Brief written June 28, 2026 from GPS Intelligence System data.

The Price of a Phone Call: How Georgia Profits from Family Communication

The Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC) has constructed a closed-loop extraction economy that depends on family money. Because incarcerated people in Georgia work for zero wages—the state is one of only seven that pays nothing for regular prison labor—every phone call, email, commissary purchase, and medical visit is funded by relatives on the outside. At the same time, GDC has deployed a managed access system that blocks contraband cell phones, wiping out the unofficial communication networks that many families relied upon, while defying federal court orders to restore email contacts. The inevitable result is not only financial devastation for some of Georgia’s poorest households, but a cycle of isolation and violence that has drawn the condemnation of the U.S. Department of Justice.

The Extraction Economy: Commissary, Telecom, and the Tax on Families

Families with an incarcerated loved one in Georgia face a layered set of charges that siphon a significant share of household income. A first-of-its-kind national survey published in Science Advances and analyzed in GPS’s report Families as the Hidden Tax Base found that 64% of family-incarcerated person pairs incur direct expenses, with a median monthly cost of $172—roughly 6 percent of household income. For Black families the median rises to $200 per month (9 percent of income); for Hispanic families, $230 (9 percent). Spouses and coparents bear the heaviest burden, spending a median of $276 per month, or 12 percent of their income. Mothers of incarcerated individuals spend a median of $286 per month.

These averages obscure the specific fees that construct them. Phone calls from Georgia state prisons are provided by Securus Technologies, a subsidiary of Aventiv Technologies, at a rate of $0.06 per minute as of late 2025, with a maximum call duration of 25 minutes—placing a single full-length call at $1.50. Emails are routed through JPay, also owned by Securus’s parent, and cost $0.35 per stamp at the standard rate, or $0.20 when purchased in bulk packs of 50 stamps for $10. Adding a photo attachment consumes an additional stamp; a videogram costs three stamps. Money transfers, essential for funding commissary accounts, carry fees of $3.50 for deposits of $20 or less (a 17.5 percent surcharge) up to $6.50 for amounts between $100.01 and $300, with the maximum single deposit capped at $200. The aggregate amount Georgia families pay each year across these services has never been publicly disclosed.

The commissary system deepens the extraction. GPS’s investigative report Georgia’s Prison Commissary Extraction Machine documented that markups on commissary items range from 67 percent to 1,150 percent above retail, and that the state extracted $18.76 million in commissary profit in 2024 alone. In November 2025, GDC raised prices an average of 30 percent, and GPS identified 153 items where vendor costs had dropped but GDC either maintained or increased inmate prices, pocketing an estimated $420,000 in additional profit from price manipulation alone. A GDC Master Commissary List published in 2025 confirmed pricing and markup practices. Even food sold in the commissary is often sourced from salvage brokers: Georgia’s Prison Commissary Extraction Machine revealed that Marvell Foods, a major supplier, explicitly markets to the prison system and deals in products ranging from “expired to 12-month-old inventory.”

Medical copays add another layer. GDC charges $5 per sick call and $5 per medication issued. A JAMA study in August 2024 found that higher copays in prison systems deter treatment-seeking for serious conditions, and the National Consumer Law Center documented an inverse relationship between copay levels and healthcare utilization. These fees, combined with the state’s refusal to pay wages for labor, force families into the position of having to purchase everything from pain relievers to nutritious food for their incarcerated relatives.

The FCC Battle and Georgia’s Managed Access Lockdown

The fight over prison communication rates has a long arc. In 2000, Martha Wright, a grandmother paying exorbitant fees to call her incarcerated grandson, filed suit, and the movement she sparked culminated in the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act of 2022, which gave the FCC authority to regulate all prison phone and video rates. In July 2024, the FCC voted unanimously to cap prison phone rates at $0.06 per minute, set video call caps, and banned all site commission kickbacks—the estimated $460 million annual revenue stream correctional facilities received from telecom companies. The 2024 rules projected that a 15-minute call from a large jail would drop from $11.35 to $0.90.

Georgia, however, was one of the states most financially invested in the kickback model. In fiscal year 2018–2019, it received $8,062,200.60 in commission revenue, the third-highest total in the nation. Fourteen Republican attorneys general, including Georgia’s Chris Carr, sued to preserve commission kickbacks. In June 2025, a new Republican-majority FCC suspended the 2024 rules and adopted “interim” rate caps that raised the large-prison per-minute rate to $0.11 (an 83 percent increase) and added a $0.02-per-minute “facility cost recovery” additive—effectively backdooring the banned commissions. FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez called the order “indefensible,” and Worth Rises Executive Director Bianca Tylek said it was “a betrayal of the families who entrusted the FCC to protect them.”

None of this slowed Georgia’s investment in communication control. In April 2026, GPS reporting documented that GDC completed deployment of a Managed Access System (MAS) across all 34 state prisons at a capital cost of $50 million, with annual operating costs exceeding $15 million. The system blocks unauthorized cell signals, effectively blacking out the contraband cell phones that incarcerated people use to call families, access legal resources, and alert the outside world to violence. GDC subsequently disabled a WiFi workaround that had allowed hundreds of incarcerated people to maintain contact. Immediately after the blackout, GPS reported that a gang war erupted at Washington State Prison, with incarcerated individuals no longer able to communicate with the outside and violence spilling into multiple housing units. GDC publicly denied the severity of the incident, but GPS’s intelligence system tracked multiple sources at Baldwin State Prison who reported that family contact had been severed entirely between March and May 2026—a pattern corroborated by five distinct informants across three active cases.

Unpaid Labor: Forcing Families to Fund Survival

The extraction economy is structurally forced because Georgia pays incarcerated workers nothing for labor. The state is one of approximately seven that do not compensate individuals for regular prison work assignments—kitchen, laundry, groundskeeping, construction. GPS’s report Prison Labor & Wage Exploitation in Georgia noted that Black Georgians, who make up about 60 percent of the prison population but only 31 percent of the state population, are disproportionately trapped in this arrangement. With no wages, incarcerated people cannot purchase phone time, email stamps, or commissary goods; every dollar must come from family. The system then profits twice: from the free labor that maintains and operates prisons, and from the inflated commissary prices and communication fees paid by relatives. This closed loop, as GPS described it, means “the state benefits at every stage—from labor extraction through commissary markup through telecom fees and medical co-pays.”

The 2010 Georgia prison strike—the largest in U.S. history—centered on nine demands, including a living wage, decent healthcare, nutritional meals, and “access to families.” None of those demands have been met as of 2026. The legal architecture protecting this arrangement sits in Article I, Section 1, Paragraph XXII of the Georgia Constitution, which mirrors the 13th Amendment’s slavery exception and allows involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime.

First Amendment Defiance: GDC’s War on Email

While the state works to sever contraband communication, it has also fought to restrict approved digital contact. In November 2024, Judge Self of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia granted summary judgment in Benning v. Oliver, ruling that GDC’s 12-person email contact restriction violated the First Amendment and ordering the department to cease enforcing it. Yet in February 2026, GPS’s court monitoring found that GDC continued to enforce the email-contact restriction. On February 10, 2026, Judge Self held the GDC Commissioner in contempt for willfully violating the court order. The defiance directly impacts families who rely on email as the most affordable and accessible form of written communication with their incarcerated loved ones.

From Delayed Death Notices to Gang Wars: Communication Blackouts Kill

The DOJ’s sprawling investigation of 17 Georgia prisons, detailed in a 93-page report and summarized in GPS’s analysis DOJ Investigation of Georgia Prisons, found that “deliberate indifference” to violence, gang control of housing units, and pervasive understaffing created conditions where people “leave prison worse than when they came in.” Among the 82 minimum remedial measures, DOJ urged GDC to improve public transparency and stop withholding information from families.

The consequences of information blackouts are lethal. GPS has documented cases where families were not notified of deaths for months or years: the family of Roy Mason Morris learned of his death more than a year after it occurred and never received a death certificate or autopsy report. The DOJ found that GDC frequently misclassified homicides as “unknown” cause of death, and that seven deaths in 2022 were reclassified as homicides only in 2024. Incarcerated individuals interviewed by the DOJ reported that they do not report violence because they believe staff will take no action, and families receive “partial or delayed information, if any,” about injuries or deaths.

The contraband cell phone phenomenon—15,500 phones seized in 2024—is itself a symptom of the communication vacuum. Incarcerated individuals risk severe discipline to obtain phones because the authorized system is too expensive and restrictive. But those same phones are used by gangs to extort families: the DOJ confirmed that incarcerated gang members have assaulted people and coerced money from their relatives outside via contraband calls, a cycle that the managed access blackout does little to address. The underlying problem remains that the official communication channels are priced beyond reach and structurally designed to extract money rather than sustain family ties.

Georgia’s Inaction and the Fight for Free Calls

Six states and New York City have eliminated prison phone charges, and Connecticut, the first to do so, made calls, video calls, and emails free. Massachusetts saw call volume more than double after making calls free in 2023. New York reported a 45 percent increase in phone minutes the first month calls went free. In contrast, Georgia has taken no legislative action to provide free calls or further reduce rates, and no bills have advanced in the General Assembly, despite the state ranking third nationally in kickback revenue. Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, meanwhile, has led coalitions of 23 to 31 state attorneys general pushing for federal authorization to jam cell phone signals inside prisons—a policy that, without a free alternative, would sever the last lifeline for many families.

A few initiatives offer hope. The nonprofit Ameelio, which charges the corrections department rather than families for its communication platform, has been adopted by Iowa and is being piloted in Maine, but does not operate in Georgia. The 2026 gubernatorial race, with Governor Kemp term-limited, presents an opening: prison conditions have become a statewide issue after the DOJ’s findings of unconstitutional conditions and the governor’s proposed $600 million emergency spending plan. GPS has launched tools—the Lighthouse App, a Parole Packet Builder, and an AI advocacy platform—to equip families with information and legal resources as they navigate a system that profits from their isolation.

This analysis draws on GPS’s investigative reports “Prison Communications & Financial Exploitation,” “Families as the Hidden Tax Base,” “Georgia’s Prison Commissary Extraction Machine,” “Prison Labor & Wage Exploitation in Georgia,” and “DOJ Investigation of Georgia Prisons,” as well as federal court records in Benning v. Oliver, data from the FWD.us/Science Advances national survey, and GPS’s own intelligence system and mortality tracking.