The calls themselves will not be charged, but the account must exist.

**Do the free calls apply at county jails in Massachusetts?** Yes. The no-cost call legislation applies to county Houses of Correction as well as state DOC facilities. Each county facility implements the law through its own contracted vendor. Confirm the specific setup and vendor with your county House of Correction directly.

**How does visitation work in Massachusetts state prisons?** You must be on the pre-approved visitor list. Visitor applications are downloaded from the specific facility's page, filled out, and submitted. Photo ID is required at the time of the visit. Hours and scheduling vary by facility. Contact the facility directly or visit mass.gov/corrections for current information.

**Can I use video visits from Massachusetts state prisons?** Yes. Video visits run through Securus Technologies and are a paid service separate from the no-cost phone call program. Your family sets up a Securus account and funds it for video visits. Contact the specific facility for current video visit scheduling and availability.

**What is the federal situation at Devens?** Federal inmates at Devens FMC/FCI are subject to BOP rules: 300 phone minutes per month with 15-minute call caps at $0.06 per minute, plus TRULINCS email through CorrLinks at $0.05 per minute on the inmate's end, free for families, up to 30 approved contacts and text only. Federal calls are not free.

**What is the Massachusetts no-cost call political situation?** As of December 2025, a group of Republican lawmakers and county sheriffs requested an investigation into the program's costs. The Massachusetts Department of Correction has stated that no-cost calls are essential to the rehabilitation process. The program remains in effect. Check mass.gov/corrections for current status if reading this near or after mid-2026.