Family Communication

Brief written September 13, 2026 from GPS Intelligence System data.(DS)

The Hidden Tax: What Georgia Families Pay to Stay Connected

Family communication in Georgia's prison system operates on a financial model that extracts revenue from the people least positioned to absorb it. The Georgia Department of Corrections' inmate phone contract with Securus (Aventiv) dates to September 21, 2016, with a First Amendment effective January 1, 2017. It guaranteed GDC a $4 million one-time incentive and a 59.6 percent commission on call revenue — among the highest rates in the nation, against a national average of roughly 43 percent — subject to a $325,000 per month floor. Calls ran approximately 13 cents per minute, or roughly $1.95 per 15-minute call, and the commission structure yields approximately $8 million per year to GDC. In 2019, GDC received $8,062,200.60 in annual kickbacks from Securus; by 2022 that figure had fallen to $7.04 million. The current renewed contract's exact terms require a Georgia Open Records Act request to GDC, and GPS has flagged this as an unresolved data gap.

This commission structure is not unique to Georgia, but it places the state squarely within a national pattern that advocates and researchers have documented extensively. The Ella Baker Center's "Who Pays?" study, based on surveys of more than 1,000 formerly incarcerated people and family members across 14 states, established the baseline understanding of how incarceration costs shift to families. A 2025 FWD.us report — a first-of-its-kind national survey of more than 1,600 people with incarcerated family members, developed with researchers at Duke University and NORC at the University of Chicago — found that 64 percent of family-incarcerated person pairs incur at least one direct expense related to incarceration. Among those who contribute, the median monthly direct expense is $172, representing 6 percent of household income. The burden falls unevenly: Black families contributing to incarceration costs spend a median of $200 per month (9 percent of household income); Hispanic families $230 per month (9 percent); and White families $120 per month. Mothers of incarcerated persons spend a median of $286 per month. Spouses and coparents spend a median of $276 per month, representing 12 percent of household income — the highest percentage of any relationship category. Women face a compounding burden: lost household income plus new expenses plus childcare plus emotional labor.

The commission-based contract model creates what researchers describe as perverse incentives. Commission-based contracts create an incentive for corrections officials to approve higher prices, as it directly increases facility revenue through percentage-based kickbacks. Commissions and kickbacks from commissary and telecom contracts flow into "Inmate Welfare Funds" — opaque accounts supposedly for incarcerated people's benefit — which corrections agencies use as shadow budgets free from legislative appropriation oversight. At least nine states prohibit commission-based prison telecom contracts: California, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, Rhode Island, and South Carolina. Five states — California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Colorado — have enacted laws requiring free communications in state prisons and/or jails. Georgia is not among them.

The Federal Regulatory Battle and Its Reversal

The federal government has moved repeatedly on prison communication costs, only to reverse course. The Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act was signed January 5, 2023 (Public Law 117-338), a bipartisan law that gave the FCC authority to regulate all prison communications rates. In July 2024, the FCC voted to implement phone caps of $0.06 per minute for prisons and large jails, $0.07 per minute for medium jails, first-ever video call caps of $0.11 to $0.25 per minute, banned site commissions, and banned ancillary fees. The rate-cap order FCC 24-75 was adopted July 18, 2024 and released July 22, 2024 in WC Docket 23-62, capping prison phone rates at 6 cents per minute effective January 1, 2025 for prisons and large jails and April 1, 2025 for smaller jails.

That framework collapsed under the new FCC Republican majority in 2025. The commission suspended the 2024 rules and approved higher "interim" rate caps: phone calls in large prisons from $0.06 to $0.10 per minute; small jails up to $0.18 per minute; plus a $0.02 per minute facility fee. FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez stated the Commission was "shielding a broken system that inflates costs and rewards kickbacks to correctional facilities at the expense of incarcerated individuals and their loved ones." Bianca Tylek of Worth Rises stated: "Today, the Commission bent to the will of the industry that has spent decades exploiting the basic human need of incarcerated people and their families." On June 30, 2025, the FCC's Wireline Competition Bureau issued waiver order DA 25-565 postponing compliance to April 1, 2027 — an up-to-two-year delay announced by Chairman Brendan Carr, with Commissioner Anna Gomez dissenting.

The financial stakes for Georgia families extend beyond the phone contract. The Appeal's nine-month investigation collecting commissary prices from 46 states found markups ranging from 40 percent to 600 percent above retail prices. GPS's reporting on the GDC Master Commissary List has documented pricing practices and markups on inmate commissary items, and GPS has documented that Georgia prison commissary sales totaled over $22 million in a single fiscal year. The state's own records show fees collected from incarcerated individuals exceeding $10 million annually for each of the last three years.

The Legal Fight Over Email and Digital Communication

The most significant legal development in Georgia family communication came through federal litigation. GPS's reporting documents a federal court ruling in Benning v. Oliver in which Judge Self granted summary judgment on GDC's email contact restrictions, ruling that the restriction violated the First Amendment and ordering GDC to cease enforcing it. GPS's reporting further documents that the court subsequently held a hearing on GDC's non-compliance with that order, indicating the agency did not immediately comply with the court's directive.

The legal framework surrounding family communication in Georgia is shaped by statute as well as litigation. Georgia law establishes communication rights in adjacent institutional settings that have no prison analogue: O.C.G.A. § 37-3-142, § 37-4-102, and § 37-7-142 each guarantee patients in state facilities the right to communicate freely and privately with persons outside the facility, to receive visitors, and to send and receive sealed, unopened mail that may not be opened, delayed, held, or censored absent reasonable grounds to believe the mail contains dangerous items. The First Amendment itself — U.S. Const. amend. I — supplies the constitutional floor on which the Benning litigation rests.

GDC's own operating procedures govern the mechanics of contact. SOP 227.01, "Offender Access to Telephones," establishes procedures for reasonable and equitable telephone access, including creation and management of approved call lists, attorney calls, emergency calls, and provisions for special populations such as offenders with hearing impairments, including TTY phones and video relay service. SOP 215.23 governs cell phone use by work-release residents at Transitional Centers, where approved devices are permitted to support reentry, employment, and family reunification — with all communications subject to inspection and no expectation of privacy. SOP 106.01, the Chaplaincy Program policy, provides for clergy visitation and religious accommodation.

Death Notification: The Ultimate Communication Failure

The most severe breakdown in family communication occurs when an incarcerated person dies. GPS's reporting has documented cases in which families were notified of a death in GDC custody more than one year after it occurred, and in which no death certificate or autopsy records were provided to the family. This sits within a broader pattern GPS has documented: GDC publishes guidelines on inmate death notification procedures and family rights, but the gap between policy and practice can span months or years.

The systemic context for these failures is documented in federal findings. The U.S. Department of Justice's 2024 investigation found that gangs control housing units, including bed assignments and shower schedules, and that GDC misclassifies deaths, categorizing obvious homicides as "unknown" causes. The DOJ found that the prison census has doubled since 1990 while correctional officer staffing sits at only 50 percent of authorized levels, and that at one close-security facility a single officer was responsible for 400 beds. GPS has independently tracked 1,894 deaths in GDC custody since 2020.

The infrastructure for family communication has also been systematically restricted. GPS's reporting documents that GDC disabled WiFi access statewide, cutting off a final inmate phone communication method. GDC deployed managed access cell phone interdiction across all 35 of Georgia's operational state prisons, supported by a $35,027,675 managed access and drone detection appropriation in the Amended FY2025 budget — the single largest technology line item in that budget. The DOJ found that gangs control access to phones inside Georgia prisons, and the interdiction build-out has been justified in part by cases like that of two men convicted in January 2026 of running a nationwide wire fraud operation from Calhoun State Prison using contraband phones and VOIP to spoof police numbers, producing $464,920 in documented losses from 119 identified victims across six or more states. GPS records show five sources across three cases reporting contact with family severed at Baldwin State Prison between March and May 2026, a high-severity pattern at that facility.

The Parole Process and Family Advocacy

For families seeking to support a loved one's release, the parole process presents a distinct set of communication challenges. The State Board of Pardons and Paroles operates with a five-member board — a number unchanged since 1973, when the prison population was 9,000, despite a current population approaching 50,000. The Board considered 19,328 cases in FY2024: 2,046 life-sentenced cases, 12,257 guideline cases, and 5,025 short sentence cases. In FY2024, the Board released 5,443 offenders from prison — 420 fewer than the previous fiscal year, continuing a decline from 10,429 releases in FY2019.

The parole process itself is opaque to families. Parole hearings are not held in Georgia. Each offender entering the Georgia prison system is interviewed by parole staff, but families have no opportunity to present directly to the Board except through written correspondence. Parole investigators collect details of conviction offenses, interview inmates and family members for Personal History Statements, and complete Post Sentence Investigations — meaning family input does enter the record, but through an investigator's filter rather than direct advocacy. A Tentative Parole Month is not a release date and can be rescinded at any time; parole can be delayed or denied for programming non-completion, prison misconduct, or detainers and warrants.

The statutory notification scheme that does exist runs to victims, prosecutors, and law enforcement rather than to families. As a result of legislation enacted in 2017, the Board notifies the district attorney at a minimum of 90 days before the final decision to parole an offender convicted of a serious violent felony — murder, armed robbery, kidnapping, rape, aggravated child molestation, aggravated sodomy, and aggravated sexual battery. Judges, district attorneys, sheriffs of the county of residence prior to arrest and the county of conviction, and registered victims also receive a 72-hour statutory notification that the offender is about to be paroled under O.C.G.A. § 42-9-47. A state law adopted in 2015 created a notification process informing registered victims and prosecutors when an offender is seeking a pardon; the Board exceeds the statutory requirement and sends those notifications on all applications received.

GPS has responded to the gap families face by launching the Parole Packet Builder, a free tool for Georgia families to support parole applications, and the Lighthouse App, which provides incarcerated people and families with prison system resources, legal tools, and advocacy support. These tools represent a direct response to the structural barriers families face in navigating the parole process.

The financial dimension of parole is equally significant. The Parole Board's policy regarding supervision fees requires that each parolee pay only one type of fee, with court-ordered restitution going directly to the victim as the first priority, followed by payments to the Victims Compensation Fund, then parole supervision fees. In FY2014, $13,079,503 was collected in parole supervision fees, victim compensation, and restitution fees. The cost per day of incarceration versus parole supervision in FY2024 was $68.51 versus $2.89 — a differential that makes parole the fiscally rational choice, yet parole releases have declined for six consecutive years.

The Commissary Economy and Family Subsidization

The commissary system represents a parallel financial channel through which families subsidize the prison system. GPS's reporting on the GDC Master Commissary List has documented pricing practices and markups on inmate commissary items, and GPS has documented that Georgia prison commissary sales totaled over $22 million in a single fiscal year.

The markup structure falls hardest on basic necessities. These are not luxury items; they are over-the-counter medications and food that incarcerated people purchase because the prison's medical system and meal service do not reliably provide them. A JAMA study from August 2024 found that prison systems with more expensive copays (relative to prison wages) limit access to healthcare for pregnant people and those with chronic conditions. The National Consumer Law Center found in September 2024 an inverse relationship between copay levels and healthcare utilization — higher copays deter treatment-seeking even for serious conditions. Forty states and the federal Bureau of Prisons charge medical copays ranging from $2 to $13. GDC imposes a $5 copay for each self-initiated medical visit and a $5 charge per medication prescribed, and Georgia is one of seven states that do not pay the majority of incarcerated people for their labor — meaning a $5 copay represents an infinite proportion of prison earnings.

The Science Advances study on prison wages and commissary prices captured the absurdity of this economy: if dinner is a $0.35 package of ramen noodles and you work for the federal minimum wage, it takes 3 minutes to earn it. If you are incarcerated and work for prison wages, affording that "cheap" dinner takes a full 2 hours. Families bridge this gap. Having an incarcerated family member reduced household assets by 64.3 percent and debt by 85.1 percent, according to Sykes & Maroto (2016) using Survey of Income and Program Participation data. Parental incarceration pushes even formerly non-poor children into poverty. Children of recently incarcerated fathers are three times more likely to experience homelessness, with paternal incarceration increasing risk of childhood homelessness by 94 to 97 percent even after adjusting for pre-existing family differences.

What Reform Looks Like

The reform landscape for family communication costs is uneven but moving. The Families Over Fees Act (2024), introduced by Senators Booker and Warren, would authorize the FTC to prohibit junk fees in prisons and jails, require upfront disclosure, and create legal protections for affected families. Illinois and New Hampshire repealed pay-to-stay laws in 2019; Missouri repealed in 2025; Connecticut reformed its pay-to-stay laws in 2022. Dauphin County, Pennsylvania forgave $65.9 million in former detainee debt in September 2024. In 2021, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau penalized JPay for violating the Consumer Financial Protection Act, finding that JPay charged fees to access one's own money on prepaid debit release cards and required consumers to sign up for JPay debit cards as a condition of receiving government benefits. The CFPB order required $4 million in consumer redress and a $2 million civil penalty, with violations specifically documented in California, Colorado, and Georgia.

The evidence on what actually reduces violence is also relevant to the policy debate. A 2011 Minnesota study of 16,420 prisoners found that any visit reduced felony reconviction by 13 percent and parole violations by 25 percent. A 2008 Florida study of 7,000 prisoners found that each additional visit reduced two-year recidivism by 3.8 percent. Connecticut became the first state to make prison phone calls free statewide, with the law passed in 2021 and effective October 2022; monthly calls went from 600,656 to 1,373,276 — a 128 percent increase in the first month — with families saving an estimated $12 million per year. By contrast, when Knox County Jail in Tennessee eliminated in-person visits in favor of video-only through Securus in April 2014, contraband did not decrease despite that being the stated justification, assaults increased by approximately 10 per month, and disciplinary infractions rose.

For Georgia families, the path forward runs through the courts, the legislature, and the regulatory process. The Benning v. Oliver ruling established that GDC's email restrictions violate the First Amendment. The FCC's rate caps, even in their suspended form, established the principle that prison communication costs must be reasonable. The Martha Wright-Reed Act gave the FCC permanent authority to regulate these rates. What remains unresolved is whether Georgia will follow the nine states that have prohibited commission-based telecom contracts, or the five states that have mandated free communications — or whether it will continue to collect roughly $8 million annually from the families of incarcerated people.

Sources

This analysis draws on GPS's own investigative reporting and data analysis, including the GDC commissary master list and pricing investigation, the Securus contract analysis, and documentation of the Benning v. Oliver litigation; the Ella Baker Center's "Who Pays?" study; the FWD.us 2025 national survey; the State Board of Pardons and Paroles annual reports for FY2014 and FY2024; Georgia Department of Corrections budget and spending records; GDC Standard Operating Procedures 227.01, 215.23, and 106.01; the Official Code of Georgia Annotated; federal court rulings and FCC orders; the U.S. Department of Justice's 2024 investigation findings; and reporting from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Inmate and family accounts collected by GPS staff inform the aggregate observations throughout.