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Counterintuition: Writing a Prisoner.

Hi readers!

Most of us in prison in many states of the USA are in places where receiving a handwritten or printed letter on real paper is forbidden. Our mail gets sent to digital ingest chutes across the nation, of which at least two states choose to send to Tampa, Florida for their processing work. These ingest chutes feed our letters to a scanner, and the letters are then forwarded to prisoners in a digitized format as a so-called attempt to stymy the ingress of synthetic marijuana and other drugs that can be produced by chemically treating paper.

People have the option to send mail to these ingest chutes, or, at an amount that is typically less than the cost of postage for a single letter of up to six sheets of paper, they can use whichever electronic messaging platform the prison system in a given state uses. Here in Florida, aventiv gets the money under their Securus banner for the Florida Department of Corrections, and for a number of jails across the state. ViaPath Technologies (formerly known as GTL or GlobalTelLink) offers similar services to some of Florida's jails. Both companies offer service to other state prisons. CorrLinks is the system used in Federal prisons for electronic communications.

All of these companies place limitations on the methods we justice-impacted many use to make contact with the outside world. In some states, users can send an outbound message directly to an email address, while here in Florida prisons, we have to find a way to ask people to sign up on SecurusTech.net, and then tell them to find and add us by our committed name and identification number (our "DC Number").
In an increasingly electronic world, conveying that information to others requires us to have a physical address to mail that information when we can't call and explain it in five minutes (the alleged length of our one free monthly call).

Eyes in the Web

So, a couple of my friends are averse to financially feeding the gaping maw of two of the biggest correctional digital mail services, and I get that. They don't want to participate in Securus' surveil of me, which is understandable. They would prefer to mail a letter to me, though it goes to a Post Office Box in Tampa, Florida, but I'd like to take a moment to expose a few things:

OCR

Every, and I do mean every single message scanned in Tampa is fed through Optical Character Recognition, or OCR. When I get the letter, I receive it on my tablet or at the kiosk as a scan of the original content; the original is destroyed down in Tampa. But, if I use my tablet's search feature in the eMessages app to find a name, word or phrase that was in a message (as an example, Thubten), all messages that include that word will show up (as example, the July 2025 edition of Sravasti Abbey's Dharma Dispatch, where the venerable Abbess Thubten Chodron, as well as Thubten Jigme, Editor are mentioned).

Actually MORE Surveillance In Every Byte

The aforementioned OCR becomes more dangerous to free world denizens, when you factor in that if they hand write a letter, they are feeding a database with images of their handwriting, while connecting a dot of association with a "known criminal" who is currently incarcerated. Typing and printing the letter is slightly safer, but your mailing address on the envelope still exposes your personal information to the spider's eyes of surveil. Those who live in marginalized communities and demographics (e.g.: LGBTQIA2S+) are particularly exposed.

Oh, and the Maw is Still Fed

And if I wanted a paper copy of that person's letter, it's still $1.00 per page plus tax to print. The envelope is $2.00 of my print costs, and I cannot exclude it.
Compare and contrast, a letter sent as an eMessage costs 25¢ per page plus tax for printing.

Counterintuitivity at Play

It actually appears safer for a person to enroll to send digital messages; One may be able to NOT enter their name as it appears on an ID card, as the company accepts sign ups from over 30 countries. The catch in Florida is, if one wishes to sign up for visitation so that they can send me money, the name in their Securus account should match the name given to FDC, who will ask for ID for a valid reason: You are applying for entry as a visitor to their network of facilities. Securus asks FDC if this person is an allowed visitor before accepting funds, as so.
In a minor form of amusement, that doesn't even really matter unless you're trying to quickly deposit funds online and the recipient is at a state-run camp. With private camps like mine, funds don't go through Securus. Plus, I have a marked preference for people to use a money order or cashier's check to a designated post office box. While it's more of a wait for me, it saves my loved ones a noticeable amount of cash when they fund my antiperspirant, Maria cookie, and postage stamp addictions.
How much is saved? At least the cost of a gallon of mid-grade gasoline on the Left Coast of the USA, if my memory of fuel costs is still on point. :)

To stamp, or to eMessage...

Frankly, while I do not enjoy enriching Securus one 39¢ eMessage stamp at a time, it actually can lower the surveiled profile of users outside when used in conjunction with location deflection techniques available to everyone in the free world.
A mailed letter makes it harder to deflect by fact of needing to surrender the letter over to your postal carrier, and putting return addresses on the envelope. Even if an incorrect address goes on the outside, I would have to know a real address and spend a dollar to write back, which gives a confirmable route back to the writer.
($1.00: 78¢ stamp, 17¢ #10 envelope, and 2 sheets of paper comes out to that cost.)

For the moment, it unfortunately is more advantageous to use eMessages.
Take solace in the fact that these companies pay the credit/debit card fees when you load eStamps at this time, at least.

Hope to hear from you as your time permits, friends.

  • Jayel