Brief written October 25, 2026 from GPS Intelligence System data.(DS)

Family Communication in Georgia Prisons

Georgia does not treat a phone call home as a lifeline. It treats it as a revenue line. The state's prison telephone and tablet system is run by Securus Technologies and its subsidiary JPay, under a contract that paid GDC a 59.6 percent commission on call revenue — among the highest rates in the country — plus a $4 million signing bonus and a $325,000 monthly minimum guarantee. Families pay at the other end: per minute, per email stamp, per photo attachment, per money transfer. The rules governing who may be called and who may visit are set by GDC Standard Operating Procedures that cap phone lists at twenty people and visitation lists at twelve, and that allow a warden to shut down the phones entirely for up to 24 hours in an emergency.

Those rules have been litigated, and GDC lost. In Benning v. Oliver, a federal judge struck down the department's restriction limiting email contacts to the twelve people on an inmate's visitation list — then had to order the department to actually comply more than a year later. The same judge summoned Commissioner Tyrone Oliver to the witness stand to hear "how little credibility the Department of Corrections has."

This page examines the architecture of that system: the contract and its commissions, the SOPs that ration contact, the litigation that has partially checked GDC's authority, the cost borne by families, and what the record shows about what happens when the thread is cut.

The Securus Contract: A Commission Machine Built on Family Contact

GDC's inmate telephone contract with Securus dates to September 21, 2016, with a first amendment effective January 1, 2017. The terms, as documented in GPS's reporting on prison vendor contracts, included a $4 million one-time signing bonus to GDC, a 59.6 percent commission on call revenue, and a minimum monthly guarantee of $325,000 paid to the department. At the time, calls ran approximately 13 cents per minute — roughly $1.95 for a 15-minute call.

The commission structure is the heart of the arrangement. Securus keeps 40.4 percent of gross call revenue; GDC takes 59.6 percent. The national average commission rate has historically run around 43 percent. In fiscal year 2018–2019, Georgia collected $8,062,200.60 in commission kickbacks from prison phone revenue — the third-highest total of any state in the country. In 2022, Securus paid GDC $7.04 million in total commissions.

The contract also bundled surveillance tools at no additional charge: Investigator Pro (voice biometrics), Location Based Services (real-time tracking), THREADS (data analysis), ICER (inter-facility detection), and a Managed Access System at Autry State Prison. A Securus Forensics Lab was priced at $68,000 per month — $816,000 a year — staffed with two intake specialists, three digital forensics technicians, six intelligence analysts, a MAS intelligence analyst, and an intelligence operations program manager.

GPS's reporting describes a circular financial flow: families pay Securus for calls; Securus remits the majority to GDC as commission; GDC also pays Securus for managed access and forensic services; Securus's managed access system blocks contraband phones, pushing incarcerated people onto the paid phone system; and more calls generate more revenue for both parties. The current renewed contract's exact terms are not publicly available and would require a Georgia Open Records Act request. The most recent publicly available amendment covers 2017–2021.

In December 2025, Georgia posted a new comprehensive solicitation — 46700-GDC0001179 — for offender communications covering phones, tablets, video, and trust accounts, with a deadline of February 20, 2026. Eligible vendors under the NASPO master agreement include ViaPath, Securus, Advanced Technologies Group, ICSolutions, and Keefe.

Twenty Names, Fifteen Minutes, One Update Window

The rules that govern everyday contact are set out in GDC SOP 227.01, Offender Access to Telephones, effective March 27, 2023. The policy requires each facility to provide "reasonable and equitable access to telephones," with the warden or superintendent determining appropriate supervision consistent with the facility's mission. What that means in practice is a set of hard limits.

Each incarcerated person submits a Call Allow List capped at twenty persons, plus a separate Attorney Telephone Request Form. Only numbers on those lists can be called. Calls to cell phones are permitted; calls to remote forwarding numbers are not. The Georgia Public Defender Council's number, if added, counts against the twenty.

The phone system is programmed with a 15-minute maximum on all calls, automatically cutting off when the limit is reached. The exception is for TTY, Interpreting Phone Service, and VRS devices, which get at least 30 minutes. GPS's communications reporting separately documents a 25-minute maximum call duration in GDC state prisons, with all calls subject to monitoring and recording.

List changes are tightly rationed. After the initial list is entered, six-month revisions are scheduled by the last digit of the person's identification number — 0 or 5 in January and July, 1 or 6 in February and August, and so on. Only one Call Allow List update can be submitted during each designated month unless the warden approves an additional submission.

Monitoring is near-total. The system automatically records all calls unless a number has been blocked for recording. Calls to an attorney of record or the Indigent Defense Council are entitled to attorney-client confidentiality and are not recorded if the number was properly designated. Call Monitoring Access — the ability to listen to live and recorded calls — is limited to the warden, superintendent, and their designees. Monitoring may be triggered when a person is suspected of compromising facility safety, or calls may be selected at random. Outside agencies like the FBI or GBI must route monitoring requests in writing through the warden to the Director of Field Operations and then to the Assistant Commissioner, Facilities Division.

Disciplinary infractions can result in loss of phone privileges, but not for calls to an attorney, the PREA Hotline, or regarding ADA issues. People under investigation for serious offenses — murder, homicide, rape, assault on staff or other incarcerated people, introduction of contraband — may have phone privileges suspended until the investigation concludes.

And in an emergency, the warden can disable the entire phone system for up to 24 hours. With written approval of the Regional Director, that extends to 48 hours; beyond that requires written approval from the Director of Field Operations.

Twelve Visitors, Two Windows a Year, and a Background Check

Visitation is governed by SOP 227.05 and Board Rule 125-3-4-.01, and both define it explicitly as a privilege rather than a right. The approved visitor list is capped at twelve persons, five of whom the incarcerated person selects for financial purposes. Changes may only be made when a person arrives at their first permanent facility or during the months of May and November — and no change may occur in less than six months' time. Requested revisions must be completed and returned within fourteen working days.

Every visitor must complete an Application for Visitation Privilege, which facility staff review and approve or disapprove. Prospective visitors must sign a GCIC/NCIC consent form authorizing release of driver and criminal history information to GDC, and that information may be obtained annually thereafter. Disapproved visitors have 30 days to appeal in writing to the Regional Director.

The visitation SOP synthesis in GPS's policy library notes additional constraints: Significant Relationship Visitors are limited to two at any time, Board Rule 125-3-4-.05 requires a minimum of four hours of visitation on Saturdays, Sundays, and legal holidays at correctional institutions, and diagnostic inmates are prohibited from all visitation for the first six weeks of assignment to a diagnostic program.

For families, the practical effect is a system where the list of people you may see is fixed twice a year, the list of people you may call is fixed twice a year, and both lists are shorter than most families.

Benning v. Oliver: A Court Order GDC Would Not Follow

Ralph Benning filed his action on March 9, 2018 — well before GDC changed its email policy. It was the September 4, 2018 update to SOP 204.10 that added the requirement that an incarcerated person may only communicate by email with "a person on his/her approved visitation list." That restricted email contacts to the twelve people cleared for in-person visitation.

On November 18, 2024, U.S. District Judge Tilman E. "Tripp" Self III granted summary judgment for Benning and enjoined GDC "from enforcing SOP 204.10's email-contact restriction — i.e., limiting an offender's email contacts to those 12 persons who have been cleared to be on that offender's in-person visitation list." The order preserved GDC's ability to screen emails, prohibit emails sent to multiple recipients at once, and apply other reasonable measures like those applied to handwritten letters. A footnote noted that "there is no contact restriction on handwritten letters."

The court was blunt about the department's conduct: "this case evolved into quite the mess, and the Georgia Department of Corrections' actions in this matter are less than laudable."

Compliance did not follow. In November 2025, Benning filed a motion claiming GDC was not following the order and that prison officials were "willfully and intentionally" refusing to comply; he wrote that he "continues to be subject to email-contact restriction." On December 19, 2025, the court issued an Order to Show Cause; GDC responded January 2, 2026. At the February 10, 2026 hearing, Judge Self summoned Commissioner Oliver to the witness stand, saying he wanted the commissioner there to hear "from my mouth … how little credibility the Department of Corrections has." GDC attorney Elizabeth Crowder acknowledged there were some explanations but "little to no excuse" for the department's failure to comply. The court granted the motion to enforce.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's coverage, it had been more than a year since the district court ruled the 12-person email limit improper. Crowder said a directive was sent to all wardens and superintendents that they were no longer to enforce the portion of the policy limiting email contacts. Oliver said he instructed his team to turn on the email access "sometime shortly after Christmas." Judge Self's own summary: "If the 11th Circuit tells me to do something, I just don't get the luxury of not doing it. I don't understand how you do."

What Families Pay: Stamps, Transfers, and the Unregulated Margins

The per-minute rate has come down. As of September 2025, GDC state prison phone rates were $0.06 per minute for local, long-distance in-state, out-of-state, and international calls, plus associated taxes and regulatory fees for international calls. At that rate, a maximum-length 25-minute call costs $1.50. GPS's earlier communications reporting documented a different rate structure — local $0.13/min, in-state $0.16/min, interstate $0.21/min, with a 15-minute in-state call costing $2.10–$2.40 — reflecting the pre-cap regime.

The money now moves through the unregulated side. Email stamps cost $0.35 each at the standard rate, or $0.20 each in bulk packs of 50 for $10.00. A photo attachment costs an additional stamp. A videogram costs an additional three stamps. Music on JPay tablets runs $0.99 to $9.99 per song and up to $46 per album, against a consumer comparison of $10 per month for unlimited streaming on Spotify. E-books run $0.99 to $19.99.

Money transfers carry their own tiered fees: $3.50 for transfers of $0.01–$20.00 (a 17.5 percent surcharge on a $20 transfer), $5.00 for $20.01–$100.00 (10 percent on a $50 transfer), and $6.50 for $100.01–$300.00 (3.25 percent on a $200 transfer). The maximum single deposit through JPay in Georgia is $200.

E-messaging is not regulated by the FCC. The Martha Wright-Reed Act carved e-messaging out of rate regulation because it is not classified as audio or video communication — meaning there is no federal limit on what companies can charge. As FCC rate caps have been imposed on phone services, prison telecom companies have shifted to bundling regulated phone services with unregulated services — messaging, tablet features, games — to maintain revenue.

The aggregate amount Georgia families pay across all communication services has never been publicly reported. Neither has how GDC allocates the $8+ million in annual commission revenue, nor how many JPay tablets are in use across GDC facilities. GPS's reporting identifies each of these as open-records questions.

The Federal Rate Fight and Georgia's Non-Response

The regulatory backdrop has moved in both directions. In December 2022, Congress passed the bipartisan Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, signed January 5, 2023, expanding FCC authority to regulate phone and video calls from prisons and requiring "just and reasonable" rates. On July 18, 2024, the FCC voted unanimously to adopt sweeping rules: phone caps of $0.06/minute for prisons and large jails, $0.07 for medium jails, $0.09 for small jails, $0.12 for very small jails; first-ever video call caps of $0.11–$0.25/minute; a ban on all site commission kickbacks — an estimated $460 million annual revenue stream to correctional facilities; and elimination of ancillary fees including account funding fees, paper billing fees, live agent fees, and third-party transaction fees. The rules also prohibited providers from charging incarcerated people and families for the cost of monitoring technology, finding it serves "discretionary needs of the facility."

Then the commission reversed course. On June 30, 2025, the new Republican-majority FCC announced a two-year postponement, and its Wireline Competition Bureau issued a waiver order postponing compliance to April 1, 2027. On October 30, 2025, the FCC voted 2-1 along party lines to adopt "interim" rate caps raising the large-prison phone rate to $0.11/minute — an 83 percent increase over the 2024 rules — plus a $0.02/minute "facility cost recovery" additive that GPS's reporting describes as effectively a backdoor restoration of the commission system the 2024 rules had banned. Video interim caps were set at $0.23/minute for large facilities and up to $0.41 for small ones.

FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez dissented, calling the October 2025 order "indefensible": "Today, the Commission adopts an order that gives monopoly companies facing zero competition, the authority to increase the costs for families to maintain critical connections with their loved ones in prison." She had earlier said 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 called the changes "a betrayal of the families who entrusted the FCC to protect them from the notoriously predatory correctional telecom industry." Public interest groups including Worth Rises, UCC Media Justice, and the Benton Institute filed applications for review.

Georgia, meanwhile, has taken no legislative action to provide free calls or further reduce rates, despite ranking third nationally in kickback revenue. No bills have advanced in the Georgia General Assembly. At least nine states prohibit commission-based prison telecom contracts: California, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, Rhode Island, and South Carolina. Six states and New York City have eliminated phone charges entirely: Connecticut, California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and New York. New York made calls free administratively on August 1, 2025, at an estimated annual cost of $9 million, and reported a 45 percent increase in phone minutes in the first month. Connecticut's call volume rose 128 percent in the first month after free calls took effect, from 600,656 to 1,373,276 monthly calls.

What the Thread Holds: Contact, Violence, and the Cost of Severance

The research base GPS's reporting draws on consistently finds that contact matters. A 1972 California study found that incarcerated people with three or more visitors were 70 percent arrest-free after release, versus 50 percent with no visitors, and that "loners" were six times more likely to return to prison. A 2011 Minnesota study of 16,420 prisoners found any visit reduced felony reconviction by 13 percent and parole violations by 25 percent. A 2008 Florida study of 7,000 prisoners found each additional visit reduced two-year recidivism by 3.8 percent. A 2019 Iowa study found one additional monthly visit reduced misconduct by 14 percent and time served by 11 percent. A 2014 study found phone contact had a stronger effect on recidivism than visitation.

The inverse is also documented. Those unable to visit or call experienced PTSD, nightmares, hopelessness, depression, and anxiety at much higher rates than those who maintained contact. In the 1981 Georgia study of incarcerated women and their families, anxiety was strongly correlated with the mother's ability to plan her children's caretaker, whether she would get her children back, and her family's transportation problems in visiting. Of mothers unable to have family visit due to transportation, 41.7 percent had high anxiety, compared with 2.2 percent of mothers with no transportation problems.

The 1981 study — conducted on Georgia's incarcerated women and their families — remains one of the most detailed pictures of family contact in the state's prisons. It found that 76 percent of the women did not get to visit with their families as often as they would like. Thirty percent never got visits from their children. Twenty-two percent never telephoned their children. Eighty-five percent of the children lived more than 50 miles from the institution, making a visit "an all-day affair with a minimum of 1.5 hours travel time each way." For 37 percent of the women, transportation was a major problem when their families visited. Nine out of ten women approved of special visiting hours for children; 83 percent said they would like their child to spend the night at the prison if Georgia allowed it. One woman's answer to why: "I feel my child deserves more of me than a 2-hour visit twice a month."

The financial burden on families is now measured at national scale. The FWD.us June 2025 report, developed with Duke University and NORC at the University of Chicago from a survey of more than 1,600 people with incarcerated family members, found average direct out-of-pocket family spending of $4,200 per year — more than 27 percent of income for someone at the federal poverty line — and total annual costs to families approaching $350 billion, nearly four times the $89 billion taxpayers spend on jails and prisons. Families spend $1.8 billion annually on travel for prison visits, averaging $1,703 per year for the 51 percent of families who visit. Black family members average $2,256 per year on visit travel and pay 2.5 times more overall ($8,005/year) than white family members ($3,251/year). One in three families with an incarcerated loved one goes into debt to stay connected. Eighty-seven percent of the financial burden of prison communications is carried by women, disproportionately women of color.

The Center for Public Integrity's six-month investigation found families "forego medical care, skip utility bills and limit contact with their imprisoned relatives" to afford fees. GPS's reporting has collected the same testimony in Georgia. Susan Stokes, on disability income, spends $50 per month on phone calls: "I do without a lot, but his needs and care come first." Teresa, whose son is at Dooly State Prison: "I send $75 for commissary, and $40 for phone calls. When I can't afford it, I feel like I've failed him all over again." S'hantel Butler, an Army veteran and family member: "You're minimizing how much the prisoners can do, and you're maximizing the profits." And Tasha, whose husband was at Washington State Prison when five people died there in January 2026: "We're all doing time with him — broke, tired, and praying the next call doesn't cost more than we can pay."

When the Thread Is Cut: Silence, Delay, and Death

The most consequential failures of family communication are not about price. They are about notification.

GPS's reporting has documented a recurring pattern in which families learn of deaths, hospitalizations, and serious injuries from someone other than the department. In one case documented by GPS, a family was notified of Roy Mason Morris's death more than 14 months after it occurred, and no death certificate or autopsy records were located. In another, a deputy warden failed to disclose a prisoner's hospitalization for 11 days despite repeated wellness check requests from family.

Roy Mason Morris died October 15, 2023, at Dooly State Prison; GPS's registry lists the cause as Unknown/Pending. He was 64.

Anthony Joseph Zino died April 5, 2023, at Smith State Prison; GPS's registry lists the cause as Homicide. He was 71. GPS's staffing reporting describes Zino as having been found dead in his cell at Smith State Prison, with a cause of death of asphyxia due to neck compression, and states that GDC claimed "understaffing did not play a role" and refused to release investigative documents, labeling them "confidential state secrets."

Ahmod Dewayne Hatcher died January 11, 2026, at Washington State Prison; GPS's registry lists the cause as Homicide. He was 23. His mother told GPS: "They were the cause of my son getting killed because they weren't doing their job."

The department's public communication has narrowed. The Southern Center for Human Rights told the 2024 Georgia Senate Study Committee that GDC ended the practice of issuing press releases when someone dies in its facilities, and changed its publication of mortality review reports so that manner of death is no longer included when requested through open records. The DOJ's October 2024 investigation found that GDC misclassifies deaths, categorizing obvious homicides as "unknown" causes. GPS's own mortality tracking has recorded 1,927 deaths in GDC custody since 2020 — a figure that is a floor, since GDC reports deaths roughly two months late.

GPS's reporting describes accounts in which families receive partial or delayed information, if any, about injuries and deaths, and in which staff ignore or refuse information requests from families. GPS records show 12 reports of contact with family severed across two facilities between January and October 2026, and 8 reports of phone access restricted across two facilities between June and October 2026. GPS has received accounts of visitation being obstructed at multiple facilities in the same period.

The Last Thread

The through-line in Georgia's family communication system is not accident or oversight. It is design. A phone contract that pays the department a majority of every call. A Call Allow List capped at twenty and revisable twice a year. A visitation list capped at twelve and revisable twice a year. A fifteen-minute cutoff. A warden's authority to kill the phones for a day. An email restriction that a federal court struck down and the department took more than a year — and a contempt hearing — to stop enforcing.

GPS's investigative reporting on this subject describes a system that treats family contact as a privilege to ration and revoke, and documents the cheap fix the state refuses. The evidence for what contact does is not in dispute: it reduces recidivism, reduces misconduct, and reduces the anxiety that families carry on the outside. What Georgia has built instead is a system that monetizes the connection and then, when it fails, goes silent.

The people who pay for it are the ones who keep the ringer on.

Sources

This analysis draws on GDC Standard Operating Procedures 227.01 (Offender Access to Telephones), 227.05 (Visitation), 204.10 (email contact), and 215.23 (Transitional Center Resident Cell Phones); Georgia Board of Corrections Rule 125-3-2-.04; federal court orders and filings in Benning v. Oliver (M.D. Ga.), including the November 18, 2024 summary judgment order, the December 19, 2025 Order to Show Cause, and the February 10, 2026 enforcement ruling; FCC orders in WC Docket 23-62, including FCC 24-75 and FCC 25-75; the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act of 2022; reporting by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on the Benning compliance proceedings; GPS's investigative reporting on prison communications contracts, vendor conflicts, commissary pricing, and family financial burden, including "Prison Communications & Financial Exploitation: The Extraction Economy Behind Bars," "Follow the Money: Georgia Prison MAS Vendors, Contracts & Financial Conflicts," "Families as the Hidden Tax Base: How Incarceration Costs Are Shifted to Families," and "Prison Communication: Violence, International Evidence & Human Impact"; the 1981 National Institute of Justice study Georgia Women Prison Inmates and Their Families (NCJ 79468); the FWD.us 2025 family cost survey conducted with Duke University and NORC at the University of Chicago; the Center for Public Integrity's investigation of prison money transfer fees; the DOJ's October 2024 findings letter on Georgia prisons; the 2024 Georgia Senate Study Committee on the Department of Corrections final report (SR 570); and first-person accounts published in Georgia Prisoners' Speak — Tell My Story. GPS's mortality registry supplied the death records cited above.