On September 19, Senator Robert Casey (D-PA) introduced legislation that would require the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to begin digitally scanning all incoming mail, including legal mail, for people in its custody. S 5128, the Interdiction of Fentanyl at Federal Prisons Act, comes one month after unconfirmed reports attributed the death of a federal penitentiary mailroom supervisor to fentanyl exposure.
Though the text has not yet been published, the newly proposed bill appears nearly identical to HR 5266, the Interdiction of Fentanyl in Postal Mail at Federal Prisons Act, introduced in August 2023. That bill has been sitting in the House for the past year, but steadily gaining cosponsors.
“After one BOP official lost his life and numerous reports of officers being hospitalized after being exposed to mail saturated in fentanyl and other unknown substances,” Casey’s office stated in a press release, “this legislation would help keep them safe on the job.”
There are always numerous reports of officers administering Narcan to themselves or each other after perceived exposure to fentanyl, often with a trip to the hospital for good measure. The symptoms usually cited—heart palpitations, elevated pulse—are not signs of opioid overdose, and historically none of the officers in these reports were ever actually harmed. That changed in August, with the highly politicized death of a BOP mailroom supervisor.
Media coverage notwithstanding, the supervisor’s death has not been attributed to drug exposure.
On August 9, a mailroom supervisor at USP Atwater, a high-security federal prison in California, died of what’s been widely reported as fentanyl exposure from handling contraband-soaked mail. The BOP Special Investigative Services identified the mail as containing “various amounts” of contraband substances including amphetamine (likely signifying methamphetamine), nicotinamide (vitamin B12); “Spice” (synthetic cannabinoids); and furanylfentanyl (an analog about one-fifth as potent as fentanyl).
Three people were arrested in connection with the mail. An August 29 indictment, however, only includes distribution charges for two synthetic cannabinoids: AB-CHMINICA and MDMB-4en-PINACA. In rare cases these have been linked to fatal overdose, but through direct consumption rather than seconhand contact. The indictment does not mention fentanyl or any other substances, or the supervisor’s death. Media coverage notwithstanding, as of August 19 the cause of death remained undetermined, pending toxicology results.
Post-mortem toxicology has never been reliable indicator of cause of death, but we can assume the results are either still pending or don’t include fentanyl exposure, otherwise we’d have heard about them by now.
Passive fentanyl exposure is a myth. Mail scanning has always been motivated not by safety, but by money. As the nationwide understaffing crisis deepens in state prison systems as well as the BOP, private contractors like Securus Technologies are promoting their automated mail-scanning services as the solution corrections departments are looking for. Some BOP facilities already use the MailGuard scanning service from SmartCommunications, a private correctional technology firm that claims to have pioneered off-site mail processing.
“MailGuard® completely cuts off the last conduits of drugs and undocumented inmate communications with the outside world,” the company states on its website, “streamlining inmate mail into a labor-free process.”
Post-pandemic, corrections departments have increasingly dealt with understaffing the same way: When there are no longer enough staff to perform a given function in day-to-day facility operations, do without it.
If there’s only one officer to cover both sides of a living unit and they can’t be in two places at once, keep half the unit locked down in their cells. If there’s no one to transport people to off-site medical appointments, deny the appointments. If remaining staff have to be pulled away from other posts to sort mail, stop sorting mail. Once you sell the public on the idea that people die from simply touching drugs, you can use it to justify digitizing all contact with the outside world. Letters; books; hugs.
“The practice of deliberately lacing opioids to ensure targeted lethality represents a dramatic emerging concern,” claims the 2023 version of the legislation that’s been sitting in the House. “Removing mail processing from Federal prisons and relieving Bureau of Prisons employees from mail sorting duties will result in an extensive budgetary relief to the Bureau and decrease the staffing shortages facing prisons.”
The understaffing issue isn’t as simple as raising correctional officer salaries. Some state prison systems have tried that and essentially been able to recruit more officers, but not retain them. The issue is that the more vital services are pared away, the more dangerous and unbearable prisons become. No one wants to be there.
Top image (cropped) via Arkansas General Assembly. Inset image (cropped) via Oklahoma Department of Corrections/YouTube.