Phone Calls at Collins Correctional Facility

Nothing for You to Set Up

The shortest answer on this guide: you do not have to do anything.

No account, no card to register, no balance to top up, no per minute rate. New York stopped charging families for state prison calls on 1 August 2025, and Collins is covered by it.

Anyone telling you to open an account to receive calls from Collins is working from the rules that applied before then.

The Weekly Allowance

Free calls	Three per week
Length	Up to fifteen minutes each
Credited	Every Saturday
After the three	Calls run up to thirty minutes
Window	7:00 AM to 11:00 PM

The three reset weekly and do not carry over, so an unused week is gone.

The Call Comes Out

You cannot ring in. There is no number at Collins that connects to a person in custody, and no way to leave a message for one.

In practice that means keeping your phone reachable between 7:00 AM and 11:00 PM. With three calls in a week, a missed one is a large share of the month’s contact.

Fifteen Numbers, Their List

Each person keeps an approved call list of up to fifteen numbers, and they manage it. A family member cannot ask for a number to be added from outside.

So a changed mobile number has to reach them by letter or on a call before it can be dialled. A number nobody inside knows about is a number that does not work, however often you look at the phone.

One Question Worth Asking on the Call

At most prisons the phone and the visiting schedule have nothing to do with each other. At Collins they do.

Collins divides its weekend visiting days by housing unit location, and no search result or website gives you a housing unit. The only way to learn which day of the weekend belongs to your family is to ask the person inside, and the call is the fastest place to do it.

Ask which group he is in, EVEN or ODD. Then the dated schedule NYSDOCCS publishes for Collins turns that one word into every date for the year.

Worth asking again after any move inside the prison, because the answer can change with the housing unit.

Recorded, With One Exception

Calls from New York state prisons are recorded and may be monitored, with a notice at the start of each call.

Properly arranged legal calls are the exception and are not monitored. Ordinary family calls are, so speak on the basis that somebody may listen to it later.

What a Call Leaves Behind

Nothing, which is the whole problem with it.

Forty five minutes a week across three calls, and when it ends there is nothing on the shelf. A letter gets read twice and a photograph goes on a wall. Pigeonly sends both to Collins from your phone, addressed to P.O. Box 340 with the matching ZIP, so the six days a week you cannot visit still hold something.