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On Monday, the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office announced that, starting October 19, personal mail for inmates, such as letters, photographs and drawings, will no longer be accepted at the Humboldt County Correctional Facility.

Instead, such mail will have to be sent to a P.O. Box in Maryland, where a private for-profit company called ViaPath Technologies will scan the materials and deliver them to inmates via electronic tablets.

The Sheriff’s Office says this change is the latest in a series of measures aimed at preventing the introduction of illegal drugs and other contraband into the jail. Other measures introduced over the past decade-plus include a body scanner and barriers surrounding the facility’s recreation yards.

This latest measure — replacing physical mail delivery with third-party digital scanning — has become increasingly common at correctional facilities across the country in recent years.

But critics of the practice have pushed back, with some organizations, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute filing legal challenges. 

These critics cite a range of objections, including surveillance and privacy concerns; the accidental interception of privileged attorney-client mail; severe delays and technical glitches; and the routine destruction of original documents that may hold sentimental and rehabilitative value — like family photographs, handwritten letters and children’s drawings.

In a phone interview with the Outpost on Tuesday, EFF Senior Staff Attorney Cara Gagliano delved into some of these issues. Her nonprofit employer, an organization dedicated to defending civil liberties in the digital world, was among a group of plaintiffs that sued San Mateo County in 2023 over just this type of policy change for mail delivery at its county jail facilities.

The complaint was filed on behalf of five people incarcerated in San Mateo County jails, along with several of their family members and A.B.O. Comix, a collective of artists who correspond with people in jail. The lawsuit challenged digitization of personal mail on constitutional grounds, arguing that the procedure violates the privacy of inmates as well as their family members.

Gagliano and the rest of the legal team are currently preparing an appeal after part of their suit was dismissed on procedural grounds. Specifically, the court found that the plaintiffs no longer have legal standing because they’re no longer actively trying to communicate with inmates in the specified facilities.

“The background for that is, you know, these are jails; people aren’t supposed to be in there long term,” Gagliano said. “The case has stretched out for years, so all of [the people] who were incarcerated there at the beginning have either been transferred to other facilities or released entirely.”

The court has yet to rule on the fundamental questions, she added.

Regarding privacy, Gagliano said that while it has long been understood that inmates don’t enjoy the same privacy protections as the general public — and that their mail will be routinely checked for contraband and incriminating content — the digitization process raises novel Fourth Amendment concerns. 

“You have people who are not incarcerated sending in mail, and every single piece of mail that they send, [often] talking about personal issues, gets scanned and saved in this database until who knows when,” Gagliano said. “And it’s all aggregated, searchable and available to the institution or anyone that they give access to at any time.”

Furthermore, a digital copy of something isn’t the same as the original.

“We’ve talked to a lot of people who say, ‘Just being able to hold the same piece of paper that my family member held is really meaningful to me while I’m separated from them in this way,’” Gagliano said, adding that some families may simply not send a child’s crayon drawing if they know it will be shredded and discarded.

Other types of mail also lose value in the digitization process. 

“One of our clients, ABO Comix, is a nonprofit that works with LGBTQ inmates through things like art exercises and writing prompts,” Gagliano said. “They’ll send, like, a newsletter that has these prompts, and you’re supposed to be able to fill them in and then send it back. And when you only have a digital copy of it, you can’t do that.”

Same deal with correspondence courses that require forms to be filled out and returned, she said. 

“We [also] had clients who had prayers [and] religious materials sent to them that they need to have with them to reference and reflect on, but they don’t have physical copies,” she continued. “So it’s really not just a matter of, like, ‘Oh, some people like reading physical books, some people like reading e-books.’ This is materially changing how [inmates] can interact with their mail and what they can use mail for.”

Those material changes can have measurable impacts that concern everyone, Gagliano said, even people who aren’t especially sympathetic to the comfort and wellbeing of county jail inmates. 

“If you’re you’re looking at society’s interests, the interests of the community in general, it is not helpful to take away something that experts say is so important to rehabilitation and … avoiding recidivism,” she said.

EFF’s lawsuit wasn’t allowed to progress to the point where the plaintiffs could call their expert witnesses. “But we had experts lined up — experts in public health, a former director of the CDCR prison system — to say, ‘This is not good policy. This is not best practices, and actually, we think it will do more harm than good by depriving people of this extremely psychologically, socially important connection to society,’” Gagliano said.

She also challenged the assertion that mail scanning will reduce contraband smuggling, 

“That hasn’t been shown to be true in jurisdictions where they have used mail scanning,” she said. In Illinois, for example, there was an increase in total drug discoveries between the six months prior to digitization and the six months after, according to a report from that state’s own Department of Corrections. 

The nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative found similar results, with incarcerated people reporting that, rather than eliminating the demand for drugs, mail scanning just drove the price higher.

It’s more common for drugs to be smuggled in via jail staff, visitors and during the intake processing, rather than through the mail, Gagliano said. “When you just close down one avenue, it just starts coming in more through other avenues, and so it really needs to be a more holistic approach if you’re actually serious about reducing drugs coming in to the facility. You really need to have significant emphasis on treatment [to address] the demand side of the equation, not just supply.”

Humboldt County Sheriff’s Correctional Captain Duane Christian, who oversees the county jail, sent written replies to a series of question from the Outpost.

He noted that the Sheriff’s Office already contracts with Virginia-based ViaPath Technologies as the jail’s tablet provider, and digital scanning of mail is another service the company offers. 

How much will this service cost?

“The cost depends on the average daily population [at the jail] and is considered reasonable if it reduces the risk of contraband introduction into the facility,” Christian said.

ViaPath, the second-largest prison telecom corporation in the United States, generates an estimated $600 million to $800 million in annual revenue, according to quarterly earnings reports reviewed by Bloomberg. Critics of inmate mail digitization, including EFF, accuse vendors such as ViaPath of employing predatory practices to monetize prison communication, saying these systems heavily incentivize families to use the vendor’s proprietary mobile apps to send electronic messages and photos while charging high per-page or per-photo digital ‘stamp’ fees.”

Christian said that, while there are valid concerns about this new digitization system, he doesn’t see financial exploitation as one of them.

“There should be no exploitation of the families as the cost of postage would be the same whether sent to the facility or sent to the third-party vendor,” he said. 

The proprietary app employed by ViaPath (called “GettingOut”) is free to download, and the cost to send messages, photos and videos varies by jurisdiction and facility. Base rates for “friends and family” found online are typically 25 cents for messages and photos and $1.75 for a 30-second video. 

Prison inmates in Nevada this year announced plans to boycott ViaPath tablets for 12 weeks, with one advocate citing “a funding structure that leaves families subsidizing the prison system through inflated communication costs.”

Regarding the potential for legal mail to be accidentally diverted into the digitization pipeline, Christian said, “[T]he Sheriff’s Office is doing a significant amount of messaging so the public and those incarcerated know what mail requires being sent to the third-party vendor, and what mail should be sent directly to the facility (such as legal mail or mail with money orders).”

In response to a question on Facebook, the Sheriff’s Office said that soft-cover books will continue to be accepted at the jail, as long as they’re sent via retailers. 

As for delivery delays and technical problems such as low-quality or unreadable scans and mail being returned to the sender or discarded without clear explanations, Christian said mail is supposed to be scanned and delivered digitally within one business day of arriving at the delivery location. “Any technical issues will be monitored, and the expectation is the vendor corrects them in a reasonable time frame,” he added.

Families seeking more information about the new process can access an informational flier by clicking here.