Communications & Technology
Key Findings
Critical data points synthesized across multiple research collections.
The Extraction Economy: Monopoly Communications and State Kickbacks
The prison communications industry generates $1.4 billion in annual revenue nationwide, built almost entirely on monopoly contracts that eliminate competition and guarantee captive customers (*Prison Communications & Financial Exploitation*). At the center of this system sit two dominant corporations — Securus Technologies and ViaPath Technologies (formerly GTL) — which together control approximately 80% of the U.S. prison telecommunications market, serving roughly 3,450 correctional facilities and 1.1 million incarcerated individuals (*Prison Communications & Financial Exploitation*). This is not a market; it is a duopoly sustained by government contracts that reward the highest commission rates, not the lowest consumer prices.
Georgia is a prime beneficiary of this arrangement. GDC receives $8+ million per year in kickbacks from Securus Technologies, extracted at a 59.6% commission rate on gross prison phone revenue — making Georgia the third-highest state in the nation for commission revenue, with $8,062,200.60 collected in fiscal year 2018–2019 alone (*Follow the Money; Prison Communications & Financial Exploitation*). Securus, for its part, reports approximately $700 million in annual revenue with a 51% gross profit margin — a margin only sustainable when the customer has no alternative provider and the contracting agency profits from high prices (*Follow the Money*). The commission structure creates a structural perverse incentive: the more families pay, the more the state collects. Cost reduction is institutionally irrational.
This extraction falls disproportionately on the families of incarcerated people — who are already among the most economically vulnerable in Georgia. Nationally, families spend $5.6 billion annually on commissary, phone calls, and basic necessities, with markups reaching 600% above retail (*Families as the Hidden Tax Base*). Direct out-of-pocket spending averages $4,200 per year per family — more than 27% of annual income for someone at the federal poverty line (*Families as the Hidden Tax Base*). In Georgia specifically, commissary markups range from 83% to 1,150% above retail, with incarcerated people paying $0.90 for a ramen packet that costs $0.15 at Walmart and $4.00 for generic ibuprofen worth $0.40–$0.48 at retail (*Prison Labor & Wage Exploitation; Georgia's Prison Commissary Extraction Machine*). Communications costs are one layer of a system in which incarceration is, in effect, taxed to families who did not commit the underlying offense.
Managed Access Systems: $50 Million in Contraband Technology
GDC's primary technical response to contraband cell phones has been the deployment of Managed Access Systems (MAS) — infrastructure that intercepts and blocks unauthorized cellular signals within prison perimeters while allowing approved calls through designated channels. Georgia has spent approximately $50 million through FY2026 deploying MAS across its prison estate, expanding coverage from 23 to 27 facilities (*MAS Technology, Vendors & Deployment; Follow the Money*). Three vendors share this budget: Trace-Tek/ShawnTech, CellBlox/Securus, and Hawks Ear — the last of which is a named contractor whose contract relationships with GDC merit scrutiny given Securus's simultaneous role as the monopoly phone provider collecting 59.6% commission rates (*Follow the Money*).
The scale of contraband seizures cited to justify this spending is substantial: between November 2021 and August 2023, GDC recovered 12,483 cellphones, 27,425 weapons, 2,016 illegal drug items, and documented 262 drone sightings and 346 fence-line throw-overs (*DOJ Investigation*). GDC has also reported confiscating over 37,000 phones since 2022, averaging approximately 1,300 per month — a rate that suggests MAS deployment, now in its third year of expanded operation, has not eliminated contraband phone access (*MAS Technology, Vendors & Deployment*). The persistence of contraband phones despite a $50 million investment raises a fundamental question the department has not publicly answered: if MAS were effective, confiscation rates should decline. They have not.
Additionally, the OWL (Overwatch & Logistics) Unit — GDC's centralized surveillance command center — has received approximately $17.8 million in dedicated funding over three fiscal years (AFY2025–FY2027), stacking surveillance infrastructure costs on top of MAS expenditures (*GDC Overwatch & Logistics*). The combined contraband-technology and surveillance investment approaches $68 million in recent appropriations, all directed at the *symptom* — unauthorized phones — rather than the underlying driver: the absence of affordable, legal communication alternatives.
The Monitor-Not-Block Alternative: What International Evidence Shows
A growing body of international evidence and domestic advocacy points toward a fundamentally different approach: legal, affordable, in-cell phone access monitored for safety rather than blocked by expensive signal-jamming infrastructure. The United Kingdom invested just £10 million to install in-cell landline phones across its entire prison estate — a fraction of Georgia's $50 million MAS spend — and found that access to family communication reduced violence, improved mental health outcomes, and reduced the incentive to possess contraband devices (*Prison Communication: Violence, International Evidence & Human Impact*). The underlying logic is straightforward: incarcerated people obtain contraband phones primarily because legal alternatives are unaffordable or inaccessible. Remove the cost barrier, and you remove much of the demand.
The Monitor-Not-Block policy framework, supported by advocacy organizations and reflected in FCC rulemaking discussions, argues that modern telecommunications allow for robust monitoring, recording, and filtering of prison calls without physically blocking signals — eliminating the need for MAS infrastructure entirely. Proponents argue that this approach is cheaper to implement, more effective at intelligence collection (since monitored calls generate usable data while blocked calls drive communication underground), and far less financially harmful to families (*Policy & Advocacy: Monitor-Not-Block*). The legal pathway involves challenging MAS contracts on cost-benefit grounds and leveraging FCC jurisdiction over in-facility telecommunications pricing — jurisdiction the FCC has already used to cap interstate call rates.
GPS's research identifies a structural conflict of interest that may explain GDC's preference for MAS over access reform: because GDC receives $8+ million annually in Securus commissions tied directly to call volume and pricing on the official phone system, lowering call costs or expanding access through legal channels would reduce commission revenue. MAS deployment, by contrast, generates new vendor contracts while preserving the existing commission-generating monopoly. The $50 million MAS investment is therefore not separable from the commission revenue structure — they are two components of the same financial architecture.
Vendor Contracts, Conflicts of Interest, and Financial Architecture
The financial relationships between GDC and its communications and contraband-technology vendors constitute what GPS has documented as an interlocking conflict of interest. Securus Technologies occupies a uniquely conflicted position: it is simultaneously Georgia's primary prison phone monopoly provider (from which GDC earns 59.6% commissions) and a MAS vendor through its CellBlox subsidiary — meaning it profits from both the legal communication system and from the technology nominally designed to suppress the illegal communication system that its own pricing structure incentivizes (*Follow the Money*). This is not an accidental overlap; it reflects the vertical integration strategy of the prison telecommunications industry, in which dominant firms seek contracts at every point of the communications-suppression cycle.
The other MAS vendors — Trace-Tek/ShawnTech and Hawks Ear — have received portions of the ~$50 million contraband technology budget, though detailed contract breakdowns and competitive bidding records have not been fully disclosed publicly. GPS's research flags the absence of transparent procurement documentation as a significant accountability gap (*Follow the Money; MAS Technology, Vendors & Deployment*). Georgia's contraband technology budget is classified under broader security appropriations, making independent cost-effectiveness assessment difficult. When a state spends $50 million on technology that appears — by its own seizure statistics — to not be eliminating the problem it was purchased to solve, the absence of public performance metrics is itself a finding.
Behind these vendor relationships sits the broader private equity structure of the prison communications industry. ABRY Partners and American Securities are among the private equity owners with documented positions in Securus-adjacent entities, meaning that Georgia's $8+ million in annual commissions flows ultimately to investment portfolios, not to rehabilitation, reentry, or the families financing the system (*Follow the Money*). The $1.4 billion annual prison communications industry is, in this sense, a tax on incarceration levied by private capital and collected by state agencies acting as commission intermediaries.
The Hidden Tax on Families: Communications Costs in Context
The financial burden of prison communications cannot be understood in isolation from the total economic weight that incarceration imposes on families. Nationally, the total annual cost to families of incarcerated people is nearly $350 billion — almost four times the $89 billion taxpayers spend on jails and prisons, according to a June 2025 report from FWD.us, Duke University, and NORC at the University of Chicago (*Families as the Hidden Tax Base*). This figure encompasses direct costs — phone calls, commissary, legal fees — and indirect costs including lost wages, childcare, and travel. Families spend $1.8 billion annually on travel for prison visits alone, with Black family members averaging $2,256 per year in travel costs compared to the overall average of $1,703 (*Families as the Hidden Tax Base*).
Communications costs are among the most immediate and unavoidable of these expenditures. When legal phone calls cost $0.14–$0.22 per minute at regulated interstate rates but Georgia's in-state rates remain less regulated, and when the commissary tablet and email systems carry their own per-message fees, families face a continuous fee structure for the basic act of maintaining contact with an incarcerated loved one. Approximately 65% of families with a loved one in prison were unable to meet their basic needs due to incarceration-related costs, according to the Ella Baker Center, with court-related debt averaging more than $13,000 per family (*Economic Exploitation in Prison*). 58% of families report they could not afford the costs associated with a conviction (*Economic Exploitation in Prison*). These are not marginal financial stresses — they are structural impoverishment.
The public health implications compound the financial ones. Each year served in prison is associated with approximately a two-year decline in life expectancy, with a 15.6% increase in the odds of death per additional year served (*Mass Incarceration as a Public Health Crisis*). Family contact — maintained through phone calls and visits — is among the most consistently documented protective factors against prison violence, recidivism, and post-release mortality. When family communication is priced as a luxury rather than a right, the state is not merely extracting revenue; it is actively degrading the conditions most likely to produce safe reentry. Georgia releases 14,000–16,000 people per year back into communities (*Recidivism & Reentry Failures*) — people whose family relationships, and thus reintegration prospects, have been systematically attenuated by a decade of commission-maximizing telecommunications policy.
Contraband Phones, Violence, and the Staffing Crisis: A Connected System
GDC's contraband phone problem cannot be analyzed in isolation from the violence and staffing crises that define its facilities. The DOJ's investigation found that between November 2021 and August 2023, GDC recovered 27,425 weapons alongside 12,483 cellphones — a ratio of more than two weapons per phone, suggesting that contraband interdiction is a systemic security failure far broader than telecommunications (*DOJ Investigation*). Meanwhile, GDC's systemwide correctional officer vacancy rate stands at approximately 50%, with 10 facilities exceeding 70% vacancy and 18 prisons reporting vacancy rates above 60% (*GDC Staffing Crisis; DOJ Investigation*). Understaffed facilities cannot reliably interdict contraband at entry points, cannot monitor cell blocks for unauthorized device use, and cannot safely respond to the violence that contraband weapons and drug markets generate.
The consequences are measurable. Assaults on inmates rose 54% between 2019 and 2024, assaults on staff rose 77%, and the prison death rate surged 47% — from 2.8 to 4.1 per 100,000 — over the same period (*Staffing Crisis & Correctional Officer Turnover*). Total deaths in Georgia prisons hit a record 333 in 2024 (*MAS Technology, Vendors & Deployment*). In this context, spending $50 million on MAS technology while leaving half of correctional officer positions vacant represents a fundamental misallocation: technology cannot substitute for the staff presence required to enforce institutional security. The OWL surveillance unit's $17.8 million in three-year appropriations adds another layer of technology investment in a department that cannot fill its entry-level uniformed positions.
Contraband phones in this environment serve functions beyond communication. They coordinate drug distribution, extortion, and gang operations — 31% of GDC's population are validated Security Threat Group members (*2024 Senate Study Committee*) — in an environment where underground markets fill the vacuum left by inadequate programming, unaffordable legal communications, and the power structures that emerge in chronically understaffed facilities. MAS technology addresses the device; it does not address the social ecology that produces demand for it. International evidence consistently finds that facilities with robust legal communication access, adequate staffing, and meaningful programming have lower rates of contraband phone possession — not because of signal-blocking infrastructure, but because the underlying need is met through legitimate means.
Accountability Gaps and the Path to Reform
A persistent obstacle to reform is the opacity of Georgia's prison communications financial architecture. GDC's commission revenues from Securus are documented in state procurement records, but the full breakdown of MAS vendor contracts — including performance benchmarks, unit costs, and competitive bidding documentation — has not been made fully public. GPS's research identifies this as a critical accountability gap: Georgia has spent approximately $50 million on contraband technology with no publicly available performance evaluation demonstrating that MAS deployment has reduced contraband phone prevalence, reduced violence, or produced any measurable security improvement (*Follow the Money; MAS Technology, Vendors & Deployment*). The continued monthly average of 1,300 confiscated phones after years of MAS operation suggests either that the technology is not performing as contracted or that its performance metrics were never tied to contraband reduction in the first place.
The FCC's 2024 rulemaking on prison phone rates — which extended interstate rate caps and moved toward intrastate regulation — represents the most significant federal leverage point for reform. Georgia's 59.6% commission rate is an outlier even among high-commission states, and advocates have argued that FCC jurisdiction over in-facility telecommunications can be used to prohibit commission arrangements that inflate rates above cost-based levels. Simultaneously, state legislative action through bodies like the 2024 Georgia Senate Study Committee on the Department of Corrections could mandate transparent MAS contract reporting, commission rate disclosure, and independent cost-effectiveness audits (*2024 Senate Study Committee; Policy & Advocacy*). The Committee's 2024 report documented the depth of GDC's operational failures but did not directly address the communications financial architecture — a gap GPS's research is designed to fill.
The reform case rests on a convergence of evidence: MAS technology has not solved the contraband phone problem; legal phone access is priced beyond the reach of families already in financial distress; the state collects millions in commissions from a system it is supposed to regulate; and family communication is one of the most evidence-supported factors in reducing recidivism and post-release mortality. Georgia releases 14,000–16,000 people annually into communities with a three-year felony reconviction rate of 25–27% (*Recidivism & Reentry Failures*) — a rate that, while lower than the national average of 39–44%, represents thousands of people whose reintegration is measurably harmed by the relational and financial damage that exploitative communications pricing inflicts. The $50 million spent on MAS, redirected to affordable legal phone access and reentry programming, would represent a better investment by virtually any public safety metric available.
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