Monitor, Don’t Block: Georgia’s $50M Phone Fix Is Already Installed

In January 2026, a five-day federal trial established what years of aggressive contraband enforcement had never stopped. Two inmates at Calhoun State Prison — Joey Amour Jackson and Lance Riddle — were convicted of running a nationwide wire fraud operation that stole $464,920 from 119 identified victims across six states. They spoofed police department phone numbers from inside the prison. They threatened women with arrest warrants. They instructed female victims to undress in Target store bathrooms and perform “cavity searches” on camera, then used the recordings to extort them.

Every call was made on contraband cell phones obtained through drones, staff corruption, and a black market that no amount of phone suppression has ever shut down. “I panicked,” one victim told investigators. “They had my information. They knew details about me.” By the time she described her terror to federal agents, nearly a hundred other people had lived through the same script.

Georgia now operates a Managed Access System — MAS — across most of its 34 state prisons, with rollout still ongoing, at a capital cost of $50 million and estimated annual operating and maintenance costs exceeding $15 million on top of that. GDC arrived at Calhoun with MAS around mid-2025, after the worst of these scams had already run their course. But the question is not whether MAS would have stopped them. The question is whether any blocking-first strategy ever could — and the answer, at Calhoun and everywhere else, is no.

This is Part 2 of the GPS investigation into Georgia’s phone crackdown. Read Part 1: “The Crackdown That’s Killing — Georgia’s $50M Phone War Fuels Record Prison Violence”

EXPLAINER

What Is a Managed Access System (MAS)?

A Managed Access System is a network of antenna arrays and signal-processing equipment installed throughout a prison that intercepts every cellular signal within its perimeter. When a phone attempts to connect, MAS captures the device’s unique identifiers — its IMEI (hardware ID) and IMSI (subscriber ID) — and checks them against a whitelist.

Authorized devices (staff phones, approved contractors) are passed through to the commercial carrier. Unrecognized devices are blocked, and their identifiers are logged and submitted to carriers for permanent blacklisting.

MAS is legal under FCC rules and distinct from signal jamming, which is a federal crime. Unlike jammers, MAS must pass through emergency 911 calls. Georgia has contracted MAS installations across most of its 34 state prisons through three vendors: Trace-Tek LLC, CellBlox/Securus, and Hawks Ear Communications, with rollout still underway.

The core limitation: MAS blocks calls it doesn’t recognize. It cannot listen to the calls it does block, and it cannot stop calls that route around it — via VOIP apps, prison WiFi networks, or phones modified to resist MAS detection.

Why Blocking Never Could Have Stopped Calhoun’s Scammers — And Never Will

Calhoun State Prison ranks first among all GDC facilities for contraband arrests — appearing in more GDC press releases than any other prison in Georgia, according to a GPS analysis of 183 GDC press releases. ¹ Despite this, three separate federal criminal operations ran out of its walls in the span of a few years:

Scheme	Status	Victims	Documented Losses
Jury duty / nude photo extortion ring	Convicted January 2026 (five-day federal trial)	119 identified across 6 states	$464,920
Iowa romance fraud operation	Sentenced September 2025	Multiple women in Iowa	$500,000+
Federal agent impersonation scheme	Pleaded guilty, Western District of Washington	Healthcare workers nationwide	Undisclosed

Aggregate documented losses from Calhoun State Prison alone: over $1.5 million. Victims in at least seven states. Three separate federal prosecutions — all built on contraband phones that Calhoun’s aggressive suppression environment never stopped. ^{2 3 4}

MAS arrived at Calhoun around mid-2025, after most of these prosecutions were already in motion. But its arrival would not have changed the outcome. The reason is structural: blocking is only as good as its coverage, and coverage is never complete.

At the same time MAS was rolling out statewide, inmates were routing calls through GDC’s own internal WiFi network — using discovered passwords and VPN tunneling to bypass MAS entirely. ⁵ GDC finally cut off that workaround statewide on January 6, 2026. VOIP applications — which route calls over internet connections rather than cellular bands — remain beyond MAS’s reach regardless. GPS has also received reports that some inmates have modified cell phone firmware to prevent devices from connecting to MAS networks at all; GPS cannot verify this independently, but security researchers confirm it is technically feasible.

This is the fundamental ceiling of prohibition: determined users find alternatives, and the system hears nothing either way. Blocking technology is deaf by design — it cannot hear a scammer threatening a victim, flag dozens of calls to strangers across six states, or detect impersonated law enforcement numbers and payment demands. When MAS blocks a call, the evidence that could have stopped the crime is gone.

Monitoring changes the calculation. When inmates have legal, registered phones, the incentive to pay $1,500 for a drone-delivered contraband device and risk a felony charge collapses. And every call through a registered, monitored device — the vast majority — generates intelligence that blocking never could.

The Hardware Already Has the Answer

Georgia has spent $50 million building a system with a capability it refuses to use.

The Managed Access System works by intercepting every cellular signal within the prison perimeter, capturing the unique hardware and subscriber identifiers — IMEI and IMSI — of every device attempting to connect, checking those identifiers against a whitelist, and routing authorized devices to the commercial carrier while blocking everything else. The system already distinguishes between phones it recognizes and phones it doesn’t. This is not a proposed feature. It is the existing architecture.

Tecore Networks, whose iNAC (Intelligent Network Access Controller) system is deployed across Georgia facilities, states this in their own documentation:

“Pre-authorized device activity is passed on to commercial network(s) by the iNAC solution.” “Authorized devices [are] redirected to the actual commercial network allowing these approved devices to continue to maintain access to their commercial service.”

⁶

GDC already uses this capability every day. Every corrections officer, administrator, and authorized contractor uses their personal phone inside the perimeter — because their device is on the whitelist. The infrastructure that distinguishes “authorized device” from “unauthorized device” is operational at Georgia prisons where MAS has been deployed.

Switching from block-everything to monitor-registered-inmates is not an engineering project. Register inmate phones on the whitelist, route their calls through an AI monitoring layer before passing to the commercial carrier, and continue blocking all unregistered devices exactly as today. The hardware doesn’t change. The policy does. It is a configuration change to infrastructure Georgia has already paid for.

Blocking Gives You a Number. Monitoring Gives You a Criminal Case.

When MAS blocks a call today, Georgia receives: the IMEI of the device, the carrier it attempted to use, the timestamp of the attempt, and the location within the facility. That is the complete intelligence product from a $50 million system. It does not know what was said. It does not know who was called. It cannot distinguish a murder order from a phone call to a dying family member.

AI-monitored communications produce something entirely different.

LEO Technologies — which GDC has contracted for prison phone intelligence — uses machine learning to analyze call content, identify behavioral patterns, and flag criminal activity in real time. ⁷ The documented capabilities of AI monitoring systems like LEO contrast with blocking’s intelligence output at every threat level that concerns Georgia officials:

Threat	How AI Monitoring Detects It	Does Blocking Catch It?
Prison scam operations	Multi-state call patterns, impersonation language, payment demand scripts	No — call blocked; scammer uses VOIP or replacement phone
Hit orders and murder coordination	Threat language, coded kill orders, targeting information in real time	No — call blocked; murder proceeds undetected
Gang coordination across facilities	Social network mapping, coded language, cross-facility call analysis	No — blocking is content-blind
Drug and drone logistics	Keywords, quantities, drop locations, delivery timing	No — call blocked; drone drop continues
Staff corruption	Calls between inmates and officer personal phones; bribe language flagged	Partial — connection logged; content unknown
Sextortion operations	Explicit content patterns, threat escalation, payment demands	No — call blocked; victim unreachable
Suicide and self-harm	Distress language, hopelessness indicators, farewell patterns	No — call blocked; inmate silenced with no outlet

Consider what AI monitoring would have identified at Calhoun during the jury duty ring. The operation involved dozens of outbound calls to randomly selected numbers across six states. Every call used law enforcement impersonation language — “warrant,” “arrest,” “U.S. Marshal,” “bond.” Every call escalated to payment demands via gift cards or wire transfers. Every call used the same script, from the same devices, inside the same facility.

That is not a needle in a haystack. That is a pattern AI monitoring flags within days of the first call. The federal investigation that eventually convicted Jackson and Riddle required years and relied entirely on victim complaints. Monitoring would have surfaced the operation before most of those 119 victims were ever targeted. ⁸

Real-world AI monitoring has delivered exactly these results in other jurisdictions. A 147-count RICO indictment in South Carolina was built entirely on digital evidence from monitored prison phone calls. Law enforcement officials have described AI suicide detection as “the most valuable tool” in their facilities. Cold homicides have been solved when inmates were overheard discussing murders on monitored lines. ⁹

Attorney General Carr has cited the case of an 88-year-old veteran killed after a gang leader ordered the hit from prison using a contraband phone. The call was made. The order was given. MAS didn’t prevent it because MAS cannot stop every contraband phone — 11,880 phone incidents in 2024 prove that blocking is not containing the problem. ¹⁰ But if that call had been monitored instead of blocked, the threat would have been flagged before the murder was executed. Blocking means law enforcement never hears the order. Monitoring means they hear it in time to act.

Commissioner Oliver has said repeatedly that a contraband phone “can be used as a deadly weapon.” He is right — but only when the communication is invisible. An AI-monitored phone is not a weapon. It is a surveillance device that law enforcement controls: every word recorded, every pattern analyzed, every threat escalated to investigators in real time. That is not soft on crime. It is the most comprehensive surveillance apparatus Georgia has ever deployed against prison-based criminal activity. The choice isn’t between safety and phones. It’s between intelligence and silence — and Georgia has chosen silence.

Georgia Already Does This at 12 State Facilities

The argument that monitored phone access cannot work inside Georgia’s prison system is a claim that Georgia’s own Department of Corrections has already disproved.

Since July 1, 2016, Georgia’s Transitional Centers have allowed residents to carry personal cell phones — not GDC-issued devices, not restricted flip phones with seven approved contacts, but personal smartphones purchased by the residents themselves, used freely. The one condition: staff may search them at any time, and residents sign a waiver acknowledging this. ¹¹

Commissioner Homer Bryson announced the policy with direct, unambiguous reasoning:

“These individuals are in the process of returning to their communities, and we believe it is important that they begin learning the responsible use of technology.”

There are currently approximately 2,300 residents across Georgia’s Transitional Centers carrying personal phones under this policy. These are GDC facilities. The residents are serving state prison sentences. The program has been running for nearly a decade without collapse.

GDC’s own research found TC residents are up to one-third more likely to maintain a crime-free life after release. Phone access — enabling job applications, apartment searches, banking, family reconnection, and reentry planning — is a documented contributor to that outcome. ¹²

When GDC briefly tried to restrict TC phones in 2022 — mandating GDC-issued flip phones with seven approved contacts and no internet — residents documented the immediate damage to their reentry plans and GDC reversed course within months. Even the Department acknowledged that restricting communication undermined outcomes.

The TC model is monitored access at scale: staff can search phones at any time, facilities log device information, residents sign consent waivers. That is the same architecture proposed for closed facilities — made more thorough through MAS infrastructure and AI analysis rather than manual spot-checks. Georgia’s prisons are already running monitored phone access at a dozen facilities. It has been operational for a decade.

The Law Doesn’t Need to Change

The most important sentence in this entire policy debate may be the one fewest officials have read.

O.C.G.A. § 42-5-18 — the statute that criminalizes contraband phones — is titled “Items prohibited for possession by inmates; warden’s authorization; penalty.” It does not absolutely prohibit telecommunications devices in Georgia prisons. It prohibits unauthorized ones:

“It is unlawful for any person to obtain for, to procure for, or to give to an inmate… any telecommunications device… without the authorization of the warden or superintendent or his or her designee.“

“It is unlawful for an inmate to possess… a telecommunications device… without the authorization of the warden or superintendent or his or her designee.“

¹³

The warden has statutory authority to authorize telecommunications devices. This is not an exception or a loophole. It is the explicit text of the law Georgia wrote. It is precisely how Transitional Center phones are legal today: TC wardens authorized the devices under 42-5-18. No statutory amendment was needed. No legislative action was required. The Commissioner issued a policy directive, the wardens authorized the devices, and inmate phone possession became lawful.

The path for closed facilities is identical to what made TC phones legal: the Commissioner issues a policy directive establishing a Monitored Communication Program, participating wardens authorize registered devices under 42-5-18, and MAS routes those calls through an AI monitoring layer before passing to the carrier. Unregistered devices remain blocked — exactly as today.

This requires no bill before the Georgia General Assembly. No committee. No floor vote. No governor’s signature. The Commissioner and Board of Corrections hold this authority now. The statute is already written. The infrastructure is already installed. The precedent is already operational at 12+ facilities. The only missing element is the decision.

The Cost Argument Is Backwards

Opponents of monitored phone access frame this as an added expense. The numbers say otherwise.

Georgia’s $50 million MAS deployment carries significant ongoing costs regardless of whether the system is used to block calls or monitor them. Antenna arrays, base transceiver stations, spectrum analyzers, and the software infrastructure that runs them require maintenance contracts, licensing fees, and technical staff estimated at several hundred thousand dollars per facility per year — costs the state is already paying at every facility where MAS has been deployed. Whitelisting a registered inmate device is a configuration change. It does not add to those costs by a single dollar.

The only genuine new expense in a monitoring model is the AI analysis layer — the software that processes call content, flags criminal patterns, and generates intelligence reports. Based on available contract data for systems like LEO Technologies, that cost runs approximately $2 to $5 million per year statewide for Georgia’s prison population. ⁷

Georgia could cover that cost entirely — without appropriating a single dollar of new state funding — by charging inmates a $10 per month access fee. At 50,000 inmates, that generates $6 million per year: more than enough to fund the AI monitoring layer, with money left over. This is not an unusual arrangement. GDC already collects $14.9 million annually in agency funds from commissary and fees — extracted from incarcerated people and their families through inflated commissary markups and service charges. ¹⁴ A modest phone access fee, in exchange for monitored personal communication, is consistent with how GDC already operates.

But the cost calculation doesn’t stop there. Consider what Georgia currently spends trying — and failing — to suppress contraband phones:

• TAC squad operations: A GPS analysis of GDC salary data and confirmed TAC squad compensation rates puts the cost of operating the squad at approximately $107,500 per operating day — accounting for officer base pay (average $55,000/year), the $100-per-day TAC bonus each officer receives above their regular salary, employment taxes, meals, and transportation for 25 vehicles. At roughly 115 operating days per year with a standard complement of 200 officers, that is $12.4 million per year — before counting the cost of the regular posts those officers vacate while on TAC duty. ¹⁵
• Prosecution of smuggling cases: hundreds of cases biannually against staff and outside conspirators, each requiring investigator hours, prosecutorial resources, and court time
• Drone interdiction technology: nearly $1 million per year in equipment to counter aerial delivery, with 150+ drones seized in 2024 alone ¹⁰
• Staff corruption investigations and prosecutions: 360+ correctional officers arrested for contraband smuggling since 2018, each case representing significant law enforcement and legal costs

Every one of these enforcement expenditures exists because of demand for contraband phones. That demand is indestructible as long as phones are prohibited — because the need for communication does not disappear when communication is banned. When inmates have legal, registered, monitored phones, the $1,500 black market price for a contraband device collapses overnight. Staff have no one to sell to. Drone operators lose their customer base. The $12.4 million annual TAC squad operation — built substantially around phone interdiction — could be redirected toward weapons, drugs, and gang contraband: the contraband that actually kills people.

The net cost of switching from blocking to monitoring is not a premium. It is a transfer — from an enforcement economy that produces no intelligence, to a monitoring system that generates criminal cases — funded by the inmates who use it.

A 5% reduction in recidivism from restored family contact would save $73.5 million per year in avoided incarceration costs. ¹⁰ The monitoring system pays for itself before a single scam is intercepted or a single hit order is flagged.

Georgia is currently spending heavily to stay blind. The alternative costs less and sees everything.

The Argument GDC Never Makes Out Loud

There is a reason Georgia officials frame the phone crackdown exclusively in terms of crime and safety — and never in terms of what phones actually reveal inside their prisons. Contraband phones document conditions. They are how video of beatings, footage of gang-controlled dorms, and images of filth, neglect, and medical abandonment leave the facility and reach the public. The Department of Justice cited conditions inside Georgia’s prisons as among the worst it has ever investigated. ¹⁶ That evidence came, in significant part, from phones.

The unstated case for phone prohibition is not about scammers or gang leaders. It is about opacity. A prison without phones is harder to document.

The argument fails on its own terms. Georgia’s prisons are among the most-reported-on in the country precisely because the conditions inside them are catastrophic enough that no suppression strategy has contained the evidence. Federal investigators have been inside. GPS sources report conditions continuously. Families talk. Lawsuits produce discovery. The DOJ findings report exists. The phones GDC seizes are replaced within weeks. Prohibition has not produced opacity — it has produced unmonitored chaos that is harder to prosecute, not harder to see.

There is also a direct operational cost to the phone crackdown that receives almost no public attention: the TAC squad model depletes the regular staff it is supposed to supplement.

GDC’s Tactical Squad operations — the large-scale facility sweeps targeting contraband — routinely pull 200 to 300 correctional officers from their regular posts, operating roughly 115 days per year. Each officer on TAC duty receives $100 per day above their regular salary, and the full cost of a standard 200-officer TAC operation runs approximately $107,500 per day — $12.4 million per year — not counting the staffing gap those officers leave behind. ¹⁵

On those days, the housing units, medical wings, and common areas those officers normally staff are left with reduced coverage. The facilities are less safe on the days GDC is conducting its most aggressive contraband enforcement — because the officers who would otherwise be watching the dorms are sweeping for phones.

The result is predictable: violence fills the gap. Officers stretched thin across understaffed units cannot intervene before incidents escalate. The crackdown meant to reduce disorder is actively creating the conditions for it.

A monitored phone access model changes this entirely. When inmates have legal phones, the premise of phone sweeps disappears. The $12.4 million currently spent running TAC operations substantially aimed at phone interdiction can be redirected — along with the officers themselves — toward weapons seizures, drug interdiction, and the gang contraband that actually drives the homicide rate. The 200 officers pulled from their posts to find phones go back to the posts where their presence prevents the violence GDC claims it is trying to stop.

GDC cannot simultaneously argue that phones threaten safety and deploy hundreds of officers away from safety duties to remove them. The phone crackdown is not a safety program. It is a suppression program — and what it suppresses most effectively is not communication, but accountability.

The Commissioner’s Decision

The case for monitoring instead of blocking does not rest on ideology. It rests on three documented facts:

The hardware is already installed. MAS systems across most of Georgia’s state prisons already distinguish authorized from unauthorized devices, already whitelist staff phones, already route authorized traffic to commercial carriers. The technical modification required to add registered inmate phones to that whitelist and route their calls through an AI monitoring layer is a configuration change.

The law already permits it. O.C.G.A. § 42-5-18 gives every warden the statutory authority to authorize telecommunications devices at their facility. This is the same authority that has made TC phone access legal since 2016. No new legislation is needed. The authority is existing.

The precedent already proves it works. 2,300 residents across Georgia’s Transitional Centers carry personal phones today under monitored access conditions. GDC’s own research documents the outcomes. When GDC tried to take those phones away, they reversed course because the data on reentry success was undeniable.

Commissioner Tyrone Oliver can authorize a Monitored Communication pilot at a single MAS-equipped facility today. If the pilot confirms what every international comparison, every TC outcome, and every documented AI monitoring result indicates — he expands it. If it produces unexpected problems — he ends it. A pilot requires no permanent commitment and generates the Georgia-specific data that can justify or foreclose system-wide expansion.

What the Commissioner cannot continue to justify is spending $50 million on technology configured to be deaf while scammers steal millions from victims in six states, gang leaders order murders that law enforcement never hears, and 2,300 TC residents carry personal phones just miles down the road from facilities where the same communication is treated as a felony.

The infrastructure for the right answer is already in place. The law already authorizes it. The only thing it requires is the decision to turn it on.

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Call to Action: What You Can Do

Awareness without action changes nothing. Here’s how you can help push for accountability and real reform:

Join the GPS Advocacy Network — Sign up at https://gps.press/become-an-advocate/ and we’ll advocate on your behalf every week. GPS identifies your state legislators, crafts personalized letters on the most pressing prison issues, and sends them directly to the representatives who represent you. You receive a copy of every letter. It takes two minutes to sign up — we handle the rest.

Tell My Story — Are you or a loved one affected by Georgia’s prison system? GPS publishes first-person accounts from incarcerated people and their families. Submit your story at https://gps.press/category/tellmystory/ and help the world understand what’s really happening behind the walls.

Contact Your Representatives — Your state legislators control GDC’s budget, oversight, and the laws that created these failures. Find your Georgia legislators at https://gps.press/find-your-legislator/ or call Governor Kemp at (404) 656-1776 or the GDC Commissioner at (478) 992-5246.

Demand Media Coverage — Contact newsrooms at the AJC, local TV stations, and national criminal justice outlets. More coverage means more pressure.

Amplify on Social Media — Share this article and tag @GovKemp, @GDC_Georgia, and your local representatives. Use #GAPrisons, #PrisonReform, #GeorgiaPrisonerSpeak.

File Public Records Requests — Georgia’s Open Records Act gives every citizen the right to request incident reports, death records, staffing data, medical logs, and financial documents at https://georgiadcor.govqa.us/WEBAPP/_rs/SupportHome.aspx.

Attend Public Meetings — The Georgia Board of Corrections and legislative committees hold public meetings. Your presence is noticed.

Contact the Department of Justice — File civil rights complaints at https://civilrights.justice.gov. Federal oversight has forced abusive systems to change before.

Support Organizations Doing This Work — Donate to or volunteer with Georgia-based prison reform groups fighting for change on the ground.

Vote — Research candidates’ positions on criminal justice. Primary elections often determine outcomes in Georgia.

Contact GPS — If you have information about conditions inside Georgia’s prisons, reach us securely at GPS.press.

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Further Reading

The Crackdown That’s Killing: Georgia’s $50M Phone War Fuels Record Prison Violence

Part 1 of this investigation — how GDC’s Managed Access System rollout correlates directly with record violence at every facility where activation dates have been confirmed.

$700 Million More — And Nothing to Show for It

Georgia has poured hundreds of millions more into corrections while homicides, deaths, and phone incidents all set records — the budget case against the current approach.

Record Every Call: How to Expose Contempt and Abuse

Practical guidance for families navigating a phone system designed to limit rather than enable contact — and how to document what GDC won’t.

GPS Informational Resources

Guides, fact sheets, and resources for families and advocates navigating Georgia’s prison and parole system.

Pathways to Success

Reentry resources, support programs, and evidence-based guidance for people returning from Georgia’s prison system.

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Research Explainers

GPS Research Explainers distill complex data and legal research into accessible briefings. These explainers are directly relevant to the issues covered in this article:

Research for Advocates

GPS research collections on family contact, communication suppression, contraband technology, and the evidence base behind monitored access — the data foundation for the monitor-not-block argument.

Research for Legislators

Legislative briefings on managed access technology, comparative corrections policy, and the per-inmate cost model for monitored communication — for officials examining Georgia’s phone crackdown.

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Explore the Data

GPS makes GDC statistics accessible to the public through several resources:

• GPS Statistics Portal — Interactive dashboards translating complex GDC reports into accessible formats, updated within days of official releases.
• GPS Lighthouse AI — Ask questions about Georgia’s prison system and get answers drawn from GPS’s investigative archive and data analysis.
• Machine-Readable Pages for Researchers — GPS maintains AI-optimized pages for data analysis:
  • AI Content Index — https://gps.press/ai-index/

The AI Content Index has links to numerous machine readable pages, but this is all that is needed by an AI to fully understand all the data. You can learn more about using GPS Data with AI Tools in our article on the topic:

How to Use GPS Data with AI Tools

A step-by-step guide showing researchers, advocates, families, and journalists how to use GPS’s machine-readable data pages with AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to analyze Georgia prison conditions, statistics, and policy.

Contact GPS at media@gps.press for access to underlying datasets used in this analysis.

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About Georgia Prisoners’ Speak (GPS)

Georgia Prisoners’ Speak (GPS) is a nonprofit investigative newsroom built in partnership with incarcerated reporters, families, advocates, and data analysts. Operating independently from the Georgia Department of Corrections, GPS documents the truth the state refuses to acknowledge: extreme violence, fatal medical neglect, gang-controlled dorms, collapsed staffing, fraudulent reporting practices, and unconstitutional conditions across Georgia’s prisons.

Through confidential reporting channels, secure communication, evidence verification, public-records requests, legislative research, and professional investigative standards, GPS provides the transparency the system lacks. Our mission is to expose abuses, protect incarcerated people, support families, and push Georgia toward meaningful reform based on human rights, evidence, and public accountability.

Every article is part of a larger fight — to end the silence, reveal the truth, and demand justice.

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Footnotes

1. GPS Analysis of GDC Press Releases, https://gps.press/ [↩]
2. WALB: Two Georgia inmates convicted in nationwide jury duty phone scam, https://www.walb.com/2026/01/10/two-georgia-inmates-convicted-nationwide-phone-scam-targeting-jury-duty-victims/ [↩]
3. KCRG: Georgia inmates sentenced for Iowa romance scam, https://www.kcrg.com/2025/09/18/georgia-inmates-sentenced-running-scam-out-prison-targeting-iowans/ [↩]
4. DOJ Western District of Washington: Georgia prison inmate pleads guilty to impersonating federal agent, https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwa/pr/georgia-state-prison-inmate-pleads-guilty-impersonating-federal-agent-part-national [↩]
5. GPS Reporting: MAS Deployment and the GDC WiFi Workaround, https://gps.press/georgias-cell-phone-crackdown-security-or-silence/ [↩]
6. Tecore Networks: iNAC Managed Access Datasheet, https://www.tecore.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Tecore-Networks_iNAC-Managed-Access-Datasheet.pdf [↩]
7. LEO Technologies Prison Phone Monitoring, https://www.leotech.co/ [↩][↩]
8. WALB: Victims speak after Georgia prison inmates convicted in nationwide nude photo scam, https://www.walb.com/2026/01/14/thought-i-was-going-jail-victims-speak-after-georgia-prison-inmates-were-convicted-nationwide-nude-photo-scam/ [↩]
9. Filter Magazine: In Defense of Contraband Cell Phones — the intelligence case for monitoring, https://filtermag.org/prison-contraband-cell-phones/ [↩]
10. GPS Statistics Portal, https://gps.press/gdc-statistics/ [↩][↩][↩]
11. GDC: Transitional Centers Now Allow Residents to Carry Cell Phones, https://gdc.georgia.gov/press-releases/2016-07-01/transitional-centers-now-allow-residents-carry-cell-phones [↩]
12. Filter Magazine: Why GDC-Issue Phones Hurt Reentry, https://filtermag.org/prison-phones-georgia/ [↩]
13. O.C.G.A. § 42-5-18, Justia Georgia Code, https://law.justia.com/codes/georgia/title-42/chapter-5/article-1/section-42-5-18/ [↩]
14. GPS Statistics Portal — The Incarceration Tax, https://gps.press/gdc-statistics/ [↩]
15. GPS Analysis of GDC TAC Squad Operational Costs, https://gps.press/gdc-statistics/ [↩][↩]
16. DOJ Findings Report: Investigation of Georgia’s Prisons, https://www.justice.gov/d9/2024-09/findings_report_-_investigation_of_georgia_prisons.pdf [↩]