Back before the COVID-19 pandemic when the Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC) still had corrections officers, the first shift would be in a hurry to deliver our mail, because it was the last thing they had to do before they went home. These days, mail is handled somewhat differently.
“Pretty regularly I would receive a month’s worth of mail in one day,” J* who left Central State Prison in early 2025, told Filter. “For years there was a big caged mailroom you could go to if you needed to weigh a package or mail legal documents certified … then one day that was moved to the top floor of [the] administration area, which a prisoner could not get a pass to visit.”
After that, mail would be left in bags in the briefing room for the second shift to pick up on their way to their posts. A lot of people thought it would be reasonable if the warden and various members of administration were to deliver the mail during their daily rounds, seeing as they’d be making them anyway. Administration may not have shared this opinion, since the mail continued to sit where it was.
GDC policy states that incoming mail is supposed to be handed out by the end of the next business day; nothing can be held for more than 48 hours after it arrives at a facility’s mailroom. But of course it is.
“We might get mail call after breakfast, or 11 o’clock at night,” C*, who paroled out from Phillips State Prison during the COVID-19 pandemic, told Filter. “Like someone just happened across sorted mail, and felt like passing it out.”
More and more people are reluctant to get court cases going because they’re aware of the strong possibility they’ll miss a filing date. You might get a three-day grace period for prison mail, but the courts aren’t going to believe that it took a month for your documents to make it out of the facility mail room and to the post office.
“Phillips just ran out of officers at some point,” said C, recalling the early days of the pandemic. “Then later it was like a tide that would rise and fall; we would have 20 cadets for two weeks, then two officers for a month. So mail, even though a Constitutional right, became less a priority than it deserved.”
If it weren’t for all the reasons why prisoners will never have our own post offices, it would make a lot of sense.
Prison mailrooms are staffed by corrections departments, not by the United States Postal Service. In the free world it is, ironically, a felony to open mail that is not yours, but here institutional rules, rather than federal law, govern handling of mail. So everything must be inspected for contraband, in order to further the myth of drug-soaked letters are too hazardous for mailroom staff to touch and thus justify replacing the whole operation with privatized mail-scanning.
In state and federal prisons across the country, the USPS is being steadily replaced with one of the handful of private contractors that profit off digitizing our letters, or charging us per each electronic message we send instead.
The USPS is of course reckoning with its own understaffing issues. And the looming specter of privatization. And you’d have to assume that USPS workers wouldn’t want to stay at a corrections department job any more than corrections officers do, even if they realize the mail they’re tasked with opening isn’t actually hazardous. It’s a shame, because if it weren’t for all the reasons why prisoners will never have our own post offices, it would make a lot of sense.
Post offices can technically be established wherever there’s sufficient need; there’s no minimum population size. Village post offices, for example, are small storefronts operated by local businesses. Per the USPS, they’re “located within existing communities in a variety of locations, including convenience stores, local businesses and libraries, and are operated by the management of those locations.”
It would increase access to the courts. It would help strengthen relationships with loved ones. Re-entry preparations would be smoother. Incoming mail can’t arrive by FedEx or UPS, as those don’t deliver to PO boxes. You’d be hard-pressed to find another community that sends and receives a higher volume of letters per person. Which would only increase, once people realize they can count on it being delivered more than once a month.
*Names have been changed to protect sources
Image via Office of Inspector General
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