And now for something completely different: Notes on communication systems into the various Treasure Valley jails, as of the end of 2024. This covers the Canyon County Jail, Ada County Jail, and the various Idaho prisons in the Boise area (though some will apply to other jails using the same systems). This is all pieced together from a range of conversations with people over the past six months or so - and all of this is up to regular change as the whims of jail officials change. So. If something has changed, please update things in the comments section and I’ll see what I can do.
Who This is Relevant To
If you’re trying to communicate with someone in prison in the Treasure Valley, you may find this post helpful. If you’re dealing with someone in a jail using the CPC (Combined Public Communications - if it sounds like some of the companies in Atlas Shrugged, you’re on the right track, and your impressions would be accurate), this might be useful. If you’re trying to talk to someone in a JPay jail, it might be useful too. Otherwise there’s not likely to be terribly much of use in here.
This is not a general purpose “How to communicate with someone in jail” post. I don’t have any particular insider knowledge of the system, or access to people in whatever particular jail you’re curious. I’ve just had a chance to talk to some people recently about how everything works in the Treasure Valley, get some notes, and work out some rather undocumented details on what sort of paper books you can actually send in. All this is, of course, subject to change at some future notice (or lack thereof), without warning.
Apparently, a lot of this stuff changed around Covid (for “safety”), and hasn’t gone back to the older systems (because the new systems are “convenient” - and, also, very profitable). Every aspect of this system is optimized for extracting as much money as possible. High “transaction fees.” Expiring balances. The works. The jail communications system is very profitable, and has taken over formerly viable alternatives like “paper mail.” I’ll touch on that later.
Basic Concepts and First Steps
Depending on how long someone is going to be in jail, there are a few things they’ll likely appreciate. If it’s a few days, work out communications and call it good. For a longer stay, or unknown duration stay, they’ll likely appreciate some “commissary funds.” This is money put on an account that can go to things like “snacks,” “underwear,” “deodorant,” writing materials, headphones for making calls on devices, etc. The details vary wildly, but something in that account is likely to be appreciated. Some variety of communications are likely more important, though.
You’ll probably need to know their prisoner ID for some part of the process or another. The lookups are here: Canyon County Jail Roster, Ada County Jail Roster, Idaho State Prison Lookup. Search for name, and you can find their number. If you’re trying to find someone by name on some other system and it’s not showing up, try searching by number. Sometimes that works.
Just remember, the system is designed to be hostile and invasive. Try not to get terribly frustrated. Expect to have to provide your drivers license and other identifying information to “prove” who you are. The point is privacy invasion and profit. It’s like social media, without any of the restraints on the system.
A Brief Overview of Jail Life in Canyon County Jail
Attempting to compile notes from a few sources, the general conclusion is that life in jail sucks - and life in Canyon County is rather more boring than most. You’re in a room with a bunch of other people, with a pile of poorly welded together bunks, a few tables, a TV, and a bathroom area that includes vacuum toilets (supposedly they’re impossible to clog and will swallow a roll of toilet paper without struggling), and a few semi-private showers. Life involves watching TV, punctuated by three meals, and, if you’re lucky and the weather isn’t too bad, “outside” time (for “staring through a chain link fence at the sky in a very small area” values of “outside”). The rest of the day is yours to decide what to do with, as long as you can do it over the din of the TV and everyone else making a lot of noise and cursing like sailors. There are quiet hours from sometime at night to sometime in the morning.
Oh, and to make things interesting, new paper books are no longer allowed into Canyon County. The jail claims that the “tablet system” has thousands of books, so there’s no need to bother with archaic paper books anymore. This is not a popular opinion, but it’s What Was Decided, so is what stands. However, there are a few exemptions to this policy - just, not exactly documented ones. You can send, at least theoretically, a Bible and some other “related religious book” into prisoners. That’s it. But, if the email system is working, there are some other options too…
If someone you know is freshly in Canyon County, you’ll use two different systems - Inmate Sales and Jail ATM. Jail ATM is for commissary funds, Inmate sales is for everything else (phone, chirp, email, tablets).
The Phones (Are Awful)
If you’ve ever had someone call you from jail, you’ll be familiar with the phones. On the other hand, if this is new to you, welcome to 1970s tech, that hasn’t been touched since the 1970s - a scratchy recorded message, press some number to accept, and the phones sounding like they’re being carried across the Atlantic on a piece of old twine. They are beyond atrocious, and it seems that some devices simply can’t emit enough of a touch tone signal into the archaic phone system to actually accept a call. I’ve no advice here, because having a phone that can’t reliably accept calls, I’ve tried everything I can think of without much success. Apparently the physical device you call from matters, so perhaps the person in jail can find a different phone to try from, but good luck. If you connect, the audio quality is awful, and they’re rather expensive for what they are. So, you’ll probably be best off trying something else. Try a different phone as well if you can - I’ve had better luck with flip phones for blasting the proper signal into the prison system, and apparently proper landlines work fairly well.
Canyon County Texting: Chirp
The standard interface-to-the-outside device in Canyon County is something called a “Chirp” - and I will suggest you wander over to their website for the comically absurd “demo image” of the thing involving a conversation about guns. This provides what amounts to a SMS-only local phone number for inmates, and a limited, surveilled, logged, and data-mined text message interface they can use. If you doubt “surveillance,” consider their claims about it: “Proven as an effective behavioral, investigative, and revenue tool.”
Prisoners have to request one, but this is a pretty common device - they’re allowed to send out requests for some funding on the account, and if you get a request for something like this, odds are good someone you know is now in jail. The message should include details about how to fund their account, if you care to do so.
Hardware is some generation or another of iPod Touch wrapped in a chunky bumper case that makes it somewhat more resistant to damage than usual for this variety of device in a concrete and steel environment. Usage is simple enough: Someone outside puts money on their account, and the device costs $0.10/text, in/out, SMS, 160 characters hard limit (longer incoming texts are split into multiple), no images or anything else. If you’ve ever longed for the pay-per-text of the early 2000s, it’s back! And apparently very profitable to jails.
Since every message costs the same, it makes sense to fill the message up with as much content as possible. IfURmbrOldTxtSpkURInGoodShape2OptizeMsgs. (“If you remember old text speak, you are in good shape to optimize messages.” - 42 characters vs 76 characters) It’s also worth, if you’re talking to someone on this, turning on character count for outgoing messages so you don’t, say, send 162 characters (two messages, $0.20). My flip phone does this by default, you can enable it on some versions of iOS in Settings->Messages->Character Count. I assume there’s some way to do it on Android too. I guarantee you’ve not thought this much about characters since about 2005.
The account balance here is per-inmate, so whatever you put on their account can be used to text anyone they have a number for. Apparently, some people are a bit more careful with messages than others, and if you’re communicating with someone who tends to send three 30 character messages in rapid succession, it’s worth reminding them they can cram a lot more into a given message for a given cost (and if you’re funding their account, remind them it’s on your dime).
Canyon County: Tablets and “Visits”
Canyon County also has some variety of “tablet” device available for use. What I’ve heard of them matches the descriptions of the iPads in back. These are, on paper, a replacement for all sorts of things like “books.” In reality, they are apparently a very conflicted resource (nowhere near enough tablets for everyone), often hoarded, and the software is “Mostly rubbish.” The primary goal seems to be to get people outside to pay for tablet time for inmates to listen to music, play games, and have “video chat” visits with people outside, having fully replaced actual embodied visits with the worst of Covid-era interaction, forever and always.
In order to use a tablet for visiting, an inmate needs to have or borrow headphones of some variety. The “visits” are video chat, except somewhere in the system is a process that blurs everything except people’s faces - and doesn’t really care if it blurs out half the face in the process. You’re best off trying to interface with this from another mobile device, because the desktop interface to the video chat system is worse than usual for this sort of system. But, really, the semi-synchronous systems just aren’t very good.
On paper, the tablets replace paper books with a huge library of books. It is, in practice, some variety of barely-functional interface to Project Gutenberg in which you can’t even input text to search for books, can’t save where you are, etc. Throw in the conflict for tablets that is apparently a feature of Canyon County, and it’s not a very good substitute in anyone’s opinion.
But they had one redeeming feature: The (can be made functional) “Email” system. Unfortunately, this system seems to be disabled currently, and I’ve no idea if it will come back.
Canyon County: The Former “Email” system
This system does not appear to be currently working. Error messages indicate it has been disabled. This is for legacy and other CPC jail reference purposes only right now.
One of the very overlooked features of the tablets, though, is the ability to send “emails” to them! It’s not actually email, in the SMTP sense, but it’s an open ended system that supports sending long-form text and images (subject to constraints, of course). You need, as for the rest of the stuff, an account over at https://inmatesales.com/, and then you can buy “email packages” (some number of messages) to send/receive. Importantly, this is per-external-user - so if you have a balance, you can email anyone who’s in there, after being approved for it. Of course, since almost nobody in there seems to know it even exists, you’ll probably need some way to communicate that you’ve reached out on this (see “Chirp” and “Phone calls”).
Log into Inmate Sales, and you can go down to the mail interface. You’ll search for the person and ask to be approved to send them messages, which takes some hours.
… and then you can send messages! And when I say messages, I mean messages. I don’t know what the limit on total length sent is, because I’ve not hit it yet, at hundreds of kilobytes. There are things like “epub2txt” that allow for converting of some variety of format to another, and one can simply copy-paste into the textbox to send in something modern and relevant, as opposed to whatever is on Gutenberg. There are also PDF converters, or you can simply use your keyboard.
Again, this is pay per message, so make it worth it!
The problem is that, from inside, replying at similar length is exceedingly difficult, because, like a lot of poorly thought out software, the system times out in a hurry and will drop messages. I had a chance to collaborate with someone to work out the details of the system, and it is possible to send long messages out. It’s just very convoluted. So, feel free to copy the following into someone and hopefully they’ll be able to figure out how to respond in long form. I’m not sure of the exact details here, so expect they’ll need to adapt it somewhat.
If you want to reply to a long message from the email app, you have to work around the timeouts. If you send a message and you don’t see it in your sent mail box, it didn’t send. If you send it, and end up at some generic overview login page, it didn’t send. To send a long message, the following should work: Go into the email app, write your message in the textbox. Take as long as you want, but perform the following “save” step often enough because the app can crash at times. When you want to save the text, long press in the textarea, and select all / copy. It’s stock iOS behavior. Once you’re done, copy the message, exit out, then load the email app again, set your recipient, and long press, paste. Then send. This gives you the time you need to write the message, and you can paste and send the message within the timeout period.
Unfortunately, this system is also prone to being down without any cause, and at least as I post this, seems to be down. I’ve no idea if it will come back up, but if you’re dealing with someone in a CPC jail, this might be useful to you.
A Brief Overview of Life in Idaho State Prisons
For whatever it’s worth, apparently the state prisons are a lot nicer. Not only can people get a range of books in, they have a far wider range of activities they can participate in. These include chapel, “walking around outside and seeing the horizon,” and generally walking from point A to point B as part of life. There are apparently some options as far as continuing education go, and the sentiment seems to be that this is far, far preferable to at least Canyon County. There are, however, some (as always, undocumented…) limitations on what type of books you can send in. Don’t try to send in anything with a “fancy” binding in which the book binding separates from the inner binding (“lie flat” sorts of bindings). These aren’t permitted, and will be rejected. If there’s a gap gap in the binding when the book is opened, that’s a problem - so, unfortunately, most “nice” Bibles are out of the question, and will be destroyed if the inmate can’t pay to ship them home.
Idaho State Prisons: JPay for Email and Commissary
The Idaho prison system uses JPay for commissary and communications. Create an account there, and search for an inmate. You may need to search by inmate ID - the search system is poor, and you’ll have way better luck searching by ID than by name. Social media grade search, this is not.
Once you add an inmate, you can add money to their commissary account, as well as buy “stamps” to send text based messages back and forth (you can also assign “stamps” to an inmate so they can send messages out to you without you having to send a message with a return stamp - the postal analogies are strong here). The limit here is 20k characters, so around 4k-5k words - though you could, of course, compress things somewhat if you wanted to get more in. It’s not quite so flexible as the Canyon County system, but it’s a reasonable amount of text. It also has the benefit of currently working. You can also use this for commissary funds. I’m still working out details of the Idaho State system, so if you know more about how the phone systems work and such, please let me know in the comments. I will say, their phones seem a lot better than Canyon County’s system.
Ada County: Getting Out
Ada County seems to rely on the Getting Out app. This can be used for text based communications as well as funding commissary accounts. There are some kiosks that will take cash or card at the front of the jail, which like you to give them all your information, but seem to accept some handwaving in the process. Again, assume that you’ll hand over all your information in order to interact with a prisoner, and you won’t be disappointed. The phones work, but I don’t have nearly as much current information about the Ada County system as I do about the others. Sorry.
What About Physical Letters?
Can you send a letter in? To the state prisons, yes. To Canyon and Ada county, not meaningfully. If you send a letter, you send it to a place that scans the letters and delivers them digitally, on the tablets. If the email system is up - and I’m entirely not sure what the process looks like with the email system down. This is, of course, more convenient for the jail, as they don’t have to worry about contraband like “drugs” or “tape” coming through the system. Keep a copy of anything you send in, as the original copy is destroyed, and there is no way to keep a copy after getting away from the jail digital systems.
EFF is fighting this. I have donated to this cause, and have alerted them to the state of the system in Idaho. Please consider donating to them and tag your donations for this cause. If you want to reach out about the state of things in Idaho, let me know, and I can send you more detailed information to send in. I believe that if the email system is down, and the physical letters are delivered through this system, it may be against something or another with regards to the State Constitution, but I’m trying to get more details. Contact me if you want to join this fight against Canyon County jail.
Canyon County: Sending Religious Books
I can’t find it documented anywhere, but there seems to be some variety of understanding that while general books are not permitted to be sent to inmates, you can send Bibles! The concept, as both described and tested, seems to be that one can send one Bible and one other “religious book” of some variety per inmate (devotions, sermon commentary, stuff like that - though delivery of these is only about 80% in my experience, and I cannot determine why). I’ve had the opportunity as of recently to start working this out, and at least for Canyon County, the best source for books seems to be Amazon. Things have to come from some recognized bookstore, and since they don’t accept anything except Bibles, I’ve not tested the bounds of this.
But if you happen to want to send a Bible to someone in Canyon County, you absolutely can do so. Books have to be soft cover - so paperback or “soft leather” covers, not hardcover. Address them like this, and they should arrive within a day or so of delivery:
Inmate Jailbird #123456
CANYON COUNTY JAIL 219 N 12TH AVE
CALDWELL, ID 83605-3555
I remain uncertain as to the exact details of what the limits are, but as far as I’m concerned, experiment, see, and report back! Should you want to start doing this at scale, I can heartily recommend Amazon Prime for sending individually addressed Bibles and associated books into jail at a reasonable clip. My life has gotten interesting lately, but this works just fine.
Sending Books to Idaho State Prison
Idaho State Prison’s list of approved bookstores, annoyingly, does not include Amazon. Avoid separating bindings, and you should be able to send anything within reason. They can also receive magazine subscriptions in there. If you want to read the full mail handling policy, go for it. Role playing game material is explicitly forbidden, oddly enough. Their official mail handling policy doesn’t state anything about approved bookstores, though - so, please experiment and report back. Good luck!
This is pretty far outside my usual posting realm, and I will be moderating comments somewhat more aggressively than usual. I do not have any ability to reach out to any particular person. All of this is subject to change, so if you have any clarifications, please feel free to add something useful. And if you just want a Bible sent to someone in there, I’m happy to send something in. Please reach out to me in some form (email is fine, my blog about page has a way to sort that out) with their facility, name, ID, and preferred translation, and I will see if I can get something sent their way. It’s a thing I’m doing right now, and a thing I intend to continue for some while as the opportunity presents. And if you’d like to chip in a few bucks to this project, also reach out. Right now I’m purely self-funding this particular activity.
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This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.sevarg.net/2024/12/07/treasure-valley-idaho-jail-communications