Family Communication

Brief written August 9, 2026 from GPS Intelligence System data.

The Commission Model: How Phone Calls Became a Revenue Stream

Georgia's prison phone system is built on a structure that incentivizes making communication as expensive as possible. Under GDC's contract with Securus Technologies — the department's exclusive inmate telephone service provider since at least 2016 — the state receives a 59.6 percent commission on all call revenue, among the highest rates in the nation, where the average hovers around 43 percent. GPS's investigative research published in "Follow the Money: Georgia Prison MAS Vendors, Contracts & Financial Conflicts" documents that the contract includes a $4 million one-time signing bonus paid to GDC, a minimum monthly guarantee of $325,000, and annual commission payments that reached $7.04 million in 2022. The combined structure yields roughly $8 million per year flowing directly to the department from families paying to stay in touch with incarcerated loved ones.

The rates charged to families reflect this commission pressure. GPS reporting documents that Securus call rates in Georgia prisons are $0.13 per minute for local calls, $0.16 for in-state calls, and $0.21 for interstate calls — meaning a single 15-minute in-state conversation costs between $2.10 and $2.40. According to GPS's analysis published in "The Model State — ALEC and the Georgia General Assembly," the original contract, executed in September 2016 with a first amendment effective January 2017, set calls at approximately 13 cents per minute, or roughly $1.95 per 15-minute call.

The federal regulatory landscape has seen dramatic reversals that directly affect Georgia families. In July 2024, the FCC voted to cap prison phone rates at $0.06 per minute for prisons and large jails, ban site commissions entirely, and prohibit ancillary fees — a decision made possible by the bipartisan Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, signed into law in January 2023. But under a new Republican majority in 2025, the commission suspended those rules and approved higher interim rate caps, raising phone rates in large prisons from $0.06 to $0.10 per minute and adding a $0.02-per-minute facility fee. FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez described the reversal as "shielding a broken system that inflates costs and rewards kickbacks to correctional facilities at the expense of incarcerated individuals and their loved ones." Further, on June 30, 2025, the FCC's Wireline Competition Bureau issued a waiver postponing compliance deadlines to April 1, 2027 — an up to two-year delay.

Bianca Tylek of Worth Rises stated that "the Commission bent to the will of the industry that has spent decades exploiting the basic human need of incarcerated people and their families." The commission-based model, GPS's reporting notes, creates an incentive for corrections officials to approve higher prices, since percentage-based kickbacks directly increase facility revenue. These commissions flow into Inmate Welfare Funds — opaque accounts supposedly designated for incarcerated people's benefit, but which function as shadow budgets that bypass legislative appropriation oversight.

Georgia has now posted a comprehensive request for proposals for new offender communications services, including phones, tablets, video, and trust accounts. Solicitation 46700-GDC0001179 was posted December 6, 2025 with a February 20, 2026 deadline, but the current renewed contract's exact terms remain opaque — as GPS reporting notes, they require a Georgia Open Records Act request to GDC to obtain.

By contrast, five states — California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Colorado — have enacted laws requiring free communications in state prisons or jails. When Connecticut became the first state to make prison calls free in 2022, monthly call volume jumped from 600,656 to 1,373,276 — a 128 percent increase in the first month alone. The state budget allocation was $11.2 million, and families saved an estimated $12 million per year.

What Families Actually Pay: The Layered Burden

The financial weight of staying connected to an incarcerated family member extends well beyond phone bills. GPS's research report "Families as the Hidden Tax Base: How Incarceration Costs Are Shifted to Families," drawing on a first-of-its-kind national survey of more than 1,600 people with incarcerated family members conducted by FWD.us in collaboration with Duke University and NORC at the University of Chicago, documents the scale: among those who contribute, the median monthly direct expense is $172, representing 6 percent of household income, and 64 percent of family-incarcerated person pairs incur at least one direct expense.

The burden is distributed unevenly, falling hardest on those with the least to spare. Black families contributing to incarceration costs spend a median of $200 per month, representing 9 percent of household income — but their average monthly contribution is $413 per month, the highest of any racial group. Hispanic families spend a median of $230 per month, also representing 9 percent of household income, while white families spend a median of $120 per month. Mothers of incarcerated people spend a median of $286 per month. Spouses and coparents spend a median of $276 per month, the highest percentage of any relationship category at 12 percent of household income. Women, GPS's report notes, contribute similar dollar amounts as men but face a compounding burden: lost household income plus new expenses plus childcare plus emotional labor.

On top of phone charges, families face commissary costs and medical copays. According to GPS's investigative report "Georgia's Prison Commissary Extraction Machine," commissary markups on staple items run dramatically above retail — the investigation documented specific comparisons: a packet of ramen noodles that retails at Walmart for $0.31 and wholesales through restaurant suppliers for $0.31 is marked up in Georgia prison commissaries; Lay's Classic 1.5 oz bags available in 64-count cases at Sam's Club for $0.60 per bag are sold at substantially higher prices to incarcerated people; and Target's Dealworthy brand 2-packs of toothbrushes retail for $0.94 ($0.47 per brush) while commissary pricing inflates the cost to the consumer. GPS's analysis of the GDC commissary master list, which tracks 517 SKUs, reveals that in FY2024 alone, the commissary system moved $143,184 in just three high-volume electronics items, generating $25,271 in markup profit at a 21.4 percent margin — and those figures represent only a fraction of total commissary sales, which totaled over $22 million as far back as FY2005.

National data cited in GPS's reporting from The Appeal's nine-month investigation found commissary markups ranging from 40 percent to 600 percent above retail prices, while the same GPS report notes that salvage food brokers explicitly market to prison systems, dealing in "expired to 12-month-old inventory" and short-coded products for "deep discount retail stores, prison system, and institutional entities." A comparison from the GPS report shows that a $0.35 package of ramen noodles, which takes a minimum-wage worker three minutes to earn, requires a full two hours of prison wages at typical pay rates — and Georgia is one of seven states that do not pay incarcerated people for their labor.

Medical copays add a further layer. GPS's research published in "Mass Incarceration as a Public Health Crisis: Life Expectancy, Medical Access, and Georgia's Prison System" documents that GDC imposes a $5 copay for each self-initiated medical visit and a $5 charge per medication prescribed. The same copay framework applies to dental sick calls, and mental health visits initiated by the patient are subject to the same fee. With zero wages for most incarcerated people, a $5 copay represents an infinite proportion of prison earnings — and GDC's own handbook states that it will charge someone with a debt rather than denying care if they cannot afford a copay. A 2024 study in JAMA Internal Medicine found that 90.4 percent of state prisoners nationally were in facilities requiring copays, and people with chronic conditions in high-copay prisons had 2.17 times the odds of never seeing a clinician. The National Commission on Correctional Health Care, backed by 35 professional organizations including the American Medical Association, formally opposes medical copays in correctional settings. Twelve states have now eliminated prison medical copays entirely.

Court-related debt compounds the burden. According to the Ella Baker Center, cited in GPS's research, 65 percent of families with a loved one in prison were unable to meet their basic needs because court-related fines and fees sent them into debt of more than $13,000 on average. The Prison Policy Initiative found that 58 percent of families could not afford "the costs associated with a conviction."

Severed Ties: The Consequences of Blocked Communication

The infrastructure of financial extraction is paralleled by an infrastructure of blocking. The Department of Justice's October 2024 findings report on Georgia prisons documented that "gangs control multiple aspects of day-to-day life in the prisons we investigated, including access to phones." GPS's analysis in "Prison Communication: Violence, International Evidence & Human Impact" identifies a critical dynamic: if gang leaders use contraband phones to maintain order, blocking those phones without providing an alternative creates a power vacuum — and the violence that fills it.

The empirical pattern in Georgia is stark. GPS reporting documents that Georgia prison homicides quadrupled during the period when the state pursued a prohibition approach to phone blocking. When Managed Access Systems (MAS) — technology that creates a private cellular network to identify and block unauthorized phones — were deployed, facilities experienced surges in violence. At Dooly State Prison, MAS was activated around July 26, 2025; a riot occurred on September 11, 2025, just 47 days later. At Washington State Prison, MAS was activated in late December 2025, WiFi was cut off on January 6, 2026, and five people died between January 9 and 11, 2026 — just three to five days after the WiFi cutoff. In 2024, total deaths in Georgia prisons reached 333, a record that was 27 percent higher than 2023.

The Knox County Jail case provides a controlled example of what happens when in-person contact is eliminated. In April 2014, the jail replaced in-person visits with video-only visitation through Securus, citing lower violence and reduced contraband as justification. Instead, GPS's research found, contraband did not decrease, assaults increased by approximately 10 per month, and disciplinary infractions rose. The facility earned $68,777 in Securus kickbacks from March 2014 to November 2017 from the video-only contract.

The international evidence overwhelmingly supports the opposite approach. GPS's research report documents that monitored phone access reduces prison violence while removing communication channels increases it, and the United States is an outlier in treating phone access as a privilege to be denied rather than a tool to be managed. The United Kingdom's Ministry of Justice has stated that illicit mobile phones are "key enablers of the illicit economy in our prisons, which drives a significant amount of violence and self-harm" — but addresses this through monitored access, not prohibition.

Research on visitation and recidivism reinforces the importance of family contact. 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.

The Surveillance Build-Out: OWL, Managed Access, and the Push for Jamming

The state's response to the crisis in its prisons has been a massive investment in surveillance technology rather than communication access. GPS's investigative research published in "GDC Overwatch & Logistic (OWL) Unit Command Center: Technology, Surveillance & Budget Analysis" documents that Governor Kemp's total corrections investment package across amended FY2025 and FY2026 exceeded $600 million, with FY2026 representing a 44 percent increase over FY2022 levels. The OWL Unit Command Center, now under construction, is a centralized statewide surveillance hub that aggregates ten distinct technology streams: officer tablets, AeroDefense/AirWarden drone detection, managed access systems, electronic health records, Taser 10, body-worn cameras, mail screening, the Digital Forensics Unit, and the Data Intelligence Advanced Integration system — the latter funded at $1.95 million with no public description of its capabilities or vendor.

The OWL system, GPS's analysis shows, was never announced through a press conference or press release and does not appear on GDC's public-facing website. Its funding was distributed across three fiscal years and multiple budget bills — approximately $17.8 million specifically for the OWL Unit across FY2025 through FY2027 — in a pattern that GPS research characterizes as deliberately obscuring the total scope of investment. Representative Dale Washburn described OWL's function in a March 2025 legislative recap: body cameras and tasers "will be linked to an Over Watch Logistics Unit (OWL), funded at $7.2 million, that will continuously monitor security cameras across the state, enabling a rapid response to disturbances."

The OWL system pairs with Axon Fusus, a platform that originated in municipal policing real-time crime centers and enables "a single Operations Center" to have "real-time access to live and recorded video from multiple Corrections facilities, in one interface, accessed from a single computer." The Electronic Frontier Foundation warned in 2023 that Fusus "really encourages the adoption of additional surveillance tools," calling real-time crime centers "a gateway" to expanded surveillance. The radar component, O.W.L.'s GroundAware system — a joint venture between Leidos subsidiary Dynetics and Alabama Power Company — tracks humans, vehicles, and drones within a 15 km radius, encompassing significant civilian territory around prison facilities. GPS's research notes that radar systems deployed at 35 prison facilities across rural Georgia, predominantly in counties with significant Black populations, create surveillance coverage over surrounding communities without any public notice or community input.

All 35 of Georgia's operational state prisons are now covered by managed access cell phone interdiction, supported by a $35 million appropriation. The FCC adopted a jamming proposal on September 30, 2025, and in January 2026, Attorney General Chris Carr led a 23-state coalition advocating for FCC cell phone jamming authority in prisons. Senate Appropriations Chairman Blake Tillery declared that "prisons are for punishment and rehabilitation — not TikTok." The FY2026 budget allocated only $805,000 for vocational education programs, compared to over $50 million for technology and security improvements. The GDC-OWL WiFi network — the branded statewide prison WiFi system that incarcerated people used to communicate — appears nowhere in any budget document, board minutes, or procurement record under that name, and in 2026, GPS reporting documented that GDC disabled WiFi access statewide, cutting off one of the final remaining methods of telephone communication for incarcerated people.

Death, Silence, and the Search for Answers

The ultimate breakdown in family communication is death notification. GPS has received recurring accounts from families who learned of a loved one's death months or more than a year after it occurred, sometimes receiving no autopsy records or death certificates to explain how the person died. The Department of Justice's October 2024 findings report confirmed that GDC misclassifies deaths, categorizing obvious homicides as "unknown" causes. GPS's original research, published in "Prison Mortality & Deaths in Custody: Data Gaps, Misclassification, and Accountability Failures," found that in at least 13 cases, GDC reported prisoners died of "natural causes" while medical examiners later determined the deaths were accidental drug overdoses, and in 31 additional cases, GDC labeled deaths as "undetermined" while medical examiners ruled them accidental overdoses. Combined, GPS documented at least 44 misclassified deaths.

Statewide, GPS has independently tracked 1,860 deaths in GDC custody since 2020. The 332 deaths in 2024 represented an all-time record and a 27 percent increase over 2023. Georgia's prison homicide rate in 2024 was roughly eight times the national prison homicide rate, with 66 deaths investigated as homicides. The state's prison suicide rate exceeds 40 per 100,000 — double the national prison average — and GDC recorded 40 suicides in 2022, an all-time record.

Georgia does not proactively publish individual death data. GPS has tracked mortality through its own data collection systems, finding patterns of misclassification and underreporting. According to a study published in the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice in 2024, 21 of 54 prison systems nationwide release no individual death data at all. Georgia officials have restricted details about prison deaths as homicides have spiked, blocking access to death information. As former Atlanta mayor and gubernatorial candidate Keisha Lance Bottoms stated in a written response to GPS in August 2026: "This lack of transparency leaves grieving families with the unnecessary burden of seeking answers. Families are left calling county coroners' offices on their own, one by one, piecing together the truth about how their loved one died."

GPS records show five distinct reports of family contact being severed at Baldwin State Prison between March and May 2026 alone, spanning both high and moderate severity. Across the system, GDC's grossly inadequate staffing — a finding the DOJ emphasized in its 2024 report — leaves incarcerated people unsupervised and hampers staff's ability to respond to violence. The DOJ found that staff shortages contribute directly to gang control of housing units, response times to violent incidents are dangerously slow, and many posts go unfilled during shifts. The Senate Study Committee on the Department of Corrections, in its 2024 final report, found that staffing remains the single greatest challenge facing GDC and that high vacancy rates directly correlate with increased violence.

Sources

This analysis draws on multiple GPS investigative research reports including "Families as the Hidden Tax Base: How Incarceration Costs Are Shifted to Families," "Follow the Money: Georgia Prison MAS Vendors, Contracts & Financial Conflicts," "The Model State — ALEC and the Georgia General Assembly," "Prison Communication: Violence, International Evidence & Human Impact," "Mass Incarceration as a Public Health Crisis: Life Expectancy, Medical Access, and Georgia's Prison System," "Georgia's Prison Commissary Extraction Machine," "Prison Mortality & Deaths in Custody: Data Gaps, Misclassification, and Accountability Failures," "GDC Overwatch & Logistic (OWL) Unit Command Center: Technology, Surveillance & Budget Analysis," and "GDC Staffing Crisis: Vacancy Rates, Turnover & Workforce Challenges"; the FWD.us national survey of families with incarcerated loved ones conducted with Duke University and NORC at the University of Chicago; the Ella Baker Center's "Who Pays?" study; Department of Justice CRIPA findings reports; the 2024 Georgia Senate Study Committee on the Department of Corrections final report; federal court records; FCC orders and public statements; GDC standard operating procedures and commissary master data; the Georgia Governor's Budget Reports for Amended FY2025 through FY2027; and family accounts collected by GPS staff.