On July 1 from 100p-230p ET/11a-1230p PT, Prison Policy Initiative will host a webinar Fighting for Families: How advocates are resisting attacks on visitation and physical mail, on the importance of family connection and the growing movement to protect these vital lifelines.

Jails and prisons across the country are implementing increasingly restrictive communication policies. Contact visitation is under attack, and more than 30 states no longer allow incarcerated people to receive physical mail from their loved ones, while the original physical correspondence is often destroyed.. The aggressive shift toward mail digitization and the restriction of contact visits are alarming trends that heavily isolate incarcerated people.

For-profit prison telecom vendors now dominate the mail systems in many jurisdictions. The sweeping changes impact families in several major ways:

• The Loss of Sentimentality: Handwritten letters, original drawings, and the tangible traces (e.g., perfume scents) of loved ones are entirely lost.
• Degraded Quality: Scanned or photocopied pages are frequently blurry, darkened, or cut off. Faces in photographs can become indistinguishable.
• Added Financial Burdens: Families are often forced to pay fees to send digital messages or photos, or pay for physical printouts once the scan is received inside.
• Massive Surveillance: Digitized mail creates massive surveillance databases managed by private contractors, raising serious data privacy concerns.

Administrators often implement these policies under the guise of interdicting contraband like drugs or “drug-soaked paper”. However, carceral watchdog groups and state data consistently show that physical mail is a negligible source of contraband. Data from states like Florida and Texas indicate that the vast majority of contraband is brought in by corrupt staff, not through the mail system.

Advocates argue that maintaining strong family connections is one of the most effective tools to reduce recidivism. Families and advocacy groups are actively fighting back.

The webinar will feature:

• Jodi Hocking
  Executive Director, Return Strong Nevada
• Taj Mahon-Haft, PhD
  Director, The Humanization Project

Together, they will discuss why family connections matter, how they are being restricted, and what strategies advocates and families can use to push back.

The webinar will include live American Sign Language and Spanish interpretation and will be recorded and posted to Prison Policy Initiative’s website.

Prison Policy Initiative has also released a new toolkit for advocates opposing mail scanning, which may be helpful for anyone working to protect communication between incarcerated people and their loved ones.

Register for the July 1st webinar here—>>> Fighting for families: How advocates are resisting attacks on visitation and physical mail

Prison Policy Initiative produces cutting edge research to expose the broader harm of mass criminalization, and then sparks advocacy campaigns to create a more just society.