Communications & Technology

One Company, Every Layer: Securus, JPay and the Architecture of Extraction

Georgia does not buy prison phone service from a competitive market. It buys from one company, under a contract that pays the state a share of every call, and it buys tablets, email and money transfers from the same corporate family. Securus Technologies holds the exclusive contract for paid telephone service from Georgia Department of Corrections state prisons, while JPay — a Securus subsidiary — provides tablets, email and money transfers (Prison Communications & Financial Exploitation: The Extraction Economy Behind Bars). Securus and ViaPath Technologies, formerly Global Tel*Link, together control roughly 80 percent of the United States prison telecommunications market, serving about 3,450 correctional facilities and 1.1 million incarcerated people. The national prison communications industry is a $1.4 billion annual business built on monopoly telephone, tablet, email and money-transfer services.

Securus sits at the bottom of a private-equity stack. It is a subsidiary of Aventiv Technologies, owned by Platinum Equity, the firm founded and controlled by billionaire Tom Gores, who also owns the Detroit Pistons; Aventiv is also parent to JPay and AllPaid, and the group is headquartered in Plano, Texas (#1661). The company was assembled through successive buyouts: H.I.G. Capital merged T-Netix and Evercom to create Securus in 2004 (#1663); Castle Harlan bought it for $440 million in 2011 (#1664); ABRY Partners paid $640 million in 2013 (#1665); and Platinum Equity acquired it in 2017 for approximately $1.50 billion while taking on over $1.3 billion in debt to finance the leveraged buyout (#1666, #1667). A second GPS record puts the 2017 purchase price at $1.60 billion (#5383); the public record does not reconcile the two figures.

The debt has since defined the company's behavior. Securus reports approximately $700 million in annual revenue at a 51 percent gross profit margin (#5384, #5385), but S&P downgraded it to CCC- in October 2023, Moody's rated it junk in November 2023, a distressed debt exchange followed in December 2023, and a SPAC deal collapsed (#5403). Its bonds traded at 47 cents on the dollar in March 2024 as the FCC prepared rate cuts (#1670) and later at 8 cents on the dollar (#5390). In April 2025 the company completed a distressed debt-for-equity exchange, issuing a $360 million loan and handing ownership to creditors, subject to FCC approval (#1673). Worth Rises described the underlying business model this way: "They must be unjustly and unsustainably profitable to service their debt and generate the returns private equity investors demand" (#1788).

Georgia's contract is one of the mechanisms producing that revenue. The original inmate telephone agreement with Securus dates to September 21, 2016, with an effective date of January 1, 2017 (#8327). It specifies a commission of 59.6 percent of gross revenue to the Georgia Department of Corrections — among the highest rates in the country, against a national average around 43 percent (#5393) — a minimum monthly guarantee of $325,000 (#5394), and a one-time signing bonus of $4,000,000 (#5395). In fiscal year 2019 the state collected $8,062,200.60 in commissions, the third-highest total of any state (#5396; Prison Communications & Financial Exploitation). In 2022 Securus paid Georgia $7.04 million (#5397). Georgia's commission rate stood at 46 percent as far back as 2000 (#1723).

The same contract bundled in surveillance products 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 (#5400). A Securus Forensics Lab staffed with two Intake Specialists, three Digital Forensics Technicians, six Intelligence Analysts, one MAS Intelligence Analyst and one Intelligence Operations Program Manager ran $68,000 a month, or $816,000 a year (#5399). Location Based Services, according to ACLU documentation cited in GPS's contract research, provides real-time tracking of virtually any cell phone in the country without warrant verification; a Missouri sheriff used it to track judges (#5416, #5427).

GPS's contract research describes the result as a circular flow: families pay Securus for calls; Securus retains 40.4 percent and remits 59.6 percent to the state; the state then pays Securus for managed access and forensic services; and Securus's managed access blocks contraband phones that would otherwise compete with its own paid network (Follow the Money: Georgia Prison MAS Vendors, Contracts & Financial Conflicts). That characterization of the blocking layer is GPS's analysis of the incentive structure, not a finding by any regulator. What is documented is the arithmetic of the commission and the parallel payments back to the vendor.

Procurement has moved through the National Association of State Procurement Officials master agreement, with Nevada as lead state and at least nine states — Georgia among them as of mid-2024 — participating (#1743, #3594). The agreement offers five vendors: GTL/ViaPath, Securus, Advanced Technologies Group, ICSolutions and Keefe Commissary Network (#1745), and NASPO itself takes 1 percent of gross revenue from every product sold under it, creating one more party with an interest in maximizing charges (#1744). Georgia posted a new comprehensive solicitation for offender communications — phones, tablets, video and trust accounts — on December 6, 2025, with a deadline of February 20, 2026 (#5423, #5530). What the public cannot see is the current contract itself: the full Georgia-Securus agreement, including the present commission percentage, annual revenue, term dates and renewal provisions, is not publicly available, and the most recent published amendment covers only 2017–2021 (#1777, #8328).

What Families Pay: Rates, Fees and the Tablet Economy

The headline rate in Georgia is low by historical standards and almost useless as a description of what a family actually spends. Georgia families currently pay $0.06 per minute for calls from state prisons (Prison Communications & Financial Exploitation: The Extraction Economy Behind Bars), and as of September 2025 that rate applied uniformly to local, in-state long distance, out-of-state and international calls, plus associated taxes and regulatory fees on international calls (#1719). A maximum-length call is described in one GPS collection as 25 minutes, costing $1.50 at that rate (#1720, #1721); one such call every day runs about $45 a month (#1722). Before the federal caps, families paid as much as $1 per minute, and a 20-minute call could cost $8 or more (Families as the Hidden Tax Base: How Incarceration Costs Are Shifted to Families).

The rate record does not agree with itself. A separate GPS contract file lists Securus's Georgia rates as $0.13 per minute local, $0.16 in-state and $0.21 interstate, with a 15-minute in-state call at $2.10 to $2.40 (#5398), and a summary of the 2016 contract puts calls at approximately 13 cents a minute, or about $1.95 per 15-minute call (#8327). Those numbers cannot all describe the same rate at the same moment. The $0.06 figure is tied to the FCC cap and dated September 2025; the higher figures appear in contract-period records without a comparable date. Georgia's own rules add a second contradiction: one GPS collection states a 25-minute maximum call length (#1720), while the governing procedure, SOP 227.01, programs a 15-minute maximum (#21238, #19917). Which limit a given facility actually enforces is not documented publicly.

What is not in dispute is the fee architecture around the per-minute charge. In Georgia prisons, JPay email stamps cost $0.35 each at the standard rate and $0.20 each in 50-stamp bulk packs costing $10.00 (#1657, #1658, #1801). A photo attachment costs another stamp; a videogram costs three (#1725, #1726). Money transfers run $3.50 for deposits of $0.01 to $20.00, $5.00 for $20.01 to $100.00, and $6.50 for $100.01 to $300.00 (#1730, #1731, #1732), with a maximum single deposit of $200 (#1733). The structure is regressive by design: $3.50 on a $20 transfer is a 17.5 percent surcharge. At the Bulloch County jail, which contracts with Securus, families also pay a $3.00 deposit fee on top of per-minute charges (#1737).

Tablet content is where the markup becomes hardest to defend. JPay tablets, deployed in Georgia prisons beginning in 2015 and provided at "no cost" to the department or to incarcerated people (#1724), operate on a closed network with no internet access (#1797). Music costs $0.99 to $9.99 per song and up to $46 per album, against $10 a month for unlimited streaming on Spotify (#1728). Games ran $24.99 a month on GTL/ViaPath tablets (#1740); e-books run $0.99 to $19.99 (#1741). A tablet loaded with music and games can represent more than $500 in purchases (Economic Exploitation in Prison: Wages, Fees, and the Poverty Cycle). Incarcerated people in Georgia quickly found ways to hack the JP5 tablets for internet access, creating an underground market — one documented practice being $1,000 of prepaid text messages copied to a thumb drive and resold inside for $5 to $10 (#1742). The tablet program itself generated 865 complaints between March and September 2023, 73 percent of them unresolved, and GDC canceled it in December 2023 (#5401); the settlement included a nondisparagement clause barring the department from publicly criticizing Securus (#5402).

Taken together, a Georgia family maintaining regular contact with a loved one in a state prison is estimated to spend $115 to $135 a month on phone, email, money transfers, video and entertainment (#1752), with extreme cases reaching $500 a month (#1751). One in three families with an incarcerated loved one goes into debt to stay connected (#1748; Families as the Hidden Tax Base), and 87 percent of the financial burden of prison communications is carried by women, disproportionately women of color (#1749). Families report forgoing food, medical care and utility payments to maintain contact (#1796). A mother in one GPS interview put the arithmetic plainly: "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" (Prison Communication: Violence, International Evidence & Human Impact).

County jails are worse. A family with a loved one in a Georgia county jail could pay three to four times the state prison amounts given higher per-minute rates and commission structures (#1792). Glynn County jail holds a 69 percent commission rate on its Paytel contract — the highest in the coastal region — and collected more than $300,000 annually in phone and tablet fees against an average daily population of 411 (#1683, #1684, #1685), charging $0.18 per minute local, $0.19 in-state and $0.21 out-of-state (#1736). Chatham County has a 52 percent Paytel commission and charges $8 for a 20-minute video call (#1686, #1687). Liberty County holds a 50 percent HomeWAV commission and charges close to $1 per text message (#1688, #1738). Prison communications services carry markups of 1,000 percent or more over comparable consumer telecommunications costs (#1772). The pattern is not new: a 1981 study of Georgia women prisoners found that a monthly call was permitted only if the family accepted the charges (Georgia Women Prison Inmates and Their Families, NCJ 79468), and that 26 percent telephoned their children weekly while 22 percent never called them at all (#15666, #15649).

The Regulatory Seesaw: Federal Rate Caps and Georgia's Inaction

The fight over prison phone rates is twenty-five years old and has reversed twice in eighteen months. It began in 2000, when Martha Wright — a grandmother paying exorbitant fees to call her incarcerated grandson — filed suit alongside other families and the Center for Constitutional Rights against Corrections Corporation of America (Prison Communications & Financial Exploitation: The Extraction Economy Behind Bars). Congress responded with the bipartisan Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, passed in December 2022 and signed January 5, 2023 as Public Law 117-338, expanding FCC authority to regulate phone and video calls from prisons and jails at "just and reasonable" rates (#1695, #8332).

On July 18, 2024, the FCC voted unanimously — including Trump-appointed Commissioner Brendan Carr — to adopt sweeping rules (#1696). The order capped prison and large-jail phone rates at $0.06 per minute, with $0.07 for medium jails, $0.09 for small jails and $0.12 for very small jails (#1697, #1698); set the first-ever interim video caps at $0.16 per minute for prisons and $0.11 to $0.25 for jails (#1699); banned site commissions outright, eliminating an estimated $460 million annual revenue stream to correctional facilities (#1700, #1682); and eliminated ancillary fees including account funding, paper billing, live agent and third-party transaction fees (#1701). The commission projected roughly $500 million a year in family savings, nearly 2 billion additional call minutes annually, and a 15-minute call from a large jail falling from $11.35 to $0.90 (#1702, #1703, #1704). Fourteen Republican attorneys general sued, specifically to preserve commission revenue (#1706); the First Circuit refused Securus and Pay Tel's request for a stay in November 2024 (#1708).

Then the seesaw tipped. On June 30, 2025, the new Republican-majority FCC announced a two-year postponement of the 2024 rules, citing implementation challenges and safety concerns, pushing compliance to April 1, 2027 (#1709, #8334). Commissioner Anna Gomez dissented, saying 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" (#1710, #947). On October 30, 2025, the FCC voted 2-1 along party lines to adopt interim caps that raised the large-prison rate to $0.11 per minute — an 83 percent increase over the 2024 rules — with $0.12, $0.14 and $0.18 for progressively smaller jails, video caps of $0.23 to $0.41, and a new $0.02 per minute "facility cost recovery" additive that functions as a backdoor restoration of the commission system the 2024 order had banned (#1711, #1712, #1713, #1714). Only three states — Florida, Kentucky and Oklahoma — had rates above the new caps when they were adopted, meaning most facilities were already compliant with the stricter 2024 rules (#1715). Worth Rises estimated the change would cost families an additional $215 million a year (#1716); Gomez called the order "indefensible" (#1785). Public interest groups including Worth Rises, UCC Media Justice and the Benton Institute filed for review (#1799).

The regulatory gap that survives all of this is e-messaging. The Martha Wright-Reed Act carved email out of rate regulation because it is not classified as audio or video communication, leaving no federal limit on what companies charge per stamp (#1729). As phone rates were capped, companies shifted revenue toward unregulated services — messaging, tablet features, games — bundling them with regulated phone service to hold overall revenue steady (#995, #1003). Securus explicitly pushed tablet adoption and content sales in 2024, even as it faced potential bankruptcy, as a strategy to move revenue from regulated phones to unregulated tablets (#1798).

Georgia has not moved independently. The state has taken no legislative action to provide free calls or further reduce rates, despite ranking third nationally in commission revenue, and no bills have advanced in the General Assembly (#1762). Six states and New York City have eliminated phone charges entirely — Connecticut, California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Minnesota and New York (#1753, #950) — and the results are consistent. Connecticut became the first state to make calls free in October 2022, on an $11.2 million budget allocation, with families saving $12 million a year (#5320, #5324); monthly calls rose from 600,656 to 1,373,276 in the first month, a 128 percent increase (#5321). Massachusetts made calls free in December 2023, the first state to include all local jails, and call volume more than doubled (#1755, #5327). New York implemented free calls administratively on August 1, 2025 at an estimated annual cost of $9 million, and saw a 45 percent increase in phone minutes in the first month (#1757, #1758); New York City had made jail calls free in 2019, saving families an estimated $10 million a year (#1759). Florida's governor vetoed even a $1 million pilot offering one free 15-minute call per month (#1761).

Managed Access: $50 Million to Block the Signal

Georgia's answer to contraband phones is a technology called a Managed Access System, and it is the largest single technology investment in the prison system. A MAS creates a private cellular network that mimics commercial carriers; when a phone connects, the system identifies it by IMEI and IMSI, checks a whitelist, and blocks anything unauthorized, supporting 2G through 5G with 911 passthrough and CALEA compliance (MAS Technology, Vendors & Deployment in Georgia Prisons). The FCC's own notice describes managed access as a micro-cellular private network that analyzes transmissions to determine whether a device is authorized to reach public carrier networks (#21312), and notes that unlike a jammer, a MAS lets authorized devices and emergency calls connect while terminating unauthorized transmissions (#21345).

Three vendors hold the FCC contraband interdiction licenses covering 35 Georgia facilities: Trace-Tek/ShawnTech at 28, CellBlox — a Securus subsidiary — at 4, and Hawks Ear Communications at 3 (#5478, #3540, #3542, #3543). ShawnTech claims to hold, with Trace-Tek, 86 percent of all contraband interdiction system licenses issued nationally (#5484, #3541, #5405). CellBlox's Georgia presence dates to a 2014 managed access pilot at a maximum-security facility, and Securus acquired its assets in January 2015, subsequently investing more than $40 million in managed access technology (#3545, #3544). CellBlox's Wireless Containment Solutions had blocked 1.7 million calls in Georgia prisons by 2017 (#5489). ShawnTech's C-DOS program goes further than blocking: it permanently disables contraband phones from connecting to any network, has disabled more than 4,000 devices, and markets the capability as bypassing the warrant process (#5483, #5406, #3546). No lawsuit has yet tested that practice, and the legal questions it raises — whose property is being destroyed, and under what authority — remain open (#5418).

The money is substantial and the paper trail is thin. Georgia's contraband technology budget is approximately $50 million, funding the three managed access vendors (#5379, #5337), and the state spent approximately $50 million through fiscal year 2026 deploying managed access, expanding from 23 to 27 facilities (#5476). The amended fiscal year 2025 budget carried $35,027,675 for managed access and drone detection — the largest single technology line item in the department's budget, covering all 35 operational state prisons (#3520, #3585) — with an additional $13,387,475 in amended fiscal year 2026 and existing funds of $10,793,600 carried into fiscal year 2027 (#3018, #5518, #5517). Drone detection accounted for $966,000 (#5519), off-site mail screening for $913,248 (#3525), and mail screening generally runs $900,000 to $1.8 million a year (#5520). Separately, GDC holds an open agency contract with Computech International estimated at $20,936,400 for cellular managed access equipment, installation, training and maintenance, purchased cooperatively off a federal GSA schedule (#21489).

The vendor structure raises harder questions than the budget does. No request for proposals, sole-source justification or contract award was found on the Georgia procurement registry or Team Georgia Marketplace for any of the three managed access vendors — 35 facility contracts worth tens of millions of dollars with no visible procurement record (#5496), and the specific procurement vehicle for the $35,027,675 deployment is not publicly identifiable (#3570). Hawks Ear Communications, which holds contracts at Hancock, Phillips and Valdosta state prisons, is a two-person operation with no physical office: Roger Banks of Fort Lauderdale is listed as manager and also runs a windows-and-door company; Myles Lu of Vancouver is the technical contact at Star Solutions International; the Fort Lauderdale address is an entertainment and intellectual property law office; the Atlanta address is a Regus virtual office; and the company has no website or track record (#5493, #5408, #5409). Its FCC experimental license, tested near Hancock State Prison, listed equipment as "TBD" and was never granted (#5494, #5410), and the company did not obtain contraband interdiction certification until March 2025 — meaning it operated at Georgia facilities without certification for years (#5495, #3590). Hawks Ear registered in Georgia in March 2022, and no procurement records were found for how its three contracts were awarded (#5411). Before any of that, in fiscal year 2019, the state posted an interim sole source for a three-facility Hawks Ear managed access pilot estimated at $2,300,000, describing it as based on a previously conducted limited proof-of-concept test and noting that a successful pilot might result in a formal RFP (#21491).

The facility count itself is contested in the record. One set of GPS findings describes managed access hardware installed at 35 Georgia facilities and all 35 operational prisons covered (#5452, #5478, #3585); another describes expansion from 23 to 27 prison facilities through fiscal year 2026 (#5477). The difference may reflect facilities versus housing units, or licensing versus active deployment, but GPS's published research does not reconcile the two figures, and the department has not explained it.

What the system has not done is reduce phone-related incidents. Despite managed access deployment, phone incidents rose from 8,966 in 2019 to 10,578 in 2023 to a record 11,880 in 2024, with 23,623 total incidents logged between 2019 and 2025 (#5507, #5336). Contraband phones are replaced faster than they can be blocked, through drone delivery and staff smuggling (#5442), and VOIP technology bypasses carrier-based blocking entirely, so by the time a device is identified the call is already made (#5441). Inmates at Macon State Prison exploited the 911 passthrough requirement to place 204 emergency calls in 2024, none legitimate, overwhelming and shutting down a 911 center serving 13 Georgia counties (#5512). During the deployment's second phase, heart monitors and wireless medical devices stopped functioning — a potential Eighth Amendment problem under Estelle v. Gamble (#5501). And if the FCC approves cell phone jamming in prisons, the entire private managed access vendor ecosystem becomes unnecessary (#5430) — after Georgia has spent $50 million on it.

The Violence Record: Seizures, Scams and Named Deaths

Georgia seizes extraordinary numbers of phones and still cannot keep them out. More than 37,000 contraband phones have been confiscated since 2022, averaging about 1,300 a month (#5481, #2912, #7546); 15,500 or more were seized in 2024 alone (#1769, #21217); 12,483 were recovered between November 2021 and August 2023 (DOJ Investigation of Georgia Prisons: Violence, Safety & Constitutional Violations); and an estimated 20,000 or more are inside the prisons at any given time (#5508). Contraband phones sell for $800 to $1,200 inside, against roughly $100 on the street (#5370), and their price moves with the availability of legitimate alternatives: when tablets were available between 2015 and 2017, contraband phone prices dropped from $1,200 to $1,500 down to $200 to $500 (Follow the Money: Georgia Prison MAS Vendors, Contracts & Financial Conflicts). Drone incidents rose about 600 percent, from 43 in 2019 to 297 in 2023 and 283 in 2024, with more than 1,000 since 2022 (#5509, #5374). Operation Skyhawk, which concluded in March 2024, produced 150 arrests including eight correctional officers, and seized 87 drones, 273 phones and 22 weapons (#3552, #3553). More than 360 staff have been arrested for smuggling contraband since 2018 (#5419), and one correctional officer received $150,000 for smuggling 150 phones into a Georgia prison (#5420).

The federal investigation documented what the phones are used for. The Department of Justice found that "gangs control multiple aspects of day-to-day life in the prisons we investigated, including access to phones" (DOJ Investigation; Prison Communication: Violence, International Evidence & Human Impact), that contraband weapons, drugs and cellphones are commonplace, and that incarcerated people and their families have been assaulted or threatened to extort money from relatives outside (DOJ Investigation; #2578). Thomas White pleaded guilty in September 2023 to using a contraband phone from a Georgia prison to direct a drive-by shooting near Marietta (#2524). Documented phone-based fraud traced to Georgia prisons includes $464,920 stolen from 119 identified victims across six or more states from Calhoun State Prison (#5433); $3.5 million taken by a single incarcerated person at Telfair State Prison (#5432); more than $560,000 extorted from more than 440 military members in a sextortion ring (#5435); and a jury duty scam from Autry State Prison that produced more than 50 indictments, including 15 corrections officers (#5431). Two men were convicted on January 9, 2026 for conspiracy to commit wire fraud using contraband phones and VOIP to spoof police numbers nationwide from Calhoun State Prison (#5438). None of these operations was stopped by the managed access system; all were discovered after the fact (Policy & Advocacy: Monitor-Not-Block, Scamming, Legal Path & Cost Model).

GPS's research also reports a temporal pattern between activation of blocking systems and subsequent violence. Every confirmed managed access activation was followed by significant violence within two to seven weeks, according to GPS's facility-level tracking (#5500, #5356). At Dooly State Prison, managed access was activated around July 26, 2025, and a riot occurred on September 11, 2025 — 47 days later (#5354, #5497). At Washington State Prison, the system arrived in late December 2025; on January 6, 2026 the department cut off a statewide WiFi workaround that incarcerated people had been using to tunnel through VPNs, eliminating the last communication channel for hundreds of blacklisted phones; and between January 9 and 11, 2026, five people died (#5498, #5355, #5499). GPS presents this as a correlation observed in its own tracking, not as a demonstrated causal finding, and the department has not published any analysis of the relationship. What the sequence does establish is that the state's most restrictive communication shutdowns coincided with its deadliest incidents.

GPS's death registry records one death directly tied to the record set behind this page:

• Marquis Reshawn Jefferson died May 11, 2022, at Washington State Prison; GPS's registry lists the cause as homicide and his age as 26. Reporting in GPS's staffing research documents that Jefferson was killed in an attack involving multiple people, and that his brother later obtained records showing the prison was so understaffed that no one was watching the dorm when the attack occurred — other incarcerated people carried his body to the door before anyone noticed (Staffing Crisis & Correctional Officer Turnover).

The comparison cases do not support the blocking strategy either. In South Carolina, legitimate phone calls rose 68 percent after managed access deployment, but assaults also rose 68 percent between 2013 and 2017, and homicides went from 1 to 12; a 25 percent guard vacancy rate was identified as the primary driver of the violence (#5527). Mississippi's Parchman facility, the first managed access deployment in the country in 2010, blocked 10,600 call attempts in its first 24 hours and reduced unauthorized attempts 60 percent in the first month (#5528), with unauthorized calls falling from 20,043 in year one to 393 in year three (#5529) — but that is a call-blocking metric, not a violence metric. By contrast, the United Kingdom installed in-cell landline phones in 20 prisons by 2018 at a cost of £10 million, restricted to pre-approved numbers with all calls recorded, and found that the phones reduced tension on the wings by eliminating fights over communal phone queues and cutting demand for illicit mobiles that "fuel violence" (Prison Communication: Violence, International Evidence & Human Impact; #5313, #5310, #5311). More than 50 UK prisons now have in-cell phones, with a reported 39 percent reduction in reoffending (#5447). Norway guarantees at least 30 minutes a week of phone access and reports a 20 percent recidivism rate against 43 percent in the United States (#531, #5449).

Georgia's own homicides rose during the rollout: 31 in 2022, 38 in 2023 and 66 in 2024 as reported by the department (#5479). GPS's review could confirm only 45 of the 66 homicides reported for 2024, with roughly 21 fourth-quarter deaths unidentified because of information suppression (#5503). The most violent facilities by homicide count — Smith with 17, Macon with 17, Telfair with 8, Hancock with 8, Phillips with 7, Valdosta with 7 and Ware with 7 — all have a contraband interdiction vendor operating managed access (#5506); Macon, the deadliest facility with nine or more homicides in 2024, is a CellBlox site (#5492, #5491).

The Rules Inside: GDC Policy, Georgia Law and the Courts

Whatever the technology does, the daily experience of phone access is set by procedure. Georgia Department of Corrections SOP 227.01, effective March 27, 2023, requires each facility to provide "reasonable and equitable access to telephones," with the warden or superintendent determining supervision consistent with the facility's mission (#21230). Each incarcerated person submits a Call Allow List and a separate Attorney Telephone Request Form covering a maximum of 20 people (#19914, #21231); only calls to numbers on those lists can be placed (#19915, #21232), and adding the Georgia Public Defender Council's number consumes one of the 20 slots (#19916). Cell phone numbers may be listed; remote forwarding numbers may not (#21232). Revisions are tied to the last digit of the person's identification number and occur only in designated months, with one submission per review period (#19919, #19920), and results are returned within 14 working days (#19923). The parallel visitation rule caps the approved visitor list at 12 people (#19921) and allows list changes only on arrival at the first permanent facility or during May and November (Family contact rules in Georgia prisons: GDC's phone and visitation policies, and Benning v. Oliver).

Calls are recorded unless a number is blocked for recording, with attorney and Indigent Defense Council lines entitled to attorney-client confidentiality if designated on the request form (#21234). Facilities must post written notice by each phone that calls may be monitored or recorded (#21235); monitoring access is limited to the warden, superintendent and their designees (#21233), may be triggered by security concerns or random selection (#21236), and outside agency requests from the FBI, GBI or other law enforcement must go in writing through the warden to the Assistant Commissioner, Facilities Division (#21237). Restrictions for disciplinary infractions cannot be applied to calls about legal access, the PREA hotline or ADA issues, though people under investigation for serious criminal offenses may have privileges suspended until the investigation concludes (#21240). In an emergency, a warden may disable the entire offender phone system for up to 24 hours, and up to 48 hours with written Regional Director approval (#19918, #21239). TTY, Interpreting Phone Service and VRS calls must be allowed at least 30 minutes (#21238).

Georgia law backs this regime with criminal penalties. O.C.G.A. § 42-5-18 defines a "telecommunications device" broadly, including telephones, cellular telephones, personal digital assistants, transmitting radios and networked computers (#21197), and makes it unlawful both to furnish such a device to an incarcerated person and for an incarcerated person to possess one "without the authorization of the warden or superintendent or his or her designee" (#21199, #21200). Possession is a felony punishable by one to five years (#21201); furnishing is a felony punishable by ten years (#21202), and a department employee or contractor who does it faces the same ten-year term (#21203). A cell phone qualifies as a telecommunications device under the statute, and ignorance of the rule is no defense (Court of Appeals of Georgia decisions summarized in Cell Phones in Georgia Prisons: What the Law Allows). The department adds its own fees: a $100 administrative processing fee for a possession finding (#21228) and a $4.00 standard fee for each disciplinary report (#21229). The statute is more permissive than it appears — the operative language bars unauthorized phones, not phones as such, and wardens already hold statutory authority to authorize telecommunications devices (#5453). Georgia has exercised that authority at scale: since July 1, 2016, all 13 transitional centers, housing roughly 2,344 residents, have allowed personal cell phones, with residents buying their own devices and staff able to search them at any time under a signed waiver (#5443). When the department tried to restrict transitional center phones in May 2022, backlash forced a reversal (#5446).

The federal courts have set the outer boundary of any claim. A prisoner has no right to unlimited telephone use, and restrictions survive if reasonably related to legitimate penological interests — the Sixth, Eighth, Ninth and Eleventh Circuits have all said so, in Washington v. Reno, Benzel v. Grammer, Valdez v. Rosenbaum and Pope v. Hightower respectively (#21327, #21404, #21428, #21381). No prisoner has an objectively reasonable expectation of privacy in outbound calls (#21429, #21448), and Georgia courts have admitted recorded jail calls against defendants where notice was given in a handbook, on signs and in a recorded warning before each call (#21286, #21288, #21291). The Seventh Circuit rejected a First Amendment challenge to exclusive prison phone contracts and high collect-call rates in Arsberry v. Illinois, holding that discriminatory tariffed rates fall within telephone regulators' primary jurisdiction rather than the federal courts (#21330, #21331).

That leaves the policy layer — and the state has been active there. Attorney General Chris Carr has led coalitions of 22 to 31 state attorneys general pressing the FCC and Congress for authority to jam cell phone signals inside prisons (#5513, #5516, #1770, #21216); in June 2024 he wrote to the FCC advocating jamming authority (#5514), and the Commission adopted a jamming proposal on September 30, 2025 (#5515, #21342), proposing to deauthorize contraband devices so that jamming would not violate section 333 (#21343, #21372). Georgia's own signal jammer statute, Act 495, was signed May 11, 2026 and takes effect July 1, 2026, exempting public safety, law enforcement and correctional agencies from the state's jammer prohibition (#21298, #21297, #21295, #21296). Whether that survives federal law is unresolved: the FCC maintains that operating a jammer is generally illegal under 47 U.S.C. §§ 302a(b) and 333, with exceptions only for the federal government (#21368, #21374, #21369). The commissioner has described contraband cell phones as deadly weapons (#2883, #7519, #5456), and the department's board has watched video of him at a Washington press conference on jamming (#21252).

The email side has gone worse for the department than the phone side. In Benning v. Oliver, the court enjoined GDC from enforcing SOP 204.10's restriction limiting an incarcerated person's email contacts to the 12 people cleared for in-person visitation, while allowing continued screening and other reasonable measures (#19933, #19930); the restriction had been added in a September 4, 2018 update to the procedure (#19928). The court granted summary judgment and issued the injunction on November 18, 2024, observing that the department's actions had been "less than laudable" (#19932, #19931). On December 19, 2025 the court issued an order to show cause, and on February 10, 2026 it granted the plaintiff's motion to enforce — after summoning Commissioner Tyrone Oliver to the stand to hear "how little credibility the Department of Corrections has" (#26315, #26317, #19936). The department's own lawyer acknowledged "little to no excuse" for the non-compliance (#19937). Email access was turned on shortly after Christmas, more than a year after the ruling (#19940).

Monitor, Don't Block: The Alternative, and What Is Still Not Public

GPS's policy research argues that Georgia has already bought most of the infrastructure needed for a different approach and is simply running it in the wrong mode. The state has contracted with LEO Technologies for AI-based phone monitoring, a system built on AWS cloud infrastructure with speech-to-text, semantic analysis and machine learning that has been used to solve cold homicides, prevent suicides, disrupt trafficking and build racketeering cases (Policy & Advocacy: Monitor-Not-Block, Scamming, Legal Path & Cost Model; Prison Communication: Violence, International Evidence & Human Impact). The Tecore iNAC managed access platform already distinguishes authorized from unauthorized devices and passes pre-authorized activity to commercial networks, meaning the change from blocking to monitoring is a configuration decision rather than a hardware redesign (#5451). The statutory authority exists: the Commissioner can issue a policy directive, wardens can formally authorize registered devices, and the precedent is already operating at 12 or more transitional centers (#5454, #5471).

The cost case is close to a wash. Blocking via managed access costs an estimated $443 to $556 per incarcerated person per year net of kickbacks, while monitored access costs approximately $583 to $646 — a premium of roughly $90 to $100 per person per year (#5458, #5457, #5459). Implementing the monitoring model across the prison system carries an estimated marginal cost of $5 million to $7 million (#5475). Against that, family contact through phone access reduces recidivism by 13 to 25 percent (#5461), and even a 5 percent reduction in recidivism — about 2,350 fewer people returning to prison — would save an estimated $73.5 million a year (#5460, #5351). GPS's summary argument is that for an additional $90 per incarcerated person per year, less than the price of a single contraband phone, Georgia could move from a system that produces no intelligence to one that catches scammers and preserves families (#5472). A three-phase strategy — a single-facility pilot, data publication, and system-wide expansion — would require no legislative action at any point (#5471). Blocking, by contrast, produces a phone number; monitoring produces a criminal case (#5470, #5341).

The objections are political rather than evidentiary. Attorney General Carr, running for governor in 2026, has said that "prisoners with contraband cell phones are ordering murders" (#5455), and the commissioner has called a contraband cell phone a deadly weapon (#5456). Advocates counter that jammers do not respond to riots, stabbings or medical emergencies — staff do — and that no amount of jamming addresses a staffing crisis (#5365). Georgia's experience lends that argument force: homicides quadrupled during the phone crackdown period (#5338, #5381), 360 or more staff have been arrested for smuggling (#5419), and the managed access vendors themselves have a financial interest in the contraband trade continuing, since contraband phones drive demand for both the blocking systems and the paid phone service that replaces them. GPS notes that it found no evidence that managed access data has ever been used for staff accountability, despite the systems' technical ability to detect unauthorized staff phones in housing units (#5422, #5421). That is an inference about incentive, stated as such, and the absence of accountability use is a documented null result.

The largest finding may be what the public cannot see. Revenue from phone, tablet and email charges in Georgia is not publicly disclosed (#1908), and the aggregate amount families pay across all communication services has never been publicly reported (#1778). The number of JPay tablets currently in use and the revenue breakdown by service type has not been reported (#1780). How GDC allocates its commission revenue is unknown and is a straightforward open records question (#1781). No systematic survey of telecom contracts, providers, rates and commission rates exists across Georgia's 159 counties (#1779). Where commissary and communications revenue flows through the Inmate Welfare Fund — the opaque account that functions as a shadow budget outside legislative appropriation — is not disclosed, and GDC quoted $88,944 for the records (Prison Labor & Wage Exploitation in Georgia; Families as the Hidden Tax Base: How Incarceration Costs Are Shifted to Families). And the GDC-OWL WiFi network, the branded statewide prison WiFi system, appears nowhere in any budget document, board minutes or procurement record under that name; its vendor, cost, specifications and relationship to managed access remain undocumented (#3572). Until those records exist, any assessment of Georgia's communications system rests on contract fragments, vendor claims and the testimony of the families paying the bills.