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by Emmett Sanders
In September 2025, the Illinois Department of Corrections implemented an emergency rule barring people in the state’s prisons from receiving cards, letters, and even their children’s drawings. Instead, the state would begin scanning incoming mail, creating digitized copies to be uploaded to incarcerated people’s tablets, and then destroying the original letters. With this move, Illinois would become the latest state to implement some form of mail scanning in its prisons. These cruel changes, which the department justified as a response to drug overdoses, were made permanent in January over vocal disapproval from the public and from incarcerated people alike. Meanwhile, the department admitted there was no evidence mail scanning would resolve the
introduction of drug contraband into its facilities, despite that being the explicit motivation behind the policy. Six months later, the department produced a report showing no substantial change in drug seizures or overdoses.
Concern around drug overdoses in prisons is genuine, though the response is misguided. Deaths from drug overdose, both in prisons and among the non-incarcerated general public, have indeed exploded over the past several decades: the opioid epidemic alone has claimed more than 806,000 lives since 1999, and prisons across the country saw about a 500% increase in deaths from drug or alcohol intoxication between 2010 and 2018. As officials scramble for answers, however, little effort has been made to resolve why there is such a high demand for drugs in prison — and why so many risk their lives and additional years
in prison to obtain them — in the first place. Instead, prisons across the country have committed themselves to the futile effort of staying ahead of ever-evolving drug smuggling methods. In this case, that involves denying incarcerated people one of the few physical connections to their loved ones that transcends prison bars: mail.
This toolkit is a response to the growing, harmful mail-scanning trend. We hope it will help advocates better understand and respond to this misguided practice that damages family connections while doing little to improve conditions behind bars. In this toolkit, we offer an overview of what mail scanning looks like in prisons across the U.S., as well as an appendix of mail scanning policies in various states. We also examine the rationale states often use to justify these policies, and discuss why they are far from the solution some claim. Finally, we offer strategies for pushing back against mail scanning policies, mitigating some of the harm of these policies when they are enacted, and providing genuine relief by actually addressing the underlying
causes of drug use in prison.
What does mail scanning look like?
In our 2022 briefing, we discussed how mail scanning works and which states were engaged in the practice. Since then, however, the number of states doing it has more than doubled: After Arkansas first implemented mail scanning procedures in 2017, dozens other states and the Federal Bureau of Prisons have followed suit. In these prison systems, people are no longer able to receive handwritten letters, children’s pictures drawn by hand, or to hold the envelope addressed to them. The implementation of mail scanning can also lead to other problems: photocopies so bad they can’t be read at all, the inability to retain and reread mail past a certain time period, and increased costs for incarcerated people and their loved ones.
“Physical mail is so important because it carries a certain tangibility that is stripped away when scanned and turned digital. The feelings and the essence of physical mail one can touch fades when digital, it’s like you can’t see and feel the love and contents anymore when it’s scanned.” —Alabama
Mail scanning makes letters harder to read, easier to lose, and slower to arrive
For about a third of mail scanning states, mail is processed at the prison where it is received. However, the majority of states use central distribution or processing centers which are located in a completely different state and run by for-profit companies. Many of these companies, like Securus, are already profiting from other forms of family communication like video calls, phone calls, and text messaging. Mail sent to these processing centers is scanned for contraband, and it’s sometimes digitally analyzed using AI for key words and phrases the prison deems threatening, explicit, or otherwise harmful.
Letters are then digitized and uploaded to an incarcerated person’s tablet or delivered as a photocopy. In some places, the incarcerated person can obtain photocopies of cards and letters that were placed on their tablets, often for a price. Where available, the physical copies are often printed in black and white and of poor quality, and may be illegible or even missing pages. As a rule, however, the original version is destroyed, having never reached the incarcerated person’s hands. In places where there is no printout option, losing access to the tablet means losing access to your letters, and such loss is not uncommon: When prisons change vendors, tablets are broken or stolen, people are placed in segregation, or when people are released, the loss of cards and letters can sometimes be permanent.
Far from fast and efficient, a letter can take anywhere from a few days to a month or more to be processed — delays which further impede an incarcerated person’s ability to maintain connection with their families.
“I can’t print out scanned mail, and once I’m eventually released, I’ll lose access to all my scanned correspondence.”—Tennessee
Interference with legal mail, educational correspondence programs, and other kinds of mail
Mail scanning policies (which are available in the appendix) generally apply to non-privileged or “personal” mail rather than legal mail. However, they do include communication with entities that provide non-legal services to incarcerated people, like higher education programs or programs that offer books or other services. Policies also tend to include provisions requiring books and other publications to be sent directly from the publisher, and are applied universally with few exceptions. Legal mail, which is required by attorney-client privilege rules to be left unread by prison officials, is increasingly falling prey to these policies as well: while the majority of states have elected to leave the process for receiving legal mail alone, a
handful have increased security measures for legal mail. Only one state (New York) has turned to scanning legal mail.
“You should know, [the Prison Policy Initiative’s letter to me] was postmarked February 20th and I received it on the evening of March 9th. It took 17 days for your letter to reach me. Honestly, that is one of the quickest pieces of mail (routed through Las Vegas) to reach me in the last couple of years.” —Pennsylvania
Mail scanning doesn’t work to address substance use behind bars
So, have these policies resolved issues of substance use behind bars? Put simply, no. In fact, drug contraband has continued relatively unabated in many of the states that have implemented mail scanning policies. Several incarcerated people we reached out to noted that, rather than eliminating the demand for drugs, mail scanning has driven the price of drugs higher. Rising drug prices are particularly alarming for two reasons: (1) prison staff have routinely been a source of smuggled drug-related contraband, and (2) rising prices increase the incentive for that smuggling. The unaddressed demand for drugs combined with the greater scarcity of drugs means that drugs are increasing in value. Simultaneously, severe staffing shortages have forced
many states to lower qualifications for employment, including shifting to dangerously lax employee screening processes and oversight mechanisms. These meager guardrails fell short in the best of times and are now being defunded and stripped away. Ultimately, this means greater incentive and increased opportunity for staff to participate in
smuggling, which has long been a problem some states have chosen to ignore.
“Scanning mail doesn’t stop the drug flow, but it does make the prices go up. The people who sell contraband in prison love it!” —Illinois
In November 2024, the Alabama Department of Corrections’ Law Enforcement Services Division reported 113 arrests related to contraband involving both civilians and correctional staff. Fully one-third of those arrested were correctional staff. Even so, the state blamed cards sent to incarcerated people by their children, implementing mail scanning procedures and stripping away physical mail in October 2025. That very same month, yet another correctional officer was charged with attempting to smuggle large amounts of fentanyl and methamphetamines into a prison. Not only have the contraband problems persisted, but
people in Alabama prisons haven’t even been receiving the scanned versions of their mail.
Alabama is far from alone in this:
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Wisconsin implemented mail scanning procedures in 2021. In 2025, a federal probe into contraband introduction resulted in the firing of nine correctional officers, with two others resigning.
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Missouri eliminated physical mail in 2022 even though correctional staff themselves had identified their colleagues as a primary source of contraband as far back as 2019. As Tim Cutt, Executive Director of the Missouri Correctional Officers Association, noted, “The drugs are getting in there. There’s no vetting process for employees.”
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Ohio eliminated physical mail in 2023, however, drug possession and drug overdoses have continued to rise in the state’s prisons. This is in part thanks to prison staff smuggling drugs with relative impunity. Since 2020, prison officials have banned 390 contractors, 104 of whom were banned for drugs or contraband, yet officials have investigated only around 30 vendors. Three hundred and thirty five former employees have also been placed on a do-not-rehire list since 2020.
While mail scanning has failed to address — and has possibly further incentivized — one common source of drugs in prisons, it has also proven to be spectacularly ineffective at preventing overdoses. In many places where mail scanning has been implemented, overdoses have actually continued and even increased:
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Pennsylvania implemented mail scanning in September 2018, yet saw the number of positive drug tests nearly triple in the five years that followed.
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Missouri saw 30 deaths from drug overdose in 2023, a year after implementing mail scanning.
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Illinois’ correctional union celebrated the implementation of a mail scanning policy in October 2025. Six people overdosed at Illinois’ Pinckneyville Correctional Center the very next month.
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Despite medical experts noting that “there have been no medically well-documented cases of accidental exposure causing an overdose,” at least 20 correctional staff claimed to be experiencing symptoms consistent with exposure to synthetic drugs earlier this year in New York. These kinds of claims are often used as a pretext to justify mail scanning. Yet it clearly hasn’t worked, as New York eliminated physical mail in 2022.
“Has mail banning resolved drug use? LOL! Not in the smallest way!” —Alabama
Mail scanning is worse than ineffective; it’s harmful to incarcerated people and their families
Prisons hold a vastly disproportionate share of people with mental illnesses and substance use disorders. Thanks to the targeted defunding of public and community-based health care, people with these health conditions who turn to substance use for self-medication are often funneled into jails and prisons and offered little treatment and far less understanding. Prisons also hold a disproportionate number of people who’ve experienced trauma. In fact, incarceration itself is a traumatic experience that impacts mental health, and substance use can often be a trauma response. In other words, the conditions that often
lead to incarceration, and the conditions incarcerated people are forced to live in, can easily inspire the initiation of drug use.
Policies like mail scanning are a perfect storm for making this problem worse, not better. Mail scanning policies focus on supply rather than on demand, and fail to both staunch the flow of drugs and to address the underlying issues that inspire it. To make matters worse, they also compound the problem by cutting off vital support systems, inflicting more trauma rather than working to resolve it. Ultimately, prisons are left in a constant state of “whack-a-mole,” unable to keep up as methods evolve and smuggling is increasingly incentivized. Ohio, for instance, is now weighing legislation that would ban the very tablets upon which people in some prisons receive their mail since the state banned paper mail in 2023. While the bill’s
sponsor cites drug trafficking as the reason, cutting off tablets won’t resolve the actual issues incarcerated people are facing or stem the demand for drugs any more than cutting off physical mail has.
Mail scanning interrupts support systems
Mail scanning interrupts many support systems incarcerated people rely upon both during incarceration and beyond. Caring letters, for instance, have been shown to reduce risk of suicide attempts by around 50%. Ironically, mail scanning impedes this lifeline in the name of stopping overdoses, even though death from suicide is still far more common in prisons than deaths from overdose, and mental health care (including suicide prevention) is often lacking.
Family communication is an important factor for success upon release as well. Staying in touch during incarceration increases one’s likelihood of attaining housing, employment, and more for people coming home. Mail scanning disconnects people from their support systems, leaving those who are released with less help — and as one incarcerated respondent noted, less reason to try.
“Prisoners know their partners’ handwriting and special language, they’ve seen their children’s pictures evolve over time. For a large portion of inmates, their loved ones are the main reason they try to succeed upon reentry.” —Hawaii
Mail scanning also makes it harder for people in prison to engage in self-improvement. For instance, these policies can impact those pursuing higher education in the form of correspondence courses, often in prisons with a shameful lack of in-person programming. Mail scanning disrupts programs, like one run by a non-profit Wisconsin that provided books to incarcerated prisoners for more than 20 years, without slowing drug overdoses in the state’s prisons. Incarcerated artists and writers, and the work of organizations that support them, are hampered as well.
Another insidious form of prison privatization
Mail scanning is also a form of prison privatization, or what attorney and researcher Stephen Raher has termed “Prison Retailing.” Many of the same companies that now process mail, like Securus and ICSolutions, are already profiting by charging families for phone calls, video calls, money deposits, and more. Companies hold hefty contracts with the state and charge incarcerated people and their families alike, maximizing their profits. Pigeonly, for instance, signed a five-year $1.7
million contract with Utah prisons, yet also offers a monthly subscription service to family and friends looking to send mail to loved ones. TextBehind received $540,000 from the Minnesota Department of Corrections last year, yet charges families between $1.29 and $1.49 per letter. The company also features a “Doodle4Kids” option which, for $1.29 to $1.49 per picture, allows kids of incarcerated people to “draw themselves online.” These charges don’t even include other
“incidental” costs or fees that incarcerated families may incur. While these charges may seem small to some, it’s important to remember that incarcerated people and their supportive families are among the poorest in society, and prison wages are extremely paltry (if they’re paid at all).
“Incidentally, the TDOC has a policy and practice of charging inmates $300 to replace a damaged tablet, even if the damage was incidental or caused by another prisoner who admits doing so.” —Tennessee
Strategies to combat mail scanning in your state
Despite all the evidence that mail scanning is harmful and ineffective, convincing officials is far from an easy task. Here, we have compiled several strategies for advocates seeking to oppose mail scanning policies in their areas, including making sure policies are based on evidence, making sure everyone is heard, and offering a few alternatives that get to the root of the problem.
Insist on data collection (the “Nevada Model”)
Calls for mail scanning are often based on anecdotal evidence rather than empirical data. Often, this is strategic: No empirical data on the practice exists because those positioned to collect it (the prison itself) decline to do so. The authors of a report supporting Illinois’ recent decision to begin scanning mail, for example, bluntly acknowledge they rely not on data from the department, but on “regular reports from local union officers at each facility.” Ensuring that any attempt to limit access to physical mail be evidence-based, and compelling prisons to collect and present data to legislative bodies in order to support their claims, can therefore be particularly useful.
Nevada provides one great example of this, where advocates recently passed legislation recognizing the right of incarcerated people to receive physical mail. It includes a provision that requires any attempt to implement mail scanning be based on hard data that show scanning works and is necessary. Requiring the state to produce data showing scanning is necessary has allowed advocates to stave off attempts by the state to block incarcerated people from receiving physical mail. Nevertheless, the state is now attempting to violate the law and implement scanning without producing the data required by AB 121.
In Illinois, advocates managed to pass SB 2201, a data collection bill designed to track incidents of contraband, drug overdose, and more. While this bill has yet to take effect, legislators in Illinois recently compelled the Department of Corrections to produce data on drug contraband found in the state’s prisons in the six months since the implementation of mail scanning. Mail scanning has had almost no impact on contraband, leading state lawmakers to note, “The numbers just aren’t there to justify this amount of work and keeping the actual mail away from the people who are in custody.”
Some useful data points to track include:
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How many pieces of mail test positive for drugs and for what substances?
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How many incarcerated people/staff have experienced suspected overdose?
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How many staff have been suspected of or investigated for drug related contraband?
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What were the outcomes of these investigations?
Facilitate input
Another powerful way to combat mail scanning is by building coalitions with incarcerated people, their loved ones, and organizations that support people in prison. Ensure that impacted people, particularly those who are currently incarcerated, are allowed to provide input or offer testimony on how they are affected by mail scanning, and the importance of family connection. Organizations and programs that serve and support people on the inside — like higher education in prison programs, those that send books to incarcerated people, and organizations that support incarcerated writers, artists, and journalists — can also be strong partners.
Address the cause, not just the effect
Mail scanning is just another policy in a long line of reactive security measures that focus on the response to harm rather than on the harm itself. However, as one formerly incarcerated person noted about people facing life in prison who are using drugs in Cook County Jail, “[T]o leave that behind, even for a minute, is all you want.” Stemming the flow of drugs into prisons means addressing why people are turning to drugs to begin with. This means attending to unmet mental health support needs and addressing trauma by ensuring:
While the focus here is largely on addressing demand, advocates can also push for better screening practices for those seeking employment in prisons and stronger oversight mechanisms, particularly around investigations of corruption or abuse.
“The drug use has not slowed down one bit as far as I can tell, but what would help is giving people the drug treatment and other programs needed to get them into better thinking patterns.”
Mitigating harm
While alternatives to mail scanning may be more effective at addressing the demand for drugs in prisons, preventing scanning from being implemented (or undoing scanning policies once they are) can be a heavy lift. Advocates dealing with this reality, like their peers in Illinois, can seek to implement policies that:
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Ensure incarcerated people and their families incur no additional fees for correspondence outside the standard postage rates;
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Prohibit prisons from generating revenue from communications services;
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Increase transparency around communication contracts and offer stronger mechanisms of oversight. Colorado for instance, has the Incarcerated People’s Communication Services where incarcerated people and their loved ones can submit complaints;
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Protect the right of incarcerated people to confidential legal communication;
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Protect privacy by limiting scanning to the physical content of letters rather than the written content of personal letters;
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Ensure that mail is processed in a timely manner, that photocopies are available at no cost upon request, and that they are high-quality, legible, and in color when appropriate;
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Prohibit disciplinary restrictions on the devices incarcerated people use to access their mail.
Conclusion
While everyone should be invested in creating safety for incarcerated people, mail scanning simply fails to prevent contraband smuggling. It ignores the role that staff play in smuggling, and is likely to have a more positive impact on the revenue private companies can generate than on drug overdoses in prisons. Importantly, mail scanning responds to the effect of a problem — how drugs enter prison — rather than resolving the root causes of high demand for drugs in prison. Worse, it tries to address a trauma response by inflicting more trauma, all while disconnecting people from opportunities and support systems. No prison system should remove such a vital lifeline, at least not without evidence that these measures will be effective and are tailored with the perspectives of those most harmed in mind: incarcerated people and their families. As one incarcerated person we reached out
to put it:
“Mail is sacred. To have something physical like that, a card, a photograph, a letter, something they touched and pored over, it’s a tangible representation of love, a token that you can return to again and again in times of loneliness or distress, a reminder of who you were before your worst day, and of who you still have the potential to be in the future.”
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For more information, including a detailed appendix about prison mail scanning policies, see the full version of this guide on our website.
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