Brief written June 7, 2026 from GPS Intelligence System data.

Family Communication

The Georgia prison system does not simply house people—it extracts wealth from the families who try to remain connected to them. From the moment a family member is incarcerated, the state and its corporate partners impose a cascade of fees: per-minute phone charges, per-message email stamps, money-transfer surcharges, and commissary markups that can exceed 1,000 percent above retail. The same agency that has fought a federal court order to allow email contact has spent over $50 million on a system designed to block unauthorized cell signals inside prisons, creating a climate in which communication is simultaneously criminalized and commercialized. The result is a closed-loop extraction engine: the state pays incarcerated people nothing for their labor, then profits doubly when their families pay inflated prices for basic necessities they are forced to buy, all while the official channels of connection grow more expensive and more tightly controlled.

The Price of Staying Connected

Georgia families pay to reach their loved ones at every turn. As of early 2026, phone calls from GDC state prisons cost $0.06 per minute, with a maximum call length of 25 minutes—a 15-minute call costs $0.90 under the current Federally capped rate, though the rate could rise under new FCC rules. E-messages are not regulated; families pay for JPay “stamps”—$0.20 each in bulk, $0.35 individually—and a single photo attachment costs an additional stamp, a videogram three. Money transfers through JPay incur fees of $3.50 to $6.50 per deposit, with a maximum single deposit of $200. These fees are paid almost entirely by the families of people the state pays nothing for their labor: Georgia is one of seven states that provide incarcerated workers no compensation for prison maintenance jobs.

GPS’s investigative publications have documented the toll. Analysis drawing on a 2025 study in Science Advances found that families with an incarcerated member spend a median of $172 a month on direct support—roughly 6 percent of household income. Black families bear the heaviest burden: a median of $200 monthly, or 9 percent of household income. The FWD.us report “Families as the Hidden Tax Base” calculated that average direct out-of-pocket family spending reaches $4,200 a year. For mothers and spouses, the numbers are steeper still—mothers spend a median $286 a month, and spouses or co-parents $276, eating up 12 percent of income. Travel for visits alone costs Black family members an average of $2,256 annually. The financial injury is generational: parental incarceration, research shows, pushes formerly non-poor children into poverty and triples the risk of childhood homelessness.

Commissary purchases, which families fund almost entirely, amplify the strain. Georgia commissary markups in 2025 ranged from 67 percent to 1,150 percent above retail, according to GPS’s pricing investigation. In November 2025, the state raised commissary prices an average of 30 percent, driving estimated annual extraction past $60 million. State commissary sales had already topped $22 million annually as early as 2005; by 2024, GPS found, the system extracted $18.76 million in commissary profit alone. GPS also documented 153 items where vendor prices dropped but GDC either maintained or increased the price charged to prisoners, netting an estimated $420,000 in additional profit from price manipulation in a single year.

The Managed Access Blackout: Silence for Security

In early 2026, the Georgia Department of Corrections activated a Managed Access System (MAS) across all 34 state prisons, at a capital cost of approximately $50 million and with ongoing operating expenses exceeding $15 million a year. The system is designed to detect, block, and in some configurations permanently disable unauthorized cellphones inside prison walls—a technology that one GDC vendor, according to GPS analysis, claims can “permanently destroy phones without a warrant, raising Fourth Amendment concerns.” The deployment was swift and, in GPS’s tracking, poorly documented: roughly $50 million in contracts were awarded to multiple vendors, including a two-person company with no physical office and no FCC certification, with no public record of competitive bidding.

The immediate consequence for families was a communications blackout. GPS reporting in January 2026 described a statewide cell phone blackout after the MAS went live, followed by GDC’s disabling of a Wi-Fi workaround that hundreds of prisoners had used to maintain contact with families. The same week, a gang war erupted at Washington State Prison that left four men dead—violence that GPS’s coverage described as the predictable result of a facility running at a 72 percent officer vacancy rate, where contraband phones had become the only reliable link to the outside world and their sudden absence destabilized an already fragile informal economy of protection and communication.

Georgia seizes more than 15,500 contraband phones a year, by its own count, and incarcerated people risk harsh discipline to obtain them precisely because the authorized system is expensive, restrictive, and monopoly-controlled. GPS’s intelligence system has recorded at least five reports from Baldwin State Prison in 2026 of family contact being severed or severely restricted, with sources describing high-severity incidents. The state’s answer—jamming rather than lowering costs—has been vigorously advocated by Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, who has led multistate coalitions pushing for federal authorization to jam cell signals inside prisons. Meanwhile, the same private equity-backed companies that profit from the official communication pipeline—Securus, its parent Aventiv Technologies, and its sister entity JPay—are the ones that lose revenue when contraband phones succeed.

Defying the Courts: The Email Contact Fight

While the state invested in technology to block unauthorized communication, it has simultaneously resisted a federal court order to permit email contact with family. In November 2024, a federal judge ruled for the incarcerated plaintiff in Benning v. Oliver, a First Amendment challenge to GDC’s restrictions on email contact lists. Despite the ruling, GPS reporting documents that GDC continued to enforce the unlawful restrictions. In February 2026, U.S. District Judge Tilman E. Self III held the GDC Commissioner in contempt for willfully violating the court’s order—an extraordinary rebuke of a state agency that had reportedly refused even to produce requested records until DOJ issued an administrative subpoena and went to court to enforce it.

The contempt finding is consistent with a broader pattern of opacity that GPS has tracked. The Department of Corrections quoted $88,944 for a FOIA request seeking records of the Inmate Welfare Fund—the opaque account into which commissary and phone commission revenue flows. GPS’s research notes that the aggregate amount Georgia families pay across all communication services has never been publicly reported, nor has the current commission percentage on the state’s Securus contract. The DOJ’s 2024 investigation found that GDC “has been disclosing less to the public about conditions and harm in the prisons” even as violence skyrocketed, and families of incarcerated people who are injured report receiving partial or delayed information, if any.

The Circular Economy: Labor, Markup, and the Opaque Welfare Fund

The financial structure that traps families is a closed loop. Georgia pays incarcerated workers nothing for the labor that keeps the prisons running—cooking, cleaning, laundry, maintenance, farming over 12,700 acres, manufacturing license plates, eyeglasses, and meat processing—while simultaneously compelling them to purchase basic necessities at commissary markups that enrich the same system. As GPS’s analysis of prison labor has detailed, 76 percent of incarcerated workers nationally are required to work or face punishment; refusal can result in solitary confinement, loss of visitation, denial of “good time” credits, and parole board consideration that explicitly weighs work history. The state’s constitution mirrors the federal 13th Amendment, permitting involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime.

The money families send flows through JPay and Securus—companies under the Aventiv umbrella, which is owned by private equity firm Platinum Equity—and generates commissions that feed the Department’s budget. Georgia received $8,062,200.60 in commission kickbacks from prison phone revenue in fiscal year 2018‑2019, the third-highest total in the nation. That revenue, along with commissary profits, is routed into Inmate Welfare Funds that GPS describes as shadow budgets free from legislative appropriation oversight. The state’s own 2024 Senate Study Committee recommended an audit of contract renewals to check for “runaway costs” by vendors, but no such audit has been published.

At every level, the system extracts. Incarcerated laborers produce over 40 percent of the food eaten in Georgia prisons—39 million meals a year—without wages. The families who try to keep them fed, clothed, and connected spend a median $172 a month they cannot spare. And the state erects new barriers faster than it removes old ones: Georgia has taken no legislative action to make calls free, no bill has advanced to reduce commissary markups, and eight other states have removed their constitutional slavery exceptions while Georgia’s exception remains intact. The nine demands of the 2010 prison strike, which included access to families alongside living wages, decent healthcare, and nutritional meals, remain unmet as of 2026.

Sources

This analysis draws primarily on GPS’s own investigative publications: the brief “Prison Communications & Financial Exploitation: The Extraction Economy Behind Bars,” the 2025 research “Families as the Hidden Tax Base” co-authored with national partners, “Prison Labor & Wage Exploitation in Georgia,” “Recidivism & Reentry Failures in Georgia,” and the “Georgia Department of Corrections: Budget & Spending Trends FY2022-FY2027” analysis. Additional data comes from the DOJ’s 2024 investigation of Georgia prisons, the 2024 Georgia Senate Study Committee report, and GPS’s internal intelligence system tracking family communication disruption. Court records from Benning v. Oliver and FCC rulemaking documents support the legal and regulatory narrative.