Phone and messages

You cannot, ever, for any reason. They call you.

There is a separate process for a genuine emergency, and it runs through the chaplain rather than through the phones. When something goes wrong covers it.

The keypress. The system requires the person answering to press a key to accept the call, and some virtual number services do not pass that keypress through. Google Voice is the usual culprit.

It is not them hanging up and it is not the prison. Test the line with any other number and you will see it immediately. Fix it before they burn more minutes on calls that cannot connect.

Three hundred a month, and four hundred in November and December. Individual calls cut off at fifteen minutes, and after each one they wait thirty minutes before they can place another.

Some institutions add a daily cap on top of that. Their handbook is the authority on their.

The monthly allowance has been revised more than once in recent years. Treat that number as current-but-checkable.

They hit a limit — per call, per day, or per month. There are warnings before it happens and they are easy to miss mid-conversation.

Practical version: do not spend the first four minutes of a fifteen-minute call on logistics. Say the important thing first.

All of them. And they get pulled.

Their side is TRULINCS and yours is CorrLinks. They initiate it by adding your address, you get an invitation, and you accept it before anything can be exchanged.

Messages are held for review in both directions, typically a couple of hours and sometimes longer. The rules are PS 5265.13.

The meter is running. They are charged by the minute to read and by the minute to write, five cents each way.

It is not indifference. A long affectionate letter from you costs them money to read, which is a genuinely awful sentence to have to write, and they would still rather have it.

No. No attachments and no images, in either direction.

Photos go by mail, printed, under the per-envelope limit, and not on Polaroid stock.

Their case. Anyone else's case. Money arrangements between inmates. Anything that could be read as a three-way call being set up, because the system listens for exactly that. Anything about another inmate at all.

And anything you would not want read aloud in a room by someone who does not like either of you, because that is the actual test.

By accepting that the monitoring is not the obstacle you think it is. Nobody is listening live. Recordings get pulled when there is a reason, and ordinary marriage does not give anyone a reason.

What actually kills these conversations is the fifteen-minute clock and the fact that neither of you has any news. So: say the important thing in the first two minutes. Bring one real thing from your week rather than a summary of it. Ask them what they ate, what they read, who they talked to — small and concrete beats how-are-you-holding-up, which neither of you can answer honestly.

The men who did best had people who called about nothing in particular and kept doing it. The content mattered much less than the rhythm.