Understanding the Commissary: A commissary is an inmate store offering essential goods and limited luxuries. These products often include clothing, shoes, snacks, food, hygiene items like soap, shampoo, and razors, as well as entertainment items such as books, magazines, televisions, radios, and cards.
Stay Connected: Essential items like paper, envelopes, and stamps help inmates maintain communication. Indigent inmates are sometimes provided a small amount of these items for free each month, but most inmates will be required to spend commissary funds to purchase them.
Funding the Commissary: Inmates can add funds to their commissary account through institutional work, trust funds, or support from loved ones.
Sending Money: A Step-by-Step Guide
The process of sending money to an inmate can vary depending on the type of facility, whether it's a jail, prison, or Federal Prison, and the state in which it is located.
Federal Prisons and some state-level prisons have centralized banking systems in place. In general, most facilities allow cash deposits through the lobby or a kiosk. While many facilities still accept postal money orders sent to the inmate's mailing address and made payable to the inmate, several states are transitioning to electronic banking.
Electronic banking enables friends and family members to send funds online, a method that correctional departments are increasingly favoring due to its efficiency and accuracy in tracking transactions, as well as its convenience for inmates and their loved ones. Regardless of the method chosen for sending funds, there are several important details you are required to know in order to send money:
- Inmates full committed name
- Inmates identification number
- Current location of the inmate
Find Your Loved One's Facility: Locate the facility your inmate is incarcerated in to understand the specific money transfer procedures for that institution.
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Check Facility Rules: Understand any restrictions on sending money, such as daily/monthly limits and who is allowed to send money. We document these facility specific rules on each institutions page. Be sure to check your eligibility to send funds, as some facilities require you to be on the inmate's visitation list.
Understanding Money Usage: Be aware that some deposited funds may be automatically allocated towards fines or restitution.
Avoid Scams and Protect Yourself: Be wary of requests to send funds to inmates other then your own. This could indicate suspicious and potentially illegal activity.
It is important to only send money to an inmate's account if you are friends or family with that specific inmate. If an inmate requests you to deposit funds into a friend's account, exercise caution as this could indicate illegal activity. Inmates may claim that money needs to be deposited into another inmate's account to avoid certain fees, but prisons typically only deduct a small percentage of the deposited funds.
Keep Records: Maintain receipts and money order numbers for tracking purposes. When sending a money order to an inmate, retain the stub with the money order number as a precaution in case the money order gets lost, providing you with a way to track and verify that the inmate received the funds.