Filed
12:00 p.m. EDT
08.02.2025
New York’s controversy over scanning mail in prisons displays a nationwide debate involving safety and privateness.
Corrections officer Mike Barrett searches an envelope for contraband within the mail room of Maine Correctional Middle, in Windham, Maine, in 2011.
That is The Marshall Mission’s Closing Argument publication, a weekly deep dive right into a key felony justice concern. Need this delivered to your inbox? Join future newsletters.
Final week, we took a have a look at the lingering results of the New York correctional officers’ wildcat strike, which resulted in March. To deliver officers again to work, certainly one of the calls for that the state met was to introduce scanners for authorized mail, meant to assist stop medicine from getting into prisons. Putting guards argued their security was in danger by each publicity to medicine, and by prisoners appearing erratically after utilizing medicine, in accordance with the Instances Union.
By late July, the scanners have been already in use at 36 of the state’s 42 prisons, and can quickly be in all amenities, in accordance with a Division of Corrections and Neighborhood Supervision spokesperson. The division has to this point been capable of bypass the formal rulemaking course of because of the emergency circumstances of the strike, however it’s now proposing to make the coverage everlasting.
These strikes have ignited controversy, and mirror a long-running debate in jail techniques throughout the nation between the necessity for safety measures and respect for incarcerated individuals’s entry to mail as an important avenue to attach with households and authorized assist.
When jail directors, lawmakers and advocates discuss “scanning” incoming mail, there are two separate issues they’ll imply. One is the digitization of mail by copying the contents into an digital format so prisoners can learn it on a pill. The opposite that means — extra precisely described as screening, as within the case of New York’s new system — is expertise to bodily check mail for indicators that it has been soaked in, or in any other case contaminated with illicit substances. Incarcerated individuals and advocates have expressed issues with each sorts of scanning, having to do with privateness, delays and the sentimental worth of handwritten letters and bodily keepsakes.
In New York, common mail from household and pals was already photocopied earlier than the strike. The brand new scanners are a trickier proposition, as a result of authorized mail is protected by attorney-client privilege.
Very similar to subject drug checks, the scanners aren’t all the time correct. Some advocates and incarcerated individuals say the brand new machines, which have been bought by way of a $4.4 million contract with “contraband detection options” firm RaySecur Inc., are incorrectly flagging contraband-free mail. When a bit of authorized mail is flagged, the corrections division’s proposed rule permits mailroom workers to withhold the mail with out confirming it really accommodates contraband. A coalition of authorized organizations with shoppers in New York prisons outlined their issues in a latest letter to the company.
“What DOCCS seems to be doing is laying the groundwork for these machines to be the ultimate willpower,” mentioned Antony Gemmell, supervising lawyer with The Authorized Assist Society’s Prisoners’ Rights Mission and co-author of the letter. “They’re utilizing this expertise past its meant scope.”
RaySecur describes its scanners as a device to cut back the quantity of mail that requires additional inspection by workers, not a technique to remove that step.
Jeremy Zielinski, who’s incarcerated at Woodbourne Correctional Facility, mentioned he was shocked when a letter from the Second Circuit Court docket of Appeals was not too long ago blocked by the mailroom. “It could make the state of affairs extra harmful in the event that they’re relying too closely on tech that does not work proper, probably lowering safety by turning into lax with their odd inspection routines,” he mentioned of guards.
Civil rights lawyer Amy Jane Agnew, who has shoppers who’ve died following overdoses in New York prisons, helps scanning the mail if it saves even one life, and isn’t bothered by having to resend the occasional letter. However, she contends that workers smuggling narcotics into prisons is a larger downside than medicine coming by way of the U.S. mail. “The most effective strategy is placing drug canines within the officer’s locker rooms, as a result of that’s the place it’s coming in.”
This debate is a part of an even bigger dialogue taking part in out in states throughout the nation and within the federal authorities. A not too long ago launched bipartisan Senate invoice would mandate that the Federal Bureau of Prisons carry out each sorts of scanning at its prisons and jails systemwide. The invoice would require the company to digitally reproduce all mail inside 24 hours for entry on a pill, after which to ship the bodily mail inside 30 days, as long as it’s decided to be free from drug contamination throughout screening.
Advocates for incarcerated individuals argue that digitizing private mail invades privateness and additional chips away at essential connections with family members. And authorized mail is trickier nonetheless, given confidentiality issues. However mail is a actual avenue for medicine in prisons, and corrections unions throughout the nation have expressed concern that dealing with contaminated mail poses critical and even deadly dangers to workers.
Final 12 months, correctional officer Marc Fisher died at a federal jail in Merced County, California, after opening a letter laced with narcotics being handed off as authorized mail. Three individuals concerned within the mail scheme — together with one incarcerated on the jail — have been in the end arrested and charged. The letter was discovered presumptively optimistic for fentanyl, artificial marijuana and amphetamines. Fisher reported extreme signs inside minutes of publicity to the mail. His post-mortem discovered that he died of pure causes from a coronary heart assault, in accordance with a authorities submitting, but in addition that “the circumstances of dying counsel exterior influences.”
The scientific consensus on transient or incidental drug publicity from issues like dealing with drug-soaked mail is that it’s extraordinarily unlikely to trigger a deadly overdose. Nonetheless, it’s not unusual for police and corrections officers to expertise odd signs after dealing with (or believing they’ve dealt with) illicit substances. Earlier this 12 months in New York, a State Police hazardous supplies crew investigated the reason for guards fainting and exhibiting slurred speech after an alleged publicity to contraband. The crew discovered no proof of “poisonous substances or medicine that may be accountable for the employees’ reactions.”
Simply how a lot contraband is coming in by way of mailrooms is unclear. Accessible information is typically spotty, if it’s tracked in any respect, and is collected by corrections companies themselves, inflicting some to query its accuracy. It’s additionally not all the time clear that scanning mail really helps cut back the circulate of medicine: Within the months after the Missouri Division of Corrections began digitizing mail, overdose deaths really elevated. A New Jersey correctional union consultant, however, mentioned digitizing mail led to a 50% lower in overdose charges in state prisons.
In any occasion, each sorts of scanning are catching on rapidly. In Tennessee, a pilot program to digitize mail at three girls’s amenities started on Aug. 1, with incoming private mail to be despatched to Maryland for scanning. In Illinois, there’s been a legislative push to ban most bodily mail getting into prisons, and the state division of corrections is within the strategy of deciding the way to use digitizing expertise it bought final fall.
The expertise used to display screen mail can also be evolving quickly, and is numerous throughout jail techniques as totally different distributors search to win contracts. Whereas New York and Hawaii are utilizing “T-ray” imaging expertise, pitched as extra delicate and correct than X-ray expertise, others are utilizing “hyperspectral imaging.” And earlier this 12 months, the Virginia corrections division turned the primary on the planet to pilot a CT-based scan (like those utilized in medication) mixed with AI machine-learning algorithms.
