Phone Calls at Mohawk 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 Mohawk is covered by it.

Anyone telling you to open an account to receive calls from Mohawk 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 Mohawk 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.

Why the Phone Carries More Here

Most of this page is statewide. Two local facts give it extra weight at Mohawk.

Weekends alternate. Mohawk divides them between odd and even DINs, so a family’s own weekends come round roughly every other one.

No free bus reaches Oneida County. The statewide visitor bus serves 18 prisons and none of Mohawk, Marcy or Mid-State is on the list, so families without a car are looking at a coach to Utica and local transport from there.

Put together, that is a lot of weeks in a year with no realistic visit. Three free calls a week is not a supplement here, it is the main line.

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 Mohawk from your phone, addressed to P.O. Box 8451 with the DIN in place, so the weekends that belong to the other group still hold something.