SPRINGFIELD – Families of Illinois prison inmates and legal advocates spoke out this week against a new program at the Illinois Department of Corrections that restricts incarcerated people’s access to incoming mail and in some cases only allows them to see electronically scanned images of letters and other correspondence.

IDOC announced in August that it was launching the program as an effort to prevent drugs and other kinds of contraband from getting inside state prisons. But critics of the program argued it violates prisoners’ civil rights and said there is little evidence to suggest such a program will have any effect.

“We don’t argue that the drug problem is there,” Juanita Hernandez, whose husband has been incarcerated, told an administrative panel. “We know it’s there. We just don’t think that the way that this has gone about is fair at all.”

Hernandez spoke at a public hearing Tuesday on a proposed change to IDOC’s administrative rules that would make the mail screening program permanent. The program is currently operating under an emergency rule that IDOC promulgated in August, but emergency rules can only be in effect for 150 days.

Lawmakers have already expressed skepticism about the program. At a meeting in September, the General Assembly’s Joint Committee on Administrative Rules formally objected to the emergency rule. While that objection did not block the rule from remaining in effect through January, it sent a message to the department that it will need to make significant changes — and listen to feedback from incarcerated people’s families, attorneys and other interested stakeholders — if it wants to make the rule permanent.

The emergency rules

Under the emergency rules, most incoming mail addressed to prisoners — including letters, photographs or drawings made by their children — is scanned into electronic images, which the prisoners can access on computer tablets that are issued to them. Some mail, such as legal correspondence from an attorney, is supposed to be exempt from scanning.

IDOC launched the program after the union representing correctional officers issued a report last year that described an “explosion in illegal drug use” in the state prison system that was endangering the health and safety of correctional workers. It suggested that drugs — including synthetic drugs as well as paper soaked in wasp spray that prisoners could burn and inhale fumes from — were getting into the prisons through unscanned mail.

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Tenielle Fitzjarrald, president of the local union representing officers at the Lawrence Correctional Center, said working conditions in the prison before the mail scanning program was implemented were unacceptable.

“Prior to mail scan being implemented at our facility, you couldn’t walk into a housing unit without smelling the acrid burning smell of chemicals or paper or smoke in the cell houses,” she told the panel. “And sometimes it was so bad that you could even see the smoke haze on the wings. Every month, we would have employees who are out of work because of exposures to these unknown substances.”

Since the department began scanning mail, she said, conditions have greatly improved.

“It is a relief to not leave work with a headache every day,” she said. “Since scanning the mail, we have gone entire weeks with no incidents involving intoxicated individuals.”

Criticisms of the policy

But Wendell Robinson, executive director of the Restore Justice Foundation, a group that advocates for less punitive criminal justice policies, said it was inhumane to cut off inmates’ access to physical mail. He said the program would likely have little effect on contraband getting into prisons.

“People often read and re-read mail to remind them of their support system,” he said. “To digitize physical mail is to eliminate the art, beauty and emotion, the texture and even a scent that is unique to physical correspondence. Additionally, there is no evidence to support that the proposed permanent rules will be effective in stopping contraband from entering the IDOC.”

Ben Ruddell, director of criminal justice policy at the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, also questioned whether any evidence supported the idea that the mail was a major source of contraband. He said limiting inmates’ access to mail raised many legal concerns, including First Amendment rights of prisoners and the people who correspond with them.

“Courts have recognized that the timing of speech is sometimes as important as its content, an observation that has particular force when it comes to mail concerning legal and medical matters,” he said. “The lack of limits on the access, use and sharing of scanned mail will likely have a chilling effect on the speech of some friends and family who may be less forthright and personal in their letters to their incarcerated loved ones, or may decide it’s not worth sending anything at all.”

The Joint Committee on Administrative Rules is scheduled to review the policy again at its next monthly meeting Nov. 18 in Chicago.

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.