Illustration by Jandos Rothstein
In his first-week blitz of executive actions, Joe Biden directed the Justice Department to not renew federal contracts with the private prison industry. “[W]e must reduce profit-based incentives to incarcerate by phasing out the Federal Government’s reliance on privately operated criminal detention facilities,” the order stated.
But the profit motive will still exist in the federal prison system, even after private prison operations contracts are exhausted. Food, medicine, telecommunications, banking, and practically every other service for incarcerated people are almost entirely privatized, through a network of subcontractors. Critics charge that these contractors prioritize their own balance sheets over the well-being of prisoners and their families, and that the services they provide are often exploitative, of low quality, and infringe on inmates’ civil rights.
One such contractor is poised to gain control of the means by which people communicate with those in the federal prison system. A company called Smart Communications has an exclusive pilot program with the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) called MailGuard, which eliminates nonlegal physical mail in federal prison facilities and transfers it to either crude paper printouts or electronic files accessed through tablets or kiosks.
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The one-year pilot program, under way in two federal corrections facilities, started under the Trump administration in March 2020. But despite stated goals to remove for-profit companies from incarceration, the Biden administration has yet to reverse the program, and in a statement to the Prospect, the BOP said that it is actively considering an expansion, pending funding. Pilots of new for-profit products from private prison companies “tend to happen unbeknownst to most of the public,” explained Wanda Bertram, communications strategist for the Prison Policy Initiative.
Mail service is critical to prison life, giving incarcerated people a rare window to the outside world and a tactile connection to family members and loved ones. “One letter feels as if it could fill one thousand days,” said Tami Eldrige, an incarcerated mother of two in Westchester County, New York, in a conversation with the Brennan Center. But as implemented around the nation, banning physical mail at prisons adds to delivery times, potentially increases costs for prisoners and families, and enables prisons to electronically surveil incarcerated people through their messages with loved ones. The lack of direct communication also increases alienation and could lead to recidivism, advocates say.
“There’s nothing like getting a birthday card you can touch and hold, to see handwriting you may never have seen before,” says Ebony Underwood, who founded We Got Us Now, a national nonprofit led by children and young adults whose parents are incarcerated. “This should never be the sole option.”
SMART COMMUNICATIONS, the maker of MailGuard, is one of the lesser lights in a prison telecommunications sector with two giants, Securus and GTL. Those companies, which control around 80 percent of the prison telecom market, are full-spectrum providers of phone, video chat, email, tablet-based entertainment (music, books, video games), and payment services, often provided at exorbitant and exploitative rates. Smart Communications has slightly less reach, but has carved out a niche with its MailGuard system.
“MailGuard® finally eliminates one of corrections [sic] longest running problems and security loopholes—contraband and secret communications in inmate postal mail,” reads the sales pitch at the Smart Communications website. Those with experience with the prison system strongly doubt that contraband in mail is a big problem. “Let me just shoot it straight to you,” said Jennifer Hamilton, whose husband has been incarcerated in federal prison and county jail over the past decade. “What is getting inside of prisons and jails comes mostly from the officers. They get paid by the inmates large amounts of money, and they’re bringing it in.”
Nevertheless, corrections officials have been attracted to the idea of restricting communications to inmates. With MailGuard, postal mail is routed to an off-site facility outside the prison, where it is converted into a digital copy and uploaded. From there, it is accessible to incarcerated people through either printed scans or Smart Communications’ proprietary tablets or kiosks.
Smart Communications, which did not respond to a request for comment, stresses that MailGuard is a “free service,” and the Bureau of Prisons told the Prospect that there is “no cost to the inmate population.” But this undersells the benefit for the company. Corrections facilities receive MailGuard as an add-on to the entire Smart Communications platform, including the tablets and kiosks that are one way to view physical mail scanned through the system. The tablets are often free, but incarcerated people can also use them to send emails and photos, and acquire books or music or games. Emails and photos sent through the system often require a “stamp,” making prisons the only places on Earth with stamps for electronic mail. And potential delays in processing scanned physical mail can lead to an overreliance on email.
Food, medicine, telecommunications, banking, and practically every other service for incarcerated people are almost entirely privatized.
Bianca Tylek of the advocacy group Worth Rises compared “free” tablets to the way drug pushers offer a free hit. “Why are you trading a one-time fixed cost for a lifetime of high rates?” she asked.
These ancillary services, with rates set by Smart Communications, are where the profits ramp up. And it reflects a disturbing trend in the monetization of incarcerated people and their families. Regular mail is banned but cost-per-page emails can go through. Physical books are discouraged but e-books are plentiful. In-person visits are restricted but video visitation is allowable. Care packages must be prepackaged through an approved list of items. In all of these examples, a private company benefits from the narrow menu of options available in prisons, as the cost of these services accrues to them.
The pandemic has only strengthened private companies’ hold on prison systems around the country. With in-person visits banned, facilities rely on pay-per-minute phone calls and expensive video visits instead. Some prisons have made a limited number of video visits free without in-person visitation, but regular contact remains prohibitively expensive.
The Smart Communications pitch, much like other companies and their video visitation services, also foregrounds the ability to spy on those in their facilities. “MailGuard creates a searchable database and opens a whole new field of intelligence for your agency,” the copy reads. This is a real lure for corrections officers, explained Alec Karakatsanis, executive director of Civil Rights Corps, a criminal justice nonprofit. “They want maximum surveillance at all times,” Karakatsanis said. “You can’t talk about it without knowing the long history of surveillance and crackdown on prisoner organizing.”
Smart Communications has had some modest success with MailGuard, primarily in county jails. An Arkansas jail eliminated physical mail in 2018. Polk County Jail in Florida did the same. At the state level, just one department of corrections currently uses the system.
After a series of drug overdoses that sent several inmates to the hospital in 2018, the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections went into a ten-day lockdown. In an effort to shut down drug entry, the DOC secured an emergency three-year contract with Smart Communications for MailGuard. At the time, there was no other mail-elimination provider and the department was unable to handle that much screening itself, explained Diana Woodside, director of policy and legislative affairs at the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections. The DOC also maintains a Pennsylvania-based security processing facility to search for contraband inside books and other items. In 2019, the state also banned physical books, alleging that drugs were smuggled in on their pages. The department relented under advocate pressure.
The MailGuard rollout was rocky. Mail delays were common and the scan quality was poor, with blurry faces and unreadable writing. “We like to think that we live in this age of high tech where you scan and print out something looking like the original,” said Bertram. “With prison technology, you’re almost always getting something worse than what the rest of us are getting.”
Corrections officials have been attracted to the idea of restricting communications to inmates.
Incarcerated people and their advocates worried about their privacy, too. “Incarcerated populations are very distrustful of the department of corrections,” said Kirstin Cornnell, social services director at the Pennsylvania Prison Society. “People complain that there’s less privacy or that DOC is withholding their mail.” Her organization receives hundreds of letters every week from incarcerated Pennsylvanians, and she said the policy has added yet another layer of stress and agitation. It confuses families; mail sent directly to the prison is returned to sender. The policy has also made it harder for people behind bars to receive course materials for higher education.
Woodside insists that the early challenges are behind them, but the Smart Communications contract ends this September, and the state plans to put the service out for a bid. It’s unclear which other companies provide this service and could compete.
MailGuard certainly didn’t fulfill its primary purpose: blocking drugs. According to state data, drugs are still entering state facilities with regularity, either through faked legal mail or corrections officers. The 2017–2018 average drug test positivity rate was 0.7 percent. After implementing MailGuard, the average number of drug tests coming back positive from September 2019 to August 2020 hovered around 1 percent, with the exception of two months with zero positive drug tests. Woodside said that the DOC has discovered forged legal mail laced with synthetic drugs, but the data indicate that drugs are more likely entering the way they did before—through corrections officers, despite the DOC’s efforts to stop it.
While the Pennsylvania contract remains up in the air, there’s one other option for Smart Communications: get their platform adopted in another flagship corrections network, as a model for lucrative deals at the state and local levels to follow. Enter the federal prison system.
THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION initiated the MailGuard system as a pilot program in March 2020. Two facilities—Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Beckley in West Virginia and United States Penitentiary (USP) Canaan in Pennsylvania—use the platform, the BOP confirmed to the Prospect. USP Canaan’s website states that mail intended for the inmate population must be delivered to a Smart Communications facility in Pinellas Park, Florida. Right now, correspondence at Canaan and Beckley is printed for distribution to those incarcerated at the facilities. Legal mail from attorneys and documents like birth certificates and Social Security cards are prohibited from the process.
The BOP estimated the delay for inmates to receive outside mail due to MailGuard at 48 hours, saying that this delay is minimal compared to the benefit of reducing the introduction of contraband into the facility. BOP consistently framed MailGuard as a drug prevention measure to the Prospect. “The mail scanning program has reduced the number of synthetic drug introductions via general postal mail to effectively zero over the pilot project period,” a BOP spokesperson said.
Of course, there are other ways to get drugs into prisons; BOP did not say whether the overall rate of drug introduction has slowed. And the 48-hour delay is an estimate, which could presumably be longer for certain correspondence. Delays could nudge the inmate population and their families into using instantaneous email instead, and pay the requisite stamp charges.
The MailGuard contract flies in the face of President Biden’s order ridding the federal incarceration system of private prison companies.
According to the BOP, all correspondence is maintained for 30 days, in case it needs to be rescanned, before being destroyed. That concerns Ebony Underwood of We Got Us Now, whose father was incarcerated for 33 years and was only released last month through a compassionate-release program.
“My father never stopped being a dad, he was so consistent,” said Underwood. “You know what it was? Letters and cards. All of the time he would send letters. That was our connection. The significance of receiving mail, that’s what’s so exciting.”
The pilot program for Beckley and Canaan has the tentative end date of March 2021. But the BOP spokesperson said that “the Agency is considering the expansion of mail scanning pending funding.” That means that the future of the program is up to the Biden administration.
The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Activists believe that the MailGuard pilot should be reversed. “I’m worried that once it gets a foothold there’s no going back,” said Alec Karakatsanis. “My experience with the criminal punishment bureaucracy is, if no one pays attention they do monstrous things.” Karakatsanis is particularly worried that frameworks like this, which have traditionally been confined to state corrections departments, may jump to the federal level, creating a feedback loop where the federal government places its imprimatur on monetizing, exploiting, and surveilling prisoners.
In addition, the MailGuard contract flies in the face of President Biden’s order ridding the federal incarceration system of private prison companies. Eliminating for-profit operations but not for-profit subcontractors raises questions about the commitment to the principle. “What’s striking to me about the fact that this [pilot] is still ongoing is that Biden ran on a criminal justice platform and this was one of his key promises,” Bertram said.
The administration has not chosen anyone to lead the Bureau of Prisons; Trump appointee Michael Carvajal now serves as acting administrator. Whether or not to continue MailGuard will be a key indicator of the administration’s stated commitment to eradicate the profit motive from federal prisons.
“We’re the innocent bystanders of this horrible experience,” said Ebony Underwood. “It’s the monetizing of our life. You’re monetizing our love. Because we want to be connected to our parents?”
