Greetings & Good Hello. Today is the topic is communication via the mail – and how facilities like Columbus County Detention Center, but also Onslow County, struggle and fail miserably coping with getting mail service to inmates. We’ll start by setting up the criminal side of the problem – and we will ignore books for the purpose of brevity.
Criminals can use mail to smuggle designer drugs into facilities by lacing paper – this includes K2 and various opiates, amphetamines, and other psychoactives. Basically, if you can dissolve it and distribute it on tabs of paper which can be ingested or smoked, you can get it through the mail. Mail can also be used to smuggle razor blades and other physical items – but these are relatively easy to catch with visual inspection and scanners – doped paper is more difficult. Lastly, information, such as escape plans, hate speech, gang activity coordination, or various sexually explicit or overly violent material can be of concern. This last category requires active content moderation and speaks to specific, local, cultural norms – in Onslow county, for example, and same-sex contact outside of the Christian Bible as well as any non-biblical anal play was strictly forbidden.
Content moderation does not apply to attorney-client communications, but all mail communications are subject to contraband search. In terms of criminal procedure the test is (a) facility security and (b) reasonable penological interest. Escape plans or plans to organize prisoner resistance to officer abuses violate (a) and (b), and, in the minds of law enforcement agents in Whiteville, non-biblical anal play is terrifying, especially if it involves man-butt.
In order to decide which mail can be read by facility anal protectors and other content moderators and which can not, facilities define a concept called “legal mail” – this is mail marked as “legal mail” and claims attorney/client privilege. Such mail should be sent by an attorney. However, facilities add one additional dimension to this, which in theory sounds good but has problems in practice. This additional dimension is digital delivery. Legal mail is also, generally, delivered in person – that is, it is handed to you, while personal mail is delivered after being scanned. Digital delivery is seen as a solution to the contraband issue since you can not dope a digital document and you can not smuggle a razor blade via a PDF. This leaves only content moderation.
In theory this system should work, except, well, the people implementing this are quite stupid and there are some edge cases to think about. Let’s look at the edge cases first because they are easier to deal with than the mind boggling stupidity of law enforcement professionals. First, consider a document like a tax return or a power of attorney – a document the inmate must sign and mail back. For such a document, being able to “view” the document is insufficient; the document must be produced on paper for the simple reason that the inmate needs to sign it. Second, some of these documents are “official documents” meaning they are on special paper or have security features such that only the original document is valid. Perhaps this document is one that needs to be signed, or perhaps it is one that must later be produced in court. In the case of the latter, an inmate must not lose access to that original – and this brings us to the realm of stupid.
Columbus County Detention Center has a policy that sounds, prima facie, reasonable. Personal mail will be scanned for digital delivery and legal mail will be (a) opened in front of the inmate, (b) photocopied in front of the inmate, and (c) the original will be either destroyed or placed in personal property. This is one version of the policy which is believed to be the one displayed to inmates on the computer monitor visible during inmate intake. This is not the policy as it is understood by staff.
The policy, as it is understood by staff, varies tremendously by staff member. One corporal, for example, gets legal mail right but believes personal mail goes right to you – he is unaware of digital delivery. One of the two “mail sergeants” believes personal mail is limited to 5 pages but correctly understands the processing of legal mail. The other “mail sergeant” believes there is no limit to personal mail but believes that all legal mail must be destroyed once it is copied, whether it is official or not. The Lieutenant believes that personal mail goes straight to personal property. All requests for clarification, in writing, of the policy are ignored or punished. Moreover, digital delivery means you have access to the mail for a few minutes a day at a shared kiosk – there is one and only one wall-mounted access point for all electronic activities, shared by everyone – so you have access to your digital mail for perhaps 10 minutes per day. This is insufficient if it contains significant case material. All digital mail is readable by numerous parties.
Against this backdrop is a questionable definition of “legal”. Legal mail, in practice, here at Columbus County Detention Center, is anything that looks like it comes from an official source. For example, materials from the North Carolina Department of Adult Corrections and the North Carolina Prisoner Legal Services were treated as legal mail although neither were my attorney. Private health records and legal documents from my international attorneys, pro-se family work, and hospital are considered public because they are sent from a family member – and thus subject to content moderation and digital archiving. That’s right – my private medical records are available to the public on the grounds that my family does not have the right to declare mail as private, while a state official’s public communication with me is automatically private because the local law enforcement recognizes the envelope. There is a very “sloppy” definition of what “legal” mail is, and, as noted, it is considered very bad form to ask for clarification of the policy.
This is where a fiduciary attorney would be helpful, however, defense counsel is ethically prohibited from acting in a fiduciary role. While it would be trivial for defense counsel to simply mail documents to you and bypass all the local yokel malarky, this is something defense attorneys are loathe to do. Moreover, defense attorneys leverage information isolation as a means of driving clients into the desired course of action, so it is counter-productive to their interests to support a defendant taking initiative. Thus the defendant is hobbled quite nicely – there is a “reasonable” process in place which is so reliably screwed up that any inmate can not effectively get access to documents or even protect official documents from destruction.
Right now I am fighting to get access to key information that I seek in order to chart my course of action. My defense counsel is doggedly belligerent in his commitment to forcing me to make the decision based on his ideas about what I should prioritize – using his unique insight into what a “normal” person would “objectively” want. As such, counsel supports the mail blockade, so I am on my own in filing a lawsuit against relevant members of the local sheriff’s office in order to get access to my mail. I am not allowed to have any help in this task – it is not ethical for any other lawyer, other than my current defense attorney, to be involved. So I try not to choke under the jack boots of freedom, but will never stop trying to breathe.
Eric Charles Welton
Prisoner #94911
Columbus County Detention Center
March 24, 2024