Can you imagine going for three straight hours during the day without your smartphone in hand? That’s in fathomable right? Well when you get into Federal Prison you’ll be trading your smartphone for a wall phone and trulincs to communicate with the outside world.
Wall Phone
When you get to your placement in Federal Prison or in some cases when you enter a BOP run transit facility you will be issued a Phone Access Code number or PAC as they are called. This PAC number is unique to you, and if you unfortunately do more than one bid, it will remain the same every time (just like your reg number).
This PAC number gives you access to the phone and you need to memorize it because you will need it to dial every time you use the wall phone.
Inmates can’t just pick up the phone and call someone. You have to first enter the phone number and caller information for anyone you want to call into your Trulincs Truphone list. Once you enter that information it takes between 15-60 minutes for that number to be active. Unless you remove that person from your phone list, or they elect to not receive calls from you by pressing 7 on the phone, they will be on your list for as long as you are in prison.
The amount of minutes you have to call someone per call varies from institution to institution but it’s typically 10 or 15 minutes. The BOP also has a “cool off” period in between calls. That means if you call someone, once you hang up, you need to wait a certain amount of time before you can make another call. In some institutions that’s 30 minutes, some it’s 15 minutes or even 10 minutes. At the transit center in Atlanta you have to wait a full hour between calls.
Of course don’t forget all of your calls can be live monitored and all of your calls are recorded. Staff monitors calls regularly and if you’re doing something you’re not supposed to on the phone, you will most likely get an incident report for it.
At the time of this writing (July 2024) Federal inmates are still receiving 510 minutes free per month to use the phone.
TRULINCS
Trulincs stands for Trust Fund Limited Inmate Computer System. This system allows inmates with messaging (email) privileges to send and receive messages from pre-approved contacts.
Very similarly to the phone you have to add the people you want to correspond with by email, to your contact list. Once you add them they will receive a notification from CORRLINCS (the at home version of trulincs) asking if they want to correspond with you via email. After they select yes, and you wait a brief period of time, you can email them through Trulincs.
Unlike the phone, which is free for the moment, trulincs messages require trulincs points which are purchased with money on your commissary account.
Keep in mind, like the phone, emails are monitored, daily.
In addition to email, Trulincs also provides Federal inmates with a bulletin board for what’s going on at the institution and the BOP, a conduit to send staff messages, a function to keep up with your commissary account and the trulincs media library for music, movies and games on your Score 7C tablet.
If you’re facing Federal Prison we provide a lot of services for you. Find out more by checking out our services page or emailing info@federalprisontips.com
