by Michael Thompson

As reported in PLN, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had postponed a 2024 rule poised to reduce the financial burden for incarcerated people throughout the country. [See: PLN, Aug. 2025, p. 19] The June 30, 2025 pause was followed by a draft proposal in October that significantly raised prices to nearly double those in the 2024 rule. When the finalized document was released on November 6, it surprisingly contained further changes, which included even more substantial price hikes. Through this new rule, the FCC effectively reversed course on nearly every major provision of the 2024 rule.

The 2024 rule would have saved millions of dollars for people incarcerated in jails and prisons, as well as their friends and families who have been known to pay in the vicinity of $500 per month for the right to communicate with them. Instead, the November final draft slipped in an additional 6.7% inflation factor over the October draft price hike with no public notice.

At issue is the profiteering off of incarcerated people and their loved ones. FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez made the point well in her critique of the …

The Chattanooga Times Free Press reported that the Georgia Department of Corrections (DOC) prisons are buckling under a 15-­year high incarceration rate, now exceeding 50,000, and projected to climb past 55,000 by 2030 due to tougher sentencing. Simultaneously, guard staffing is at a 15-­year low, signaling a severe retention crisis despite budget increases. Another growing problem: drones.

DOC Commissioner Tyrone Oliver reported that massive drones, some capable of lifting 225 pounds, are easily delivering drugs and cellphones directly to cell windows and rooftops of Georgia’s prisons. And these incidents are on the rise, with the DOC recording 71 cases of drone activity in November 2025 alone. Prisoners will often take advantage of a Georgia prison’s crumbling infrastructure to intercept a package. “The majority of [packages] are dropping on the ceiling,” Oliver said. “So what you have, when you’re talking about our aging infrastructure, most of the prisons that were built, they have internal pipe chases inside the dorm, inside the dormitory themselves. The inmates are able to get inside the pipe chase, access the roof, which is the metal roof, push it up, get the contraband, come back in.”

While technology exists to “mitigate” these flights, DOC …

by Katya Schwenk

The yacht is moored at the mouth of the Miami River, in the long shadows of the city’s luxury hotels and high-­rises. It is of Italian design: sleek, imposing, with a flybridge and sundeck and five cabins, and a price point of about $10 million. On the hull, bold silver lettering declares its name: Convict.

The Convict is the crown jewel of prison technology company Smart Communications, whose CEO, Jonathan Logan, has a reputation for flaunting the millions he has made in the business of prisons and jails. There is also Logan’s $300,000 Lamborghini, with a license plate that reads “INMATE.” There are the photos he posts dressed in garish suits, posed in the driver’s seat of his Rolls-­Royce.

The yachts, the cars—they all form part of Smart Communications’ “empire,” as insiders refer to it. The company rakes in tens of millions in revenue each year from its prison communications tech, a business model that mostly involves charging people incarcerated in the U.S. prison system to send emails (50 cents a pop) or make phone calls (7 cents a minute) or leave 30-­second voicemails ($1 each).

It …

For years, the Adams County Detention Facility in Brighton has prohibited in-person visits. But in late October 2025, a group of three children—with the youngest just four years—are suing the Adams County Sheriff and HomeWAV, a telecommunications company, in hopes of lifting the ban and getting to visit their incarcerated parents. The suit, which also lists two mothers whose 18-year-old sons are locked up at the Adams County jail, is part of a trio of cases led by civil rights groups. Called the “Right 2 Hug” project, the other two cases were filed in Michigan (they were both dismissed in 2024, but are currently on appeal).

As reported by Colorado Public Radio, the Plaintiff’s attorneys are seeking an emergency order that would allow the children and mothers to visit their relatives while the case is underway; they are also aiming to win damages from the Adams County Sheriff’s Office as well as HomeWAV, which the jail contracts with for phone and video services.

Across the country, families spend an average of $4,200 each year to stay in touch with their loved ones behind bars. [See: PLN, Aug. 2025, p. 36.] And when the Federal Communications …

In 2023, prison telecom company Securus Technologies began building AI tools using its expansive database of prisoners’ recorded phone calls. The idea was to create an AI model that could not only monitor live prison phone calls but actively detect discussion of potential criminal activity. As reported by the MIT Technology Review, one of these models was developed based off of seven years of calls in Texas prisons; and, over the past year, a pilot version of a broader model is being tested at locations that the company refuses to divulge.

The model can be used to analyze video calls, text messages, and emails, according to Securus president Kevin Elder. That data would then be flagged for human agents to choose whether or not to act upon it. In what seems like a dystopian scenario, the AI tools are being designed to intercept a crime, such as smuggling contraband inside of a facility, before it happens. “We can point that large language model at an entire treasure trove [of data],” Elder told MIT Technology Review, “to detect and understand when crimes are being thought about or contemplated, so that you’re catching it much earlier in the …

On December 1, 2025, state prosecutors announced that ten people—including three jail guards—were indicted on criminal charges related to three separate alleged smuggling schemes at the Jesup Correctional Institution (JCI) in Anne Arundel County.

The first of the schemes was a drug smuggling operation led by Awungjia Rita Atabong, a 13-year veteran jail guard with the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services (DPSCS), according to the Maryland Attorney General’s Office. Atabong, 39, communicated with prisoners using contraband cellphones, and she regularly met with associates of prisoners who provided her with packages to bring into JCI. When police searched Atabong’s home in July of this year, they discovered a large stash of drugs, ranging from nearly 8,000 MDMA pills to synthetic cannabis, tobacco, fentanyl, and methamphetamine. Four prisoners were also indicted in the racket.

In the second case, prosecutors claim that Correctional Educator Lakesha Murray, 49, smuggled drugs, food, and other contraband in exchange for money and luxury items (such as a Gucci bag) from the incarcerated students in her classroom. Murray was also caught on security camera kissing a student. Two prisoners were charged in the arrangement.

JCI’s third case centered on DPSCS guard …

by Chuck Sharman

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted on September 30, 2025, to issue a Third Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to relax the current ban on using cellphone “jamming” technology in prisons and jails. The Commission’s target: nearly 500,000 contraband cellphones used by 25% of U.S. prisoners and jail detainees, according to a September 2024 estimate from global security firm SOC LLC.

That number may be inflated, of course, to promote the need for SOC’s SignalSecure system, which is marketed to help interdict this flood of contraband. But the Urban Institute, in its own 2024 study, counted 20,000 contraband cellphones seized by 20 state prison systems over the previous year.

Under 47 U.S.C. § 333, anyone who “willfully or maliciously interferes” with FCC-authorized radio communications—including signals to and from cellphones—commits a crime. But prison and jail officials contend that this has handicapped their fight against contraband cellphone use. In response, the FCC proposed to change the definition of an “authorized” radio communication to exclude calls placed to or from contraband cellphones. Those would become “unauthorized” by definition, so they could legally be blocked by use of a cellphone “jammer.”

Currently, officials have more …

by Chuck Sharman

Backtracking from new rules passed just a year ago that would have lowered phone call rates in prisons and jails to $0.06 to $0.12 per minute, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted on October 28, 2025, to hike those rate caps to $0.10 to $0.18 per minute. The FCC had voted in August 2025 to table imposition of the former rate caps for two years, but its latest action means that they will not take effect at all.

As PLN reported, the FCC voted in August 2024 to slash rate caps for prison phone calls to $0.06 per minute and no more than $0.12 per minute in jails. Video call rates were also lowered to a maximum of $0.16 per minute in prisons and $0.11 to $0.25 per minute in jails. The order further eliminated “site commissions”—kickbacks paid to lockups by telecom providers awarded their contracts—which many lockups had come to rely on for part of their operating budget. Charges were also banned for “ancillary services,” like adding money to an account. [See: PLN, Oct. 2024, p.1.]

The FCC’s new order maintains the bans on site commissions and ancillary service charges. But the …

On June 30, the Federal Communications Commission announced a two-year postponement of a rule to lower the price of phone and video calls in prisons and jails. As PLN reported, the FCC voted in 2024 to approve the regulation, which was set to go into effect nationwide later this year and promised to rein in predatory price gouging by prison telecom companies. Along with curbing the kickbacks paid by companies to corrections systems, it would have capped phone rates to 6 cents per minute in state prisons and to no more than 12 cents per minute in local jails; rates for video calls were reduced to 16 cents in prisons and a maximum of 25 cents per minute in jails. [See: PLN, Oct. 2024, p. 1]. 

In a statement announcing the postponement, the Trump-appointed FCC Chair Brendan Carr said that the price caps had led to “negative, unintended consequences,” such as making fees “too low” to cover “required safety measures” and not allowing enough time for states to find alternative revenue sources. In a separate statement, FCC Commissioner Anna M. Gomez strongly criticized the decision, writing that the agency, instead of enforcing a bipartisan law, is “now …

A report on prison telecom costs presented to state lawmakers in Washington on December 13, 2024, showed dramatic decreases nationwide in the price of calls from prisons and jails over the past decade. A similar drop was not found in rates for e-messages sent from lockups. Data provided by the Prison Phone Justice (PPJ) campaign of PLN’s publisher, the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), also found nearly $45.5 million paid by prisoners and their families directly to prisons and jails, in the form of “commission” kickbacks from telecom vendors. 

The report was prepared by the Washington State Office of Financial Management (OFM), pursuant to statutory authorization. See: Laws of 2024, Ch. 376, § 133(20). But the short time frame provided for its work did not allow for public records requests to be completed to every jurisdiction nationwide. That’s why, in addition to HRDC’s PPJ data, researchers relied on the findings of two other prison reform nonprofits, the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) and Worth Rises, as well as Ameelio, a nonprofit which calls itself the country’s first technology nonprofit to offer telecom services to prisoners.

Data from Worth Rises was used to draw comparisons between jurisdictions and over …