Inmate mail policy fails to curb drug smuggling

In years past, Desiree Cunningham was able to stay in touch with those she knew behind bars. Mail arrived in her incarcerated friends’ hands quickly, and groups of visitors could organize trips from the Philadelphia area to correctional facilities in the most far-flung portions of Pennsylvania.

But that changed four-and-a-half years ago, and quite abruptly. Her friends will never see the original mail she sent them, and visitors must now compete for a limited number of time slots ending any efforts to get family members to more remote prisons.

“People have obituaries - they can’t go to their mother’s funeral and you try to send them the obituary, and [the prisons] have to make a copy of it and give them a copy,” said Cunningham, who lives in the Philadelphia area. “I don’t even send photos anymore.”

The fact that inmates will never physically touch something a loved one wrote or created for them, with limited chances to see that loved one face-to-face, has cast a pall over those involved in inmate advocacy.

“It’s like somebody you love being dead, but they’re still alive,” Cunningham said. “That’s torture.”

In September 2018, the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections rolled out a system in which inmates no longer receive original copies of most of their mail. Instead, correspondence is sent to a company in Florida which scans the mail, and later destroys it. Prisoners are shown facsimiles, either on electronic tablets or by re-printing the scans.

The move was in reaction to what DOC claimed were a rash of drug exposure incidents among prison staff in August 2018, although no conclusive evidence was provided that the incidents were actually caused by drugs, let alone drugs trafficked through prison mail.

Now data provided by DOC shows that the drug problem in state prisons has, by some metrics, actually become worse than it was before

the mail interception system was put in place.

Although data shows a steep drop in drug prevalence immediately after the policy was enacted, those numbers quickly rose again, with the rate of random positive drug tests among inmates now 2.7 times higher than it was before the mail interdiction system was put in place.

During a March budget hearing before the House Appropriations Committee, Acting DOC Secretary Laurel Harry defended the policy, saying it allowed the department to concentrate on other potential drug delivery methods.

“We also know that [traffickers] will look for other avenues for drugs to enter our system, and that’s where have to focus our efforts. But we don’t have to focus our efforts on the mail,” Harry said.

But legal advocates who challenged the mail policy in 2018 said it was clear then - and more so now, given the failure of the system to produce a lasting result — that the DOC was never certain it was solving the problem.

“It was a shock-and-awe campaign without having done any empirical investigation into the routes by which drugs were getting into the institutions,” said Bret Grote, an attorney with the Abolitionist Law Center. “It infuriates me to this day to see how cynical it was and what it spawned across the country.”

State lawmakers have also voiced concern that the mail system may do more harm than good, depriving inmates of the family ties that many prison studies show are crucial to reducing recidivism.

“What I am concerned about is the dehumanization of people who are incarcerated and the connections that we provide people that they can make with their family,” Rep. Ben Waxman, D-Montgomery, told Harry during the budget hearing. “Those connections are incredibly important to rehabilitate people, to make sure people return to society in a way that they’ve been meaningfully reformed.”

If the mail scanning system has allowed the DOC to focus on drug interdiction elsewhere, as Harry stated, the department’s data hasn’t shown it.

The DOC’s webpage for drug interdiction metrics hasn’t been updated since an August 2020 report, but numbers through December 2022 were provided at PennLive’s request earlier this month.

One key measure is the rate of drug finds inside the prison system, which had risen to 5.9 per 1,000 inmates in August 2018, the month DOC says it experienced a rash of illnesses among staff exposed to drugs. That metric dropped once the mail scanning procedure was put in place in September 2018, but almost immediately began to rise again, hitting 5.5 finds per 1,000 inmates in January 2020.

The metric then declined again once COVID-19 hit, and the DOC’s implemented lockdown procedures that kept inmates separated and halted in-person visitation. But drug finds began to spiral back up in 2021, hitting 4.9 per 1,000 inmates in December 2022 — even though the DOC has kept some pandemic lockdown measures in place, such as appointment-only visitation with limited time slots.

The rate of inmates being charged with drug-related misconduct has seen a similar trajectory; in August 2018, the DOC recorded 10.4 charges per 1,000 inmates, a number which dropped and then rose following the mail system implementation, and again after the COVID-19 lockdown.

But the number of misconducts hit an all-time high of 10.5 drug charges per 1,000 inmates in October 2022, even with the mail and visitation restrictions still in place.

Most striking, however, is the rate at which inmates are testing positive on random drug screenings. In August 2018, that rate was 1.0 percent — a number which then-Corrections Secretary John Wetzel said was the crucial indicator of an out-of-control drug problem that justified the mail scanning policy, according to a report at the time in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

As of this past December, that positivity rate has ballooned to 2.7 percent.

The broad sweep of the data, according to those with experience in the prison system, may represent adaptation. If drugs were coming into the prisons via mail in significant quantities then the mail scanning system lowered their incidence temporarily before traffickers switched to other methods.

“I don’t dispute some people send in drugs through the mail,” said Alexandra Morgan-Kurtz, an attorney with the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project, which also challenged the mail policy. “But there was never any kind of proof about how much volume was coming in, and there was no focus on how it was getting in.”

The DOC’s data shows the prison system recorded near zero instances of staff being taken to the ER for drug exposure following the mail system’s implementation, after a high of 48 such instances in August 2018. But the certainty of that month’s incidents has been questioned.

At the time, DOC issued a series of statements about incidents at state prisons around Pennsylvania where staff had become “sickened by unknown substances.”

Wetzel, as well as former Gov. Tom Wolf, said the solution would be to begin handling mail off-site, providing inmates only with digitized copies of their cards, letters, children’s drawings, and other correspondence.

The department also publicized a number of images purporting to show mail that had been soaked in drugs — either the synthetic cannabinoid K2, or synthetic opioids like fentanyl or suboxone, which is commonly used to treat opioid addiction.

Limited information was given, however, regarding exactly how staff became ill from these substances, or how the DOC had reached this conclusion. In 2018, WHYY reported the department had said that two field tests of affected staff came back positive for drugs; when asked this week if the department had any further evidence about the 2018 incidents, a DOC spokesperson said it did not, providing a list of symptoms from affected staff that ranged from nausea to high blood pressure to skin rashes.

The DOC’s actions in 2018 suggested that it believed staff had fallen ill after touching reside found during mail screenings. The department even announced that staff who were opening and copying inmates’ legal mail — which was processed locally and not sent to Florida — would be wearing special protective clothing while doing so.

But it is effectively impossible to become ill from such incidental contact with K2, fentanyl, or similar substances, according to medical experts.

“Both of those can theoretically get through skin, but it just doesn’t happen in any meaningful or risky way,” said Ryan Marino, toxicology director for University Hospitals in Cleveland, who previously worked in Pittsburgh and has studied drug exposure claims in Pennsylvania and Ohio.

“It is not possible and it is not something that happens,” Marino said regarding reports that prison staff became ill from accidental contact with mail; further, he said, the symptoms described in most such cases “were usually the exact opposite of what opioids or fentanyl would do.”

On Sept. 5, 2018, the DOC signed a contract with Smart Communications, the Florida-based company which promises a secure facility set up to deal with drug-laced mail, and which transmits digital scans of inmates’ items to the relevant prison before destroying them after a 45-day holding period. The company calls this service MailGuard, a “postal mail elimination system.”

That contract was described as an emergency measure, but the term length was three years, at a cost of over $4.5 million per year. That term has now been extended through September 2023, according to a contract document provided by the DOC, without the deal having been competitively bid.

Smart Communications has sued other entities for performing a similar service, claiming patent infringement, without success. The company recently made such a claim against York County and its jail service contractor Global TelLink, losing the case.

Shortly after the Smart Communications system was rolled out, several justice reform groups — including those represented by Grote and Morgan-Kurtz — sued the DOC on behalf of their incarcerated clients.

The scope of that suit was limited to legal mail, on the grounds that the DOC was violating attorney-client privilege, with the department eventually signing a settlement and allowing inmates to resume directly receiving mail from their attorneys.

“One of the things that we saw through that litigation and through our advocacy was that the DOC was pointing to a lot of possible areas of where the drugs were coming in, but were only focusing on areas where it was easy for them to exert control over the incarcerated population,” Morgan-Kurtz said.

The DOC’s own filings in the case suggest it was uncertain. The department’s stipulation of facts filing states that it had identified seven ways drugs were entering prisons, but it “did not have and does not have a statistical breakdown as to the percentage of drugs coming from each of these pathways,” DOC attorneys wrote.

“To the best of my knowledge they never bothered to investigate them,” MorganKurtz said. “The lack of due diligence goes to the root of the fact that this change to the mail policy was never about stopping drugs in the prisons.”

The legal filing also avoided any statements asserting that DOC staff were exposed to drugs during the 2018 incidents, or that these incidents were tied to the mail.

Rather, from May to September of that year, “approximately 58 suspected drug exposure incidents affecting staff were reported,” the DOC’s attorneys wrote, with the only further detail being that “in five of those instances, the presence of a controlled substance was confirmed to have been found in an area proximate to the staff member affected.”

Hospitals reportedly encountered the same conundrum. The Inquirer quoted emergency physicians at three hospitals in Pennsylvania which had taken prison staff after the suspected exposure events; none of the staff tested positive for drugs, with the phenomenon being described to the Inquirer as “psychogenic.”

“I will state unequivocally that in zero instances did the Department of Corrections obtain any evidence that any staff member who was allegedly sickened by a drug exposure had actually come into contact with any drugs,” Grote said.

The organizations involved in the 2018 suit said they did not challenge that prison staff had experienced symptoms — but that, in the lack of any evidence of drug exposure, “it’s very likely that what happened was some sort of social contagion and social panic,” said Sean Damon with the Amistad Law Project, another one of the plaintiffs.

The enactment of the mail policy in September 2018, and the pandemic that hit a year-and-a-half later, limited the vectors for drugs to enter prisons. Not only were inmates cut off from physical mail - with the exception of legal documents - but as of spring 2020 they were largely cut off from human contact as well.

In response to the COVID-19 outbreak, the DOC moved to limit interaction between inmates, and suspended in-person visitation. When visits resumed in 2021 and 2022, they were restricted to a schedule, with limited time slots available each day that had to be booked in advance.

The DOC has not ended this policy, and Harry told a Senate panel during budget hearings this month that it did not intend to, saying “the scheduling system is a security enhancement” that has helped to combat drug trafficking.

But even in the midst of the pandemic — with no mail, no visitation, and inmates confined to their cells nearly around-the-clock — it was apparent that the drug problem was as bad as it’s ever been, according to those who frequently visit inmates.

“I remember having a video visit with a friend at Mahanoy in winter 2020 peak pandemic, no one is going anywhere - and he’s like ‘my cellmate is high, everyone next to me is high, everyone is high,’” said Rev. Jay Bergen, a Philadelphiaarea pastor who visits inmates.

The curtailing of mail and visitors as possible vectors, advocates like Bergen and Grote said, suggests that the primary problem now lies with prison staff.

If anyone would know this, it’s Rasheeda Bagwell. In 2017, according to court records, Bagwell was charged with delivering drugs to inmates, charges she said she received while working as a corrections officer at SCI Graterford outside of Philadelphia.

(Graterford was closed in 2018 with the opening of the new prison, SCI Phoenix, next door.)

Bagwell pled guilty under a deal with the district attorney and served prison time for drug trafficking, but said she was quite obviously not the only one involved.

“I was the only one that stood up and said ‘yeah, I did it,’” said Bagwell, who now works as a re-entry coordinator for formerly incarcerated women.

“When I say staff, I’m not just talking about COs,” Bagwell said, with drug trafficking occurring among a wide variety of staff roles, not just guards per se. “I want people to very clearthe COs are probably the bottom of the totem pole, if you want to talk about the drug rings.”