Phone & Video Calls in Delaware (DOC)

How Phone Calls Work

Calls only go one direction: the incarcerated person dials out, from housing-unit phones or their tablet, to numbers on their approved list. You cannot call in. The published list limit is five numbers at a time, added or removed at the person’s request — so a household with several relatives may not all fit, and a new number competes for one of five slots. Call forwarding and third-party calls — including three-way calls — are prohibited.

Delaware law authorizes the department to monitor and record communications of people in its facilities, with one statutory carve-out: communications with the person’s attorney may not be monitored or intercepted.

The system carries about four million calls a year, per DOC’s published handbook.

Paying for Calls, Messages, and Video

Everything runs through the same vendor account. The published ways to set one up and add money:

• Online at gettingout.com, or the GettingOut mobile app
• By phone through ViaPath customer service at 1-866-516-0115
• In person at the self-service kiosks in every prison’s gatehouse lobby
• Prepaid collect (AdvancePay) through connectnetwork.com or (800) 483-8314, which funds calls to your specific number

The vendor publishes deposit-fee caps — $3.00 for automated deposits, $5.95 with a live operator — but not the per-minute rates themselves. Neither does DOC. What’s known publicly comes from news reporting (December 2024): calls around 4 cents a minute with 10 free minutes per person per week, electronic messages and photos 25 cents each, and video visits 25 cents a minute. Treat those as a dated snapshot — the live prices appear in the GettingOut account.

Video Visits

Video visiting runs on the same GettingOut platform, through wall-mounted consoles in the housing units. Two things distinguish Delaware’s setup:

• The incarcerated person initiates the visit, scheduling it from their side, per DOC’s handbook; family and friends join from home on a computer or smartphone through their GettingOut account. At the Women’s Correctional Institution, DOC’s visiting page also points visitors to schedule and pay through GettingOut directly.
• It is fee-based per minute, charged to the account.

The one published frequency rule is at the Women’s Correctional Institution: most people there may have one video visit per week, in 15- or 30-minute blocks, in addition to an in-person visit. The other facilities publish no video schedule — availability and limits come through the person or the GettingOut account. Video visiting operates at all four prisons, expanded system-wide during the pandemic — DOC counted more than 450,000 video visits in the year ending early 2023, and news reporting put the figure at 324,000 for the year through October 2024.

Tablets and Messaging

Delaware issued an individual tablet to every incarcerated person in 2024 — more than 4,000 devices — after running shared tablets since 2019. For families, the tablet is the main day-to-day channel:

• Electronic messages, photos, and e-cards send through GettingOut, fee-based per message, and arrive far faster than scanned postal mail
• Phone calls can be made from the tablet itself
• Roughly half of tablet use is the free side: education courses, e-books, career and wellness programs, and legal reference

Messaging and phone access can be restricted as discipline, so a sudden silence on the tablet does not necessarily mean something is wrong with the device.

Family Emergencies

If there is a death or serious illness in the family, DOC’s published guidance is to call the facility and ask for the Shift Commander or the facility Chaplain, or contact DOC Family Services at (302) 857-5470 — staff notify the person with pastoral care available. The department cannot normally direct an incarcerated person to call out, so this is the channel that actually reaches them.

Verify Before Acting

For the general, nationwide overview of this topic, see the national guide: Staying in Touch.