Beginning September 1, the Oklahoma Department of Corrections (ODOC) will no longer deliver physical mail to the nearly 23,000 people in its custody. Instead, letters—including photographs and greeting cards—must be addressed to a digital processing center in Texas where a private contractor will read and scan the contents. If approved, mail will then be uploaded to tablets provided by the same company.
Legal mail and approved books or other publications will still be delivered. Like prison and jail systems across the country, ODOC claimed that digitizing all other incoming mail is a necessary measure to combat the smuggling of dangerous drugs.
“Our shift to digital mail is solely aimed at reducing contraband,” ODOC stated to Filter. “Our primary goal is to keep our population safe, not to interfere with the communication between those in our care and their loved ones.”
Mail crackdowns do not reduce the supply of contraband drugs in prisons. Partly because crackdowns never do and partly because mail is only one means of getting drugs into prisons, and tends to not be the most prolific one.
In its announcement, ODOC claimed that an influx of contraband drugs “endangers the lives of ODOC staff and inmates who encounter the tainted mail,” heavily implying a risk of secondhand exposure where there is none.
Passive overdose—by touching a drug, or breathing in air while in the vicinity of a drug—is propaganda kept in circulation by cops, media and government entities, and is the standard in corrections departments. Some states make the claim more explicitly.
Over the past few years, prison and jail drug supplies across the country have increasingly shifted toward “strips,” a term which often refers to synthetic cannabinoids but is a catch-all for any substances soaked onto paper. In some state prison systems, this has effectively replaced bulkier contraband like tobacco. In others, cigarettes remain prevalent and are simply becoming more harmful alongside strips, which are on the same trajectory. But corrections departments frequently justify mail crackdowns by conflating all contraband drugs as having all the same harms.
“An effective digitized inmate mail system has the potential to reduce drug-related incidents,” Candice Moore, chief administrator of Information Technology, stated in the ODOC press release, “including a decrease in assaults, emergency room visits and deaths.”
Prison drug supply staples tend to be synthetic cannabinoids, methamphetamine and Suboxone, with tobacco, fentanyl and marijuana popping up more intermittently or by region. Of those, only fentanyl is associated with respiratory depression and fatal overdose. References to violent incidents are generally related either to tobacco debt, or to synthetic cannabinoid overdose. The latter is usually not physically harmful, but is widely despised by corrections officers.
“Great news!” ODOC states on its website. “For a small fee, inmates can request a physical copy of their mail through the commissary.”
ODOC told Filter that it’s “still working through the logistics for color prints.” The commissary fee for black-and-white printing is $0.25 cents per page. Wages from Oklahoma Correctional Industries, the entity that oversees much of ODOC prisoner labor (all states have a version of this) start at $0.30 per hour and cap at $0.90 for “exceptional” work.
The printing service is free for those who don’t have access to a tablet. This would mean everyone with Level 1 security classifications—around 15 percent of the prison population, according to ODOC—and anyone waiting on repairs.
The department told Filter that its current tablet count is 21,440 at state-run prisons (there are two private prisons in Oklahoma, in addition to the 22 run by ODOC).
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, prisons and jails across the country have one by one announced that mail would soon be routed through a central processing facility. State prison systems to make the switch since 2020 include Florida, Nebraska, North Dakota, New Mexico, Virginia, Texas, Missouri, Wisconsin and Delaware, which in March expanded the policy from one facility to all of them. Some corrections departments have piloted the process at a few prisons before implementing it state-wide. Montana began scanning mail for three prisons at an off-site facility in May.
Other states appear to be quietly inching closer to similar changes. The Tennessee Department of Correction, which is in the process of rolling out tablets across the state, recently banned used books. The Washington State Department of Corrections started providing Securus tablets in 2023, and stopped delivering greeting cards and post cards in 2024.
The Problem Solvers Caucus has officially endorsed the Interdiction of Fentanyl in Postal Mail at Federal Prisons Act, legislation that will cut off the flow of fentanyl and other contraband into federal prisons through the mail.
MORE: https://t.co/Hlgja5UR3B pic.twitter.com/xVwmtzL64t
— Problem Solvers Caucus (@ProbSolveCaucus) May 22, 2024
ODOC did not directly address Filter’s inquiry about whether the idea came from corrections industry telecoms giant Securus Technologies, which owns the tablets and the digital processing center. The Texas-headquartered company, best known for unaffordable phone calls and improper surveillance practices, charges per-use fees for each the tablets’ various communication features. These include eMessaging (a clunky in-house version of email) and Snap n’ Send (used for sending individual photos without text).
“We wanted to move toward digital mail for safety reasons,” ODOC told Filter. “After looking at multiple vendors, we ultimately chose to go with Securus for seamless integration.”
Securus promotes its combination tablet-and-processing-center services as an answer to the nationwide understaffing crisis, since it “fully automates” all prison system mail.
Prison systems like ODOC in turn promote digital mail as a life-saving intervention and the tablets as valuable hands-on training preparing prisoners for the modern tech advances of the outside world, “making re-entry easier and more successful.” The tablets are not connected to the internet.
Though lucrative for Securus, the processing centers are functionally redundant in terms of security and surveillance. It’s already the norm for corrections staff to open and inspect USPS letters (as well as eMessages) before delivering them, but aside from being subject to staff shortages this creates no opportunity for Securus to use them for data-mining nor profit.
If the person in custody has a tablet and the outside contact has a smartphone, taking cell phone pictures of letters, photographs or greeting cards and sending those pictures through Snap n’ Send would likely be a little faster and involve a little less surveillance than sending the actual mail to the Securus digital processing center. The cost—one USPS stamp versus one electronic stamp—would be pretty much the same. So would the end result; both images would be downloaded into the same photo gallery on the recipient’s tablet. Asked whether loved ones had any reason to send mail through the processing center rather than use Snap n’ Send, ODOC agreed that yes, it essentially comes to the same thing.
Top image via United States Office of Justice Programs. Inset image via Washington State Department of Corrections.
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