Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Colorado filed a lawsuit today against Boulder County Jail officials for enacting what they allege is an unconstitutional policy barring inmates from sending personal mail in sealed envelopes to people outside the jail.
August 3, 2010
By Vanessa Miller
The jail’s new mail policy, which was implemented in May, restricts personal outgoing correspondence to postcards that are supplied by the jail. Inmates can still send letters regarding legal matters in envelopes to attorneys. It was developed after several inmates, including two convicted sex offenders, found a way to circumvent the “uncensored inmate mail” stamp — which marked every piece of outgoing mail — and get unlabeled letters to young girls.
Mark Silverstein, legal director of the ACLU of Colorado, said the postcard-only policy “severely restricts prisoners’ ability to communicate with their parents, children, spouses, domestic partners, sweethearts, friends or anyone else who does not fall within the jail’s narrow exception to the newly-imposed ban on outgoing letters.”
“This unjustified restriction on written communications violates the rights of both the prisoners and their correspondents,” Silverstein said in a statement. “Families have a First Amendment right to receive all of their loved one’s written words, not just the few guarded sentences a prisoner can fit onto a postcard.”
Division Chief Larry Hank, who oversees the jail, said he does not believe the policy is unconstitutional and that the jail modeled its policy after similar ones in Arizona and Oregon that have survived court challenges.
Hank said inmates wanting to send mail regarding health or financial issues can talk with a jail commander about getting it marked as “official” and sent in an envelope. The commander only has to check first that there are no envelopes inside envelopes.
The jail does not have personnel specifically dedicated to handling mail, Hank said, which is why the jail can’t afford to dedicate one person to go through all the outgoing letters to make sure there aren’t envelopes inside envelopes, as the ACLU suggests.
“That would require the county hiring another person to come down and do that for me,” he said.The class action lawsuit that the ACLU filed today in U.S. District Court in Denver states the postcard-only policy has forced prisoners to abandon important correspondence or risk divulging highly confidential, sensitive information to anyone who might handle or see their postcard.
As a result, gay prisoners have been “chilled” from expressing themselves when writing to their intimate partners, according to Silverstein. Prisoners with HIV or other illnesses have refrained from corresponding with family members about their medical conditions, he said. And, he said, prisoners who express themselves through drawings or cartoons cannot enclose their art.
Anyone wanting to share an inspirational religious tract or a clipping from a newspaper or magazine are forbidden from doing so, according to Silverstein. For households where children may have access to the mailbox, parents are wary about writing to their spouses about marital problems, child-raising issues and other matters they do not wish to disclose to their children, he said.
The policy also prevents prisoners from using envelopes to send letters that seek spiritual guidance from clergy, provide sensitive information to investigative reporters, or to submit articles or letters to newspapers or other periodicals for publication.
“Writing letters to people in the free world is critical for helping prisoners maintain ties to their families and communities and ensuring their successful reintegration upon release,” said David Fathi, director of the ACLU National Prison Project, in a statement. “Enacting an across-the-board policy that significantly restricts the First Amendment freedoms of all current and future pre-trial detainees and prisoners in the jail is both unwise and unconstitutional.”
Before the new policy, prisoners were allowed to write five three-page letters per week and were given paper, envelope and postage by the jail. The new policy was adopted after several prisoners enclosed letters to Boulder-area children inside letters addressed to a third party outside the jail. That person then mailed the previously-enclosed letters to the children, which arrived without bearing the usual stamp warning recipients that the mailing originated from the Boulder jail.
“While we understand the jail’s desire to address this situation, the postcard-only policy is an over-reaction that unnecessarily infringes on the rights of hundreds of persons,” Fathi said.
He said the jail could have adopted a less restrictive rule — such as prohibiting envelopes within envelopes — that would have addressed the issue without infringing on the First Amendment rights of prisoners.
The lawsuit, which was filed on behalf of five individual prisoners who represent a class of current and future prisoners subject to the postcard-only policy, names Hank and Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle as defendants.
It seeks a court ruling invalidating the postcard-only policy.