At least in the UK, Yes You Can!

Prisoners - phone calls
If you’re in prison, it’s very important to keep in touch with family and friends. This fact sheet is about keeping in touch by phone. Friends and family can’t phone into a prison to speak to a prisoner. There are rules about the phone calls that a prisoner can make.

Who can you make phone calls to when you're in prison
If you’re in prison, you can make telephone calls using the PINphone system. You have your own PIN number to use when making a call. In some prisons, you can only call certain numbers that you have already given to the prison and which have been approved by them. In other prisons, you can call any number except for numbers barred by the prison. In all prisons, you aren’t allowed to ring certain premium rate numbers which may include chatlines or adult-only lines. The length of calls you can make may be limited.

All telephone calls made by prisoners are recorded and may be monitored at any time. This doesn’t apply to open prisons and it doesn’t apply to calls to the following people:-

• your legal advisers
• the Independent Monitoring Board
• the Criminal Cases Review Commission
• the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman Office
• the Samaritans.

These types of call are called confidential calls.
If you’re a Category A prisoner, your calls are more strictly controlled.

There are rules about what can be said in a phone call. For example, you can’t talk about things that are considered to be a threat to prison security or which are racist. If you break the rules, you may be cut off.

You might be allowed to use the prison’s official telephone for urgent compassionate calls. You’ll have to pay for these calls unless the governor is satisfied you can’t afford to. Some prisons allow a free short phone call home as soon as you arrive at prison from court. Other prisons allow you to make a short call and then take away the cost of your call from your PINphone account later on.

Source in PDF

dont know about south africa. but my question is how did this govt official put a call or txt to henry okar while in detention? i tot the reverse is the case here.

RICHIE BOI:

dont know about south africa. but my question is how did this govt official put a call or txt to henry okar while in detention? i tot the reverse is the case here.

the Govt official put a call to him before detention.

Every other telephone conversations he has had with media houses since detention have all been pre-arranged.