PODCAST: Testimonies on the Damage Done by MODOC’s Anti-Physical Mail Policies
In order of podcast appearance, testimonies are by Patricia Trimble (Southeast Correctional Center), Adam Hamilton (Jefferson City Correctional Facility), and Terrell Robinson (Bonne Terre Correctional Facility)
Podcast was recorded and edited by Dylan Pyles
Dylan Pyles is from Kansas City, Missouri and is a co-founder of Liberation Lit.
The new mail policy in Missouri, which went into effect in July of 2022, bans all physical mail from coming into facilities. Instead, all letters, photos, and other mail must be sent to a third party in Florida that scans the documents and uploads the digital scans for residents to view. This mail policy makes it harder for families to stay connected and for incarcerated people to hold onto physical mail (especially photos and cards) as keepsakes.
Dylan Pyles, one of the founders of Liberation Lit, spoke with some of his contacts living under mass incarceration in the Missouri Department of Corrections about the impact of this new mail policy on their lives, and what it means for those who are already facing harsh policies and inhumane treatment.
This podcast was originally recorded for a community town hall discussing the new MODOC mail policies August 29, 2022. The town hall was co-sponsored by the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center, Liberation Lit, Missouri Justice Coalition, Missouri Prison Reform, Missouri State Conference of the NAACP, and Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.
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Full Transcript
Minimal edits have been made to the script for clarity and ease of reading.
Introductions
Patricia: My name's Patricia Trimble. I'm at the Southeast Correctional Center at Charleston, Missouri.
Adam: Hello, my name is Adam Hamilton. I'm at Jefferson City Correctional Center where this mailroom policy was implemented. And hopefully through this town hall, people can learn about this issue and hopefully affect change.
Terrell: Well, my name is Terrell Robinson. I'm located at Bonne Terre Correctional Center. I'm doing a 50-year sentence, I'm back on a parole violation. So today, I guess we'll be speaking about the policies of the new mail system.
Dylan: Could you start just by briefly explaining the mail policy changes for listeners who might not be familiar with it?
Patricia: The mail policy changes within the Department of Corrections took affect June 15th. All incoming mail, private mail—like mother, brothers, father, sister, whatever—has to be sent to a mail processing center in Florida. They've done away with all offender-to-offender correspondence, and I guess that's kind of the gist of it.
Adam: The mail policy change was implemented due to claims by the administration that contraband was being smuggled through the mail. And in order to stop that problem, they decided to make a drastic change that not only affects me as an inmate, but it also affects my family.
Dylan: Why is physical mail important? What about physical mail is different than the digital scans?
Patricia: Well, physical mail, to me, has always been important because that is the one thing that, I mean, that's personal. A person actually took their time to sit down and handwrite you a letter. You can smell the perfume that they were wearing, or the cologne, whatever, you know. It's a very personal thing, as opposed to a very non-personal digital scan. I mean, it's not even an email, it's just a scan of something that somebody sent in.
Adam: The physical mail—we see it as an act of caring. Somebody cared enough about us, even in these circumstances to take the time, to write, to take a picture, or send a card to us.
And during mail call, you can see it in the guys’ faces when they hear mail call in the wing. You know, everybody's head rotates to find the C.O. that's getting ready to pass out letters. Cause they're hoping for a letter from their grandkids or their son. In my case, you know, I loved getting letters and pictures from my wife before she passed away. I loved mail call. That was something we all looked forward to every day. And just to have that snatched away under a false pretense, it's devastating to people.
Terrell: Physical mail is important because you can always go back and put those letters back up, as opposed to, you know, the tablet—it's one thing, but it could break at any time. And if it breaks, then you have to wait until a certain amount of time before being replaced or fixed. So these tablets that they got now is loaner tablets. So let's just say that it goes down. So, it may take anywhere from 90 days to six months before you get it replaced.
Dylan: What has been the impact so far of banning physical mail for residents and for families? Have you noticed any specific impact?
Terrell: You know when you talk about sentimental things like cards and these type of things—when you go into an average man’s cell, he’ll have cards out that his family sent him. Throughout the years people pass away—we can always go back and look at those cards and reflect back on some euphoric time.
And now you take these away from us. And that's, it's just, uh. It's wretched, man. It's, it's hard, it's hard.
Adam: That personal touch, that act of caring from my family, “I'm gonna send my brother a birthday card”—has now been stripped away and replaced with a cold, digital, impersonal flash on your tablet that they could take away at any time.
I was just talking with a guy yesterday. He got his first letter through Securus and they scanned it in, and the last two pages came out blurry. He couldn't even read 'em and he had to call his sister to find out what the last two pages said.
Patricia: Okay. Take myself, I wear bifocals. And I don't have a lot of experience with the digital stuff that's coming in, although I did have one piece of mail that was, and it was kind of hard for me to read, you know? I could blow it up. But all that does is what's fuzzy gets fuzzier. *laughs* You know?
Terrell: So, I'm not computer savvy. So, you know, of course, changing it over instantly like that. It would take some time to get used to these things. That's where we’re at today, and it is just cruel and unusual punishment for us because a lot of us do not even understand how to work these computers and tablets.
Like I say, man, this is a bad situation, man. Especially for these elderly people, man. You know, these elderly people, man, they can't even keep contact with their families no more through the mail because they don't even know how to use the tablets.
Patricia: You know, the one thing that really affects me and many of the older prisoners in the state is the doing away with offender-to-offender correspondence. You know, I have dear friends that I've known for 30-plus years. But we're not in the same institutions anymore. So now, all communication is cut off between us. That's—especially within my community—that's a serious blow to us because I'm mama across the state to the trans boys and girls.
When Jessica was still in prison, I was at the Jefferson City Correctional Center, she was at Potosi Correctional Center. And for like three years, we wrote back and forth weekly. Both of us being transgender, we were sharing research and sharing information and, “Oh my God, I'm experiencing that too. What have you been...” you know. So we've grown and we’ve flourished getting word to one another. And if she was still in, that would've come to a screeching halt. You know, I would no longer have my support mechanism, nor her mine—the understanding because, you know, you couldn't know what I go through as a trans person. Nobody could, other than another trans person. Even another trans person on the outside doesn't know what it is to be trans on the inside. So it's so imperative that we not lose our ability to communicate.
Terrell: Well, what is your purpose of cutting out our inmate-to-inmate correspondence? Because everything that comes in from me to you or you to me is censored, man. But here's the deal: we share a lot of case law with each other. You know, when different rules or laws is on the books and come out or whatnot. So, any, every way that they can turn down the fight or the family, keep our communication off, that's what they’re going to do.
Adam: They can make money off it, not only from me but from you. And they didn't understand. And I had to tell 'em that, you know, you can't send me a birthday card anymore. You have to send it to Florida. And then Florida is now sending the cards back to the families, and are saying, "We will not scan your birthday card. You have to buy an e-card from Securus in order—you can do it that way." So that is the harm. Now you just involved my family.
Patricia: Being a predatory company, praying off of prisoners and families of prisoners...who's footing the bill for this and for how long, and when is there gonna be a fee coming our way or to our folks? From the beginning, an email stamp costs me 25 cents. Something that is imaginary, fictitious, doesn't exist, cost me 25 cents. When Securus took over, all of a sudden now a single stamp cost me 27 cents because they charged me 2 cents tax. So, you know, I mean, they're gonna squeeze every ounce that they can. That in itself really lends to the absolute predatory nature of this.
Adam: When it comes to offenders—inmates—our constitutional rights can be infringed upon due to the safety and security of the institution. They lean on that for everything. But the problem with that is our family is not subject to that strict standard in a way that requires that they be scrutinized on the safety and security. Because our families—they basically turn them into a criminal, saying, "We don't trust you as a citizen to not send contraband through the mail. So we're going to infringe on your first amendment rights. Your freedom of speech, expression. We're gonna infringe on men and force you through a company in order to monetize your first amendment rights to communicate with your family."
Dylan: There are other states that have passed smiliar policies—you know, Pennsylvania, Delaware—they cite contraband as the main for banning physical mail. What do you think of that reasoning?
Patricia: My thought on that reasoning is, as a former drug addict, when I was in my addiction, getting high, if you cut off one drug—I'm simply gonna replace it with another. I mean, there was only—to my knowledge anyway—there was only one drug that was regularly coming in through the mail. Everything else is either through visit or, more importantly, through staff. In fact, they just walked two staff members out of the institution here not too long ago, and it's said that that was the reason.
And unfortunately, the drug of choice at this facility—what’s taken the place of K2—is fentanyl and we're having people ODing on a regular. We just had somebody OD yesterday or… yesterday, I think it was.
Adam: Nobody has been convicted of sending anything through the mail, which is a federal crime, by the way. No letter has been seized, turned over to the police, and the police saw the probable cause for warrant, and then turn around and had that person arrested. It hasn't happened. So their whole story of contraband coming through the mail is a straw man argument.
Terrell: They would like the public to believe that this is all about us getting in a certain amount of contraband, and just saying, "This certain thing, particularly about this stuff called K2..." Well, that's not the case. That’s not what all this epidemic of people ODing is all about. They’re not ODing about that. It’s not been one person that OD on no K2. That's fentanyl stuff, which they’re not getting that through no mail, you know?
So where are you getting it from? You have a body machine up here that takes our whole scan of our body. If you are using that, it's impossible to bring anything back from that avenue. So where is it coming from? It has to be coming from within. But even these officers—they're upset about this here, but they're afraid to speak out on it, you know, because of the consequences that may come forth on their side. So it's an overall bad situation, man. And I’ll be so happy and grateful, man, when somebody could step in and stop these people from—this is oppression, man.
Dylan: Do you believe there are any alternative solutions to banning physical mail entirely?
Adam: They could have sent the original letter to the casework office along with our name. And once we came to pick it up, they could have just said, simply said, you know, “Look and make sure you can read it all. Okay. And you can. Okay. So here's the original letter. We can't give this to you, but we need you to sign a release saying that we can put this letter in the shredder. If not, we need a self-addressed stamped envelope so we can send this back to your family.”
Terrell: Do your job. I'm saying everything—every mail that comes in here is—you know, they have machines where they scan it over and if it's an unknown substance on it, they reject it. So I'm saying there's absolutely no reason why you’re cutting it out based upon, according to you, some substances or whatever is coming on the paper, because they have the capability. The feds use it all the time. They have the capability of censoring the mail to see if it's an unknown substance on there. But the thing about it is that they don't want to do their job.
Dylan: What can folks who aren’t incarcerated do to support you on this issue?
Patricia: Well, the best thing that anybody can do is to write, call, email Anne Precythe, the director of the Department of Corrections. And voice not only our, but their concern over allowing a predatory company to simply scan. You know, they reject letters and don't really give us any reason for why—simply, “You had incoming mail, it was rejected,” you know? So we have to work together to find a solution.
Adam: Once the government, or the state becomes a censor or arbiter of what can be said and not be said, they become like a tyrant. I would advocate that they personally become familiar with that. Then that way they could make a solid argument to the central office or to the administration that the constitution guarantees my right as a free person, as a citizen, the right to communicate with my family.
Terrell: I've always said that power lies in the people, and we need to understand that we have a voice in this. But we need to come together as a people. I'm talking about—we can't do anything without citizens that's out there, you know. And getting with their representatives, man, and you know, coming together and voicing their opinions and their complaint, so that we can get the proper people in place to change some of these things, man.
Let me tell you something. I got out of prison in 2007, and to this day, I still have my daughter’s first birthday card she scribbled over on a piece of paper. You can't replace that, man. You can take this from a person that's been in this for a long time: Taking my mail away from me, where I cannot go back and relive that… Hey man, that's, that's trauma. That's, that's—that's trauma.
Take action!
Email Ann Precythe, the director of the Department of Corrections and demand the return of physical mail.
Contact your Missouri State Representative
Join Part Two of the MODOC Town Hall Series (Date TBA)
Don’t know who your rep is? You can find them here: https://bit.ly/Find-Your-Reps