Why Weβre Suing to Protect the Right of Incarcerated People to Receive Physical Mail | Electronic Frontier Foundation
In 2021, San Mateo County, California, #banned people incarcerated in county jails from #receiving #physical #mail.
Instead, family and friends were required to mail their letters to Smart Communications, a private for-profit company based in Florida that would scan and destroy those letters so that incarcerated people would be required to access them digitally through a limited number of shared tablets and kiosks in public spaces within the jails.
This is why the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, and the Social Justice Legal Foundation filed a complaint last week challenging this unconstitutional policy.
The policy invades the privacy of the 850 people incarcerated in the #Redwood #City #jail, as well as that of their families.
With only a few tablets to go around, this procedure is also a cruel way of #limiting #access to communications from family and friends by drastically reducing the ability of a person to spend time reading them.
Itβs also hard to overstate exactly how important written correspondences are to people inside jails and prisons in the U.S. β a true lifeline to the world outside.
This lawsuit also marks #EFFβs commitment to stopping the current trend that seeks to #privatize aspects of the carceral system #for #profit as well as strip #privacy away from incarcerated individuals.
Another such practice is charging exorbitant #fees for people to make #phone #calls to family membersβa scheme that #Connecticut has just made illegal.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/03/why-were-suing-protect-right-incarcerated-people-receive-physical-mail