In MCSO, phone calls are very expensive. There are two ways to pay for it. You can either purchase a phone card on commissary ($20 for 100 minutes) if you have someone putting money on your books (which also costs a hefty fee....just for them to do) or you can call a party collect and they are able to set up an account linked to their phone number. Once the intro sound byte is finished playing when your party answers "this call is originating from a correctional facility...do not forward the call to any third parties...lawyer lawyer blah blah etc" almost a minute has been burned. Now that you can talk, every couple of minutes a lady pops on, cuts off your call temporarily, and reminds you "this call is originating from the Maricopa county $name_of_jail jail" in case you or your party forgot where you were. The calls were limited to 20 minutes and you got more interruptions at the end reminding you of how much time was left for the call.
I'm grateful that I had people to call when I was in there, because it was very nice to talk to someone in the real world and there were plenty of inmates that didn't. I'm grateful that my mom and dad kept their phone accounts loaded and i was able to talk to them almost every day. I'm grateful that I can call people now and talk without any interruptions or expensive fees.
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