Suing to protect right of incarcerated people to receive physical mail | Hacker News Reader

Suing to protect right of incarcerated people to receive physical mail

eff.org

397 pointsglitcher171 comments

The amount of Type I errors that get made (that we know about) in our (USA) justice system is really wild when you truly consider the consequences.

The Innocent Project estimates that 1% of all prisoners are innocent. Hard to say if that number is accurate, but go ahead and cut it in half if you like. 0.5%. Doesn't seem like a lot in percentage terms. But of the 850 people in the jail system that the EFF is talking about here, that means at least 4 people are innocent and can't even receive a letter. Imagine if that was you. Man, it's hard to imagine. It's hard to even imagine.

"Nationwide, over 500,000 people are incarcerated in county jails like the one in Redwood City, 427,000 of whom have not been found guilty and are still awaiting trial." Apply that same 0.5% here, and that's 2,135 people. There are literally thousands of innocent people in the prison system. Thousands. A bus seats like 50 people. Imagine 40 buses full of innocent people going to jail, and that's the reality we live in.

> have not been found guilty and are still awaiting trial

PIMA had an interview with a sheriff recently. The figure that stood out to me was when he said it takes an average of 1.8 years for people in his jail to finally get to trial.

1.8 years in jail before they even decide if you're guilty. Hard to even imagine.

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/chicagos-renegade-sheriff-w...

Justice delayed is justice denied. That’s a fundamental principle of common law.

This is an outrage.

Not just common law. In the US, it is spelled out in the Bill of Rights. Unfortunately, the legal system has so distorted the plain meaning of "speedy trial" that we end up with insane, but "Constitutional" situations.

I was going to ask what happened to the 6th amendment, but it sounds like it's in the garbage with all the others.

The 6th only covers situations where you explicitly object to a delay in your speedy trial right. Often it's in the interest of the defense to delay a trial as a tactic in preventing a conviction (e.g. by introducing a defense that the victim doesn't recall exactly). Also stupid shit like the prosecution withholding or delaying evidence that would tend to exonerate the defendant happens. What tends to happen is that the prosecution and the defendants lawyer agree to continuance after continuance. (Source: been there done that, had an open and shut self defense case that took about a year to go to trial)

I think part of the issue is the sheer scale of the problem.

If I have 366 people in jail today awaiting trial and I try one case a day on average, it would be a year before you get to the last person.

Yes, the problem is alleviated with more judges, more lawyers, and more juries, but that's the problem. Those resources are not infinite.

This is actually more of a funding problem than a supply problem. In many jurisdictions, the criminal justice system is expected to pay for itself, in part or nearly in total.

If we’re talking supply and demand, reducing the supply of prosecutions for victimlesss crimes stuff like drug use and possession, reproductive decisions, and etc. might help alleviate the demand at courthouses.

Agreed. Eating the hotdog from both ends makes sense here.

Damn near all possession laws and laws where criminal intent is not required should be civil offenses without potential penalty of jail time.

They're not infinite, but I can't think of a concrete reason judges, lawyers, and juries aren't scalable to population. I can think of systemic limits, but none of them feel immutable.

You have issues with training and promotion in the cases of judges and lawyers. Not insurmountable, but there will be a lag if we were to say "We need X% more lawyers now".

You also have the issue that in order to guarantee a trial as soon as all non-people concerns are resolved, you'll need judges and lawyers doing nothing. Once you're at 100% capacity, any additional case has to wait. And the length of the wait is indeterminate.

The real problem, people-wise, is juries. Juries are selected from the community at large. They're vetted and questioned. This takes time. And not for the criminals, but for the juries themselves. You could easily wind up with essentially professional juries, which runs counter to the idea of "jury of your peers".

And beyond that, all these cases need to be tried somewhere.

Then those 366 shouldn't be in jail. They're innocent people. The idea that we lock people up pre-trial is absolutely bonkers. Bail should be granted in all but the most extreme cases, and for any who aren't granted bail they should be at trial ASAP.

For the vast majority of cases, bail shouldn't even be required.

SBF prosecutors got a big number bail, but nobody actually put up that cash. They pledged to pay later. So it's working for a financial scammer.

Yah I should have clarified - 'bail should be granted' meaning people being released without cash bail - a promise to appear, holding passports, maybe other restrictions, I think those are pretty reasonable.

They're not technically innocent. Nor are they technically guilty. Their status is in question.

And yes, the entire system is messed up. These people are being treated as definitely guilty when their status is in question. Sometimes for offenses that would not even require the level of incarceration they are at. You'll spend 15 months in jail awaiting trial for an offense that carries a 6 month maximum sentence. And even if they release you after 6 months because it would be cruel to incarcerate you "temporarily" for longer than the sentence to determine if you should even be incarcerated, it's not like you can get that 6 months back if you're not proven guilty. (Because the court doesn't prove you're innocent, just that it can't prove you're guilty, which is different.)

But your last sentence comes back around to the problem of there not being enough capacity for these people. ASAP could very well be a year and a half.

The system defers to assuming guilt because of fear. If you defer to assuming no guilt and you're wrong, you could be wrong in a very bad way. If you lock up an innocent man for 10 years, people will shake their heads and say "What a shame." If you let a murderer free while awaiting trial and they kill someone else, you are going to get absolutely fucked.

And while the chance of the second is pretty low, it's not a chance any of them want to take. It's Pascal wager, but for crime. And we know crime and criminals exist.

No. In the USA they are innocent until proven guilty.

It’s not a gray area.

The status is changed upon conviction and only upon conviction.

De jure at least.

Not defacto as you went on to discuss.

>>>They're not technically innocent. Nor are they technically guilty. Their status is in question.

They are technically innocent. That is the central assumption in any good justice system.

>>>But your last sentence comes back around to the problem of there not being enough capacity for these people. ASAP could very well be a year and a half.

I don't think anyone would consider that reasonable if they were in custody. Let's say you were charged with something (that you didn't do, let's say) - what would you consider a fair amount of time before a trial?

You do understand I'm describing the problem, not advocating for the system, right?

And presumption of innocence is a matter during the trial.

Police can and have diverted, detained, and otherwise interfered with people who have committed no crime. All I will say is that it's a complex situation and that while keeping people in jail for over a year before we even get to the trial to determine their status is not what we should be doing, the complete opposite of not detaining anyone seems equally bad in a completely different way.

I do understand that, but it's a very pernicious problem, and the idea that "innocent until proven guilty" is just some legal idea we eye-roll at and don't actually believe is at the root of it.

It should not be just a matter for the trial! It should be treated as actually true from the first time an officer interacts with a suspect.

>>Police can and have diverted, detained, and otherwise interfered with people who have committed no crime

Yep, and we need to push back against that in a much stronger way, police have far too broad powers to detain with no consequences.

The diversion/detention can be as innocuous as blocking off a road for a parade or preventing people from walking into an area with an active shooter.

In both cases, I'd be prevented from executing perfectly legal actions even though I've personally committed on crime. Because ultimately, the difference between that and being jailed awaiting a trial is a matter of degree.

And most of our ideals are far loftier than the reality of how we implement them.

And I think they should be. We should aspire to be better and to look for ways to be better. But we must also contend with reality. And when ideals and reality are in conflict, reality is going to win. Until we find out how to better adapt to reality or to adapt our ideals to reality.

We could also try fewer laws. Just a thought.

I believe this distortion is largely the product of the fact that the justice system has simply not grown in order to keep up with the growth of the U.S. population over time nor has it modernized practices sufficiently to mitigate this disparity.

For example, many matters which would've been settled rapidly 50 years ago are delayed because each time the judge schedules a subsequent hearing, it is put at the end of an already extensive schedule. Because the docket of each judge is so full, a follow-up hearing for a respondant which would've come 3-4 days or maybe a week later in the past is now booked weeks or months down the road. I don't refer to the time delays which are intended to accommodate preparation of defense or to provide discovery. Totally perfunctory appearances can be spread out over weeks or months.

The system has also failed to grown or adapt to accommodate the significant growth in chargeable offenses. Many more things are a criminal matter now than were 70 years ago.

Same with congress. Proportional to population representation in congress, even at Wyoming population level would see around 3000 representatives.

There’s a 700k to one mismatch and too much power in the hands of too few people.

There would be a lot more room for more political parties too, breaking up the duopoly can only be good regardless of your leanings.

The tents are too broad.

Interesting to think about.

Iteresting episode of Bruce Carlson's 'My History Can Beatup Your Politics' where he goes over the history of house size. Hopefully this link works for the non-subs.

http://www.myhistorycanbeatupyourpolitics.com/repre.mp3

> I believe this distortion is largely the product of the fact that the justice system has simply not grown in order to keep up with the growth of the U.S. population

I believe this distortion is because small crimes like being caught with a joint are causing our jails and legal systems to become overloaded. The solution is not to grow the justice system but rather to make sure we don't overload it with laws & violations that are unimportant.

You mentioned this only briefly: Population is not the only thing that has grown the count of trials.

Law itself has expanded significantly. There are now many more crimes a person can be accused of.

This is particularly evident in drug prohibition: possibly being in possession of a very small object (that isn't claimed by another person to be missing or stolen) is an incredibly low bar for crime accusation. An accusation of "sale or distribution" is even easier to construct!

And we can see the result: 26% of arrests are for drug related crimes[1]. These cases aren't just being thrown out, either: 46% of prisoners in federal prison are there for drug related crimes[1]. That means their cases must have added to the number of trials other prisoners have to wait in line for. A high conviction rate also motivates law enforcement to pursue more of these arrests.

By decriminalizing drug use, we could factor out a quarter of all arrests! That would surely present a significant decrease in wait times for trial.

Are drug related crimes really so serious that we should continue to pursue them, even when that pursuit overwhelms the entire justice system? That seems incredibly irresponsible to me.

[1] https://drugabusestatistics.org/drug-related-crime-statistic...

My understanding is that most people opt to waive their right to a speedy trial after consulting with a lawyer. The reason is invoking the right guarantees the prosecutor will go hard in the paint pressing the maximum possible charges and generally making the defendant's life as unpleasant as possible.

That's a significant problem. A right that is very risky to invoke is effectively denied.

That’s how the right to a jury of peers works now too - you’re expected to take a plea deal, and prosecutors threaten more charges and ask for longer sentences if someone won’t take a deal.

"tough on crime!"

> The Innocent Project estimates that 1% of all prisoners are innocent.

It's worse than this.

The Innocence Project estimates 2-10% of convictions are wrongful.

But even worse, many of the people we're talking about are still awaiting trial-- presumably they are innocent at a greater rate than those convicted.

> But even worse, we're talking about many of people who are still awaiting trial-- presumably they are innocent at a greater rate than those convicted.

"Awaiting trial" or even "Awaiting details of the charges to be hammered out" seem to be depressingly time unrestricted. I sat in on some of the hearings, and there was a lot of "Well, we're not ready, can we push this out for 2 weeks?" sort of scheduling going on.

The person I'm familiar with this from basically spent 2 months in jail (not prison, apparently the difference is that prison is nicer, jail is really just a holding tank) on false charges that were then dropped as they were "literally impossible." He wasn't in the state when the claimed events happened.

I participated in the exoneration effort for a kid who was arrested at 15 and didn’t even go to trial at all until age 19. At the trial the judge denied him the right to call expert witnesses that led to a successful appeal, and then finally after 8 years of his prime youth lost to incarceration the charges were all dropped.

Kalief Browder. Was awaiting trial at Rikers for years before charges were eventually dropped. In total he spent over two years in solitary confinement while never being tried for the petty robbery he was falsely accused of. Killed himself when he got out.

>Killed himself when he got out.

Hopefully somewhere and in a manner inconvenient for the responsible parties...

> People tell me because I have this case against the city I'm all right. But I'm not all right. I'm messed up. I know that I might see some money from this case, but that's not going to help me mentally. I'm mentally scarred right now. That's how I feel. [There] are certain things that changed about me[,] and they might not [change] back. ... Before I went to jail, I didn't know about a lot of stuff, and, now that I'm aware, I'm paranoid. I feel like I was robbed of my happiness.

Some countries like El Salvador require court dates and evidence of a crime to be submitted within a fixed period of time (2-4 weeks?), or a suspect has to be released. Perhaps this kind of system will help US courts with their priorities.

I just read about a guy that was jailed for 30 years with a sentence of 400+ years because the 800 years that the prosecutors wanted were too harsh so the judge decided to make the sentence 400ish years to be "fair". the crime this innocent man did that put him in jail for 30 years before being released was driving a getaway car while two other men robbed someone at gunpoint. nobody died to my knowledge. he couldn't give up the information because he was innocent so the prosecutors asked for that because he wasn't telling them what he couldn't know. crazy travesty of justice there. I'm sure there are tons more like this.

Good ole' Florida. It's not the first and won't be the last miscarriage of justice this state carries out.

Finally think of the large number of people imprisoned for violation of laws which ultimately don't matter, like all the people in prison for lower level drug related offenses. One of my favorite authors, Peter McWilliams, died while facing federal charges. I spoke to his mother once and she said that during this time they denied him access to vital medication, and she believes this led to his death. His crime was providing marijuana to cancer patients, something which had been legalized in CA at the time!

https://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/26/us/peter-mcwilliams-dies-...

There's probably also a fair amount of "guilty of a lesser crime, but pressured by the plea bargain system to plea to a greater crime".

And, of course, innocent or not, there's merit in the argument of whether they should be able to receive mail, have actual physical books in their possession, and so on.

> There's probably also a fair amount of "guilty of a lesser crime, but pressured by the plea bargain system to plea to a greater crime".

"You're a hick and this is Berkley California. Are you stupid? Take the deal. It doesn't matter that your offense is technically the lesser one and not the one they're charging you with. A jury trial would not go well for you here."

-their lawyer, probably (and they're not wrong)

Does their estimate include the innocent people who plead guilty because of plea bargaining?

> The Innocence Project estimates 2-10% of convictions are wrongful

This is exactly why I find the death penalty unconscionable. 1,567 people have been executed in the US since the 1970s (https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/executions/executions-overview). How many of them were wrongfully convicted? If someone is wrongfully imprisoned, at least we can let them out when they are exonerated - damaged, but with a chance to rejoin society. That's not the case with the death penalty. Without a perfect justice system, which is unattainable, the death penalty will take the lives of innocent people.

> But of the 850 people in the jail system that the EFF is talking about here, that means at least 4 people are innocent

Saying "at least 4" is pretty misleading here, since you're assuming the 0.5% is perfectly distributed. That estimate could be accurate without a single innocent in these specific 850.

It's not that misleading even if the distribution is not perfect. It would be extremely unlikely that not a single person is innocent.

Given that this is a jail and not a prison, these people are mostly awaiting trial. From a certain point of view (innocent until proven guilty), most of these people are innocent and they can't even get a letter.

True, but I think that misses the point. I think the comment was an attempt at facilitating empathy for the incarcerated who are in this situation since for most people they don't see themselves as criminals (even those who are in fact criminals) and it is harder to empathize with those who you see as being part of a different tribe/group/class.

The fact is that these are fellow humans who are suffering, not because we decided as a society that this was what justice means, nor because this was the result of some study that figured out this would decrease recidivism, but just because some for profit institution decided they wanted to do something that would directly result in them suffering. That is enough for me to support this lawsuit.

I'm white and if shit hits the fan can scrape enough money together to hire a decent lawyer.

People don't "imagine if that was you" because they KNOW it would not happen to them.

This is what I assume as well. But this is just an assumption I have. I don't even know exactly where it comes from. Is it correct? I just assume I can pay my way out… but what if I can't? I would think it really depends what you are accused of. I really don't know what I'd be able to afford.

And it's even more bizarre to think that's just how it works.

A lot of it depends on how often the prosecutor and the judge go to social events and golfing. Most defense attorneys can not beat the corrupt system and aren't willing to risk their career for one client.

> "Nationwide, over 500,000 people are incarcerated in county jails like the one in Redwood City, 427,000 of whom have not been found guilty and are still awaiting trial." Apply that same 0.5% here, and that's 2,135 people. There are literally thousands of innocent people in the prison system. Thousands. A bus seats like 50 people. Imagine 40 buses full of innocent people going to jail, and that's the reality we live in.

Nitpick: that's 427,000 innocent people incarcerated, not 2,135. They all deserve the presumption of innocence.

The decision to grant bail is in part based on the strength of the evidence and the danger to the community calculation is also in part based off past convictions. Not saying that is entirely fair, but the truth is most people in jail really are guilty which is the reason voters either don't care about this issue or even want to make the system more stacked against defendants.

That’s not the truth at all. In fact, when community funds start paying bail for those who couldn’t afford it, the majority end up having the case dismissed, because there never was any evidence - there was just the threat to let them sit in jail until they plead guilty.

That's cherry-picked results from a particular subset, also ignoring that many similar people were also released without paying any bail.

Nope. The majority of people arrested are not guilty of a crime. Those similar people who were released without paying bail are also likely to be innocent, so I don’t know how you think that opposes my point.

They deserve the presumption of innocence by the law. That does not in fact mean they are actually innocent.

Good. I'll have to send them a check and mention it's to support this lawsuit. //EDIT: Printed, signed, and mailed. I wonder what junkmail I'll get as a result of this donation...

I've had the recent displeasure of seeing the jail system far more up close than I'd prefer (from the outside, someone lied and someone I know well ended up in jail for a few months, left with all charges dropped). It's an absolutely vile system, and letters were one of the very few ways one could actually have long form conversations without paying through the nose.

Every aspect of the system is designed to extract money from those outside. You want to send messages? Great, install this app, add money (of course, a bunch of what you put in goes to mandatory fees for the privilege of putting money in), and then it ends up with pay-per-message with character limits (remember $0.25/text?), via an app that is... very permissions-grabby.

Should you want to send money through the fee system for them to buy things at the internal store, you pay your fees, and then can either pay online via a "We need to know everything about you" app, or at an in person kiosk, which tries to collect all the same information, including a photo of you, your driver's license, and whatever else they can grab.

Should you want to set up a video chat, you have to agree to a EULA that, among other things, includes "We will voiceprint anyone on the call and share that with law enforcement, and we will try to biometrically identify your facial features and do the same." And it's $7+ for 30 minutes.

Of course, it's all logged and analyzed.

I understand the need to keep communications somewhat monitored, but it feels far more like a blatant cash grab than anything else, which, given for-profit prisons, it almost certainly is.

So, of course, the one thing that bypassed this (letters were opened, read, anything useful like tape on them was removed, etc) has to go away. Because how dare someone be able to actually interact with people outside. If they do that, why, they might not come right back in on release! And that would be Bad for Profits.

Cram 80 people in a room built for 20? That's fine. Let them actually read letters? Can't have that!

My opinion of the prison system was fairly low to start with, and it rather exceeded my expectations for just how utterly evil the whole thing is, through and through.

I'm curious about the lying: were charges filed against the liar? What was the lie? Did the liar have to pay the costs incurred?

I'm not certain what legal consequences she may face as a result - I also slightly don't care, as it's far enough outside the bounds of that which I can control that I don't have reason to pay close attention to it.

> were charges filed against the liar?

I don't know.

> What was the lie?

Particular claims made about events and the timing of said events were simply wrong, rather conveniently so. The defense eventually was able to point out the accused was literally living across the country, with solid evidence thereof, at the time of the claimed events.

> Did the liar have to pay the costs incurred?

I don't think said person has any resources to pay. But the accused didn't exactly have much to their name either. It was a mess all around.

Recently went through the same thing. The person was moved twice so all the money on the app was lost since it was a different system at a different prison. Then at the last place, they changed vendors and the money on the app was lost again. I could've gotten it back, but I would've had to jump through a bunch of hoops and made a bunch of calls so I didn't worry about it which I'm sure is what they were hoping for by making it such an ordeal in the first place.

My wife is a very calm, patient person.

One of very few times I've seen her genuinely pissed off was after attempting to deal with some of the tech support for this system, because money ended up in the "wrong account" (via all the dark patterns you can imagine for the methods of donating), and the only way to move it was more or less for her to provide DNA samples to the prison (despite having nothing to do with anything) - it was that much information that they wanted to "maybe be able to help."

The system is designed to extract money at all costs, and they seem very, very good at doing so, via hook or by crook.

> Printed, signed, and mailed. I wonder what junkmail I'll get as a result of this donation.

I've been regularly donating to the EFF for years, and one of the things I love about them is that I've never received junk mail as a result (that I know of). They send out periodic newsletter-type email, but unsubscribing from them is easy and actually works.

That would be nice...

Most groups, if you send money to support them, seem to then turn around and sell your info to every other group on the planet that might be related, on the "We got a live one!" list or something. It's impressive to watch, but it's also kept me from donating to certain groups, because it's such a royal pain to get off these lists. It typically takes 3-4 "Please take me off your list!" requests to get anywhere to listen, and a few groups have ignored me so long that I've resorted to Sharpie obscenities scrawled on their return mail to get my point across. Some don't even listen then.

But I could probably heat my house on the amount of "THIS OUTRAGE IS HAPPENING AND HERE IS A LOT OF... (over, please) INFORMATION ABOUT WHY YOU SHOULD BE UPSET AND... (next page please) WILL YOU DONATE????????" junk I get.

I have a standing policy of not giving anything to groups that insult me by putting "directions of how to read a multi-page letter" at the bottom, though. It's a thing on almost everything I receive.

Yes, which is why I don't give money to organizations outside of a few exceptions. EFF is one of those exceptions.

> EFF is one of those exceptions.

For me too. Though they test my patience regularly with leftist shibboleths. I’m pretty arch-conservative too, but we’re all in this together…my zeal knows no limits when it comes to defending against overbearing government.

In my mind it doesn’t matter if they’re innocent or guilty. If the government wants the privilege of treating people as guilty before due process then the legitimacy of government is automatically in disrepute. I’d rather let all the prisoners go free and let vigilante justice prevail than put up with this.

Good, thanks for the affirmation. That helped tip the scale for me from 'donate later' to 'donate now'.

Even better the calls from prison can often get instamarked as spam by Google with little way to know they're potentially being silently dropped if you want an ounce of quiet from your cell phone. Recently saw a video from a guy who had a friend get incarcerated and they had a hell of a time getting calls through because of spam blocking.

If Americans had to spend one night in some of their jails they would be shocked at the inhumanity of them. American jails such as King County Jail in Seattle and Rikers are some of the worst places to be held in the post-industrial world. Prison is in fact preferable because states are much more compotent than counties at managing these kinds of facilities. If you are ever facing time, hope for a year and a day because usually that is the determinant if you will serve in jail or prison. You want prison.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/11/nyregion/rikers-detainees...

> King County Jail in Seattle

What's notably bad about this one?

“Over the last year, people in the downtown jail have reported spending long hours in isolation — 23 hours a day — for multiple days on end. Lawyers have complained to reporters and county officials that their clients aren’t getting regular changes of clothes, have had their medical appointments canceled and miss court dates because of a lack of adequate staffing, which extends their jail stays.”

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/aclu-sues-king-cou...

I got called up to handle a case in court and had to delete my draft comment. I'm glad I did. I think that this type of first-person experience is often lacking in these discussions.

The true issue is that legacy technology like telephone and US mail are being removed in favor of the surveillance-capitalist dystopia described here. Yes, they read your mail and record your phonecalls, but the new generation of rights abuse is indescribably worse.

Sibling comments mention that the EFF may not be the proper organization for this, but I think that it's valuable to have them in the conversation since they are experts in the policy implications, alternatives, and real impact of this type of user-hostile technology.

I think that it is on the interest of society the inmates are allowed to access things that keep their mental health. Being imprisoned is already punishment enough, isolating them completely from society, relatives and friends is akin to torture, and will surely backfire.

Indeed. Some of this ties into the debate over the purpose of prison (is it to punish or rehabilitate?), but no matter where you fall in that argument, there is one absolute truth:

The vast majority of these people will eventually be released. Even ignoring important issues like ethics, I think it's clearly in society's best interest that they are as healthy as possible when they get out.

It is to punish. But the punishment is supposed to be the removal of liberty, nothing else.

If you accept that sooner or later, most people in prison will be released, then a major part of the prisons mission must be rehabilitation, aside from restoration of justice through punishment. Because if it’s not, then people that are sent to prison will not improve and society will loose - both by removing a potentially productive member of society and by paying for the imprisonment.

If this riles you up and you want to do something, there's a new program at Georgetown opening up for technologists called the Judicial Innovation Fellowship which places tech folks with different jurisdictions to help them improve the system.

https://www.law.georgetown.edu/tech-institute/initiatives/ge...

It's kind of interesting in this context because it's mostly the tech solutions here that are famously extractive. The old ways of phone calls and letters work well. We don't need technologists, we need politicians.

I agree that a lot of tech solutions are extractive, but a huge amounts of comments on this thread are about the people who are stuck waiting for court dates and who end up stuck in the system because of how slow it is and I think there are ways technology solutions can be used to help speed up the judicial system. No question it also needs politicians (although, I am not sure most voters care about this and might even be more likely to say who cares, lock them up and throw away the key) who are willing to work on real solutions.

Heh, yeah, good. Similarly, Chicago Police Department has denied FOIA requests of people in jail because they claim they'd have to provide the records as a CD.. arguing that the CD could be used as a weapon.

that is actually entirely reasonable

a CD could be snapped and the shards used as a weapon

keep in mind we are talking about things fashioned into weapons to kill other prisoners...the prison warden has an obligation to keep inmates from getting murdered

It is eminently unreasonable for a prison to give its own prisoner a copy of some records on a computer disc which the prisoner has no way of reading.

Perhaps they could use a printer?

Say you've got a 700-page document to send to someone. Printing costs around $0.10 a side if it's monochrome and not too dense. CD-ROM costs about $1.00 total for at least 650MiB.

What do you think is more cost-effective? Your tax dollars at work, remember!

We're talking about someone who's trying to get more info about the reason why they've been put into jail. Possibly because it would help their case. The agency basically decided on an ultimatum. And no, lawyers won't always do necessary due diligence to make sure their client's case has all documents.

But complete dismissal of leaving them no options aside... if you really think that 70 dollars is a lot of money, just wait until you see the bills towards the tax payer in a FOIA lawsuit for an unnecessary denial.

This can be entirely avoided by simply printing the material.

Read-only USB storage or SD cards must exist in 2023, right?

Mail sent to you is your property. Intercepting it in transit is highway robbery.

Prisoners are slaves who do not have the same rights as other Americans

Not all incarcerated people are prisoners though. Plenty of folks in jail are simply too poor to afford bonding out before their trial date.

Well we can mince words, but functionally you are deprived of your freedom while being presumed innocent if the government decides it so.

Perhaps you have a different term besides "prisoner" to describe someone who is imprisoned before their trial rather than after. But the parent comment is correct: whatever you call them, these people are not afforded all of the rights that the rest of us have.

Are you confusing the term 'prisoner' with 'criminal'? Prisoner is used to refer to people waiting for trial frequently, and dictionaries seem to support this definition.

This is the truth. The legal exception is literally carved out in the 13th amendment; the government reserved the right to make slaves of its prisoners.

Lots of people in prison/jail are not convicted though, but merely awaiting trial. The 13th amendment only applies to "duly convicted" people.

yep prison is an abomination. Needs to be defunded and outlawed.

And then we do what to uphold the rule of law?

what do you do now for the vast majority of crimes that go unpunished?

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/01/most-violen...

majority of crimes are not even reported to police and of those reported much less than half get solved

I knew an inmate in Pennsylvania, the prison system there stopped accepting physical mail if you wanted to write an inmate, you sent a letter to a company in Florida. While their name was also in the address, the letter was to "Smart communications," in a state where you knew they were not located. That's probably the excuse they'd use -- the actual mail is not being sent to the addressee.

(In Florida, the letter was opened and scanned, then transmitted to the prison, where it was printed and delivered. It was always unclear whether it was read and reviewed in Florida or Pennsylvania or both.)

They lace their mail with spice as a way to smuggle it into prison. You have to live under certain restrictions when you are a prisoner because of the consequences of your actions.

I agree that forcing people to read their mail on only certain devices at certain times under supervision is not a human-being-respectful rule. But there is also the consideration that probably it's there for the reason of preventing drugs from being laced into the mail, even into the very paper.

How about they do the simple step of scanning the mail, and reprinting it for the inmates to receive a physical copy? Of course, then you get into the problem of how much a markup is the shitty jail company going to apply to that.

Drugs are pretty freely available in prison; you buy them from the guards. If that were the problem they were trying to resolve there are other paths to take. It isn't though.

How about no.

> But there is also the consideration that probably it's there for the reason of preventing drugs from being laced into the mail, even into the very paper.

Nah, my money's on this being the latest in a campaign of depriving prisoners of vices. First they came for the cigarettes.

This is more likely about porn. Some of the most inventive smut I've ever seen was written by/to prisoners. You have to be a real poet laureate to get erotica past dedicated censors without too many redactions.

Moving this correspondence to digital, limited-access kiosks means you don't have any romantic hope to cling to (or jerk off to) back in your cell.

Much more likely it's so they can charge $2 a minute for the privilege

Drugs come in through the guards, not the mail.

As an EFF supporter I'm a little worried about this phenomenon where nonprofits sprawl out into many unrelated areas. The ACLU, for example, started off very focused on civil liberties but in the Trump era it seemed to generalize into opposing everything Trump did.

Which, I mean, I don't support the average thing that Trump did, but it started to feel like donating money to the ACLU was just the same as donating it to the Democratic Party. And isn't someone else going to be better at spending that money effectively, if your area of expertise is "everything"?

Similarly, here in the Oakland area I was looking for food banks to donate to, but there seems to be no organization that simply provides food to needy people. Everything I could find was like, well the name of our organization is the Oakland Blah Blah Food Bank, but in practice we regrant donor money to many other causes, we do many other things, we don't really just provide food to people.

The EFF has always been deeply interested in the intersection of privacy and the digital world. That has oftentimes manifested as privacy in the digital world, but not always. This is one of those examples. The EFF is saying "privacy and this digital service cannot coexist; the digital service must therefore lose, and we know what we're talking about because we are well-versed in this policy area."

Also, a lot of not-for-profit entities intentionally branch out because such is the nature of helping the group of people they want to help. The term for it is intersectionality. That not-for-profits are heavily siloed is less a matter of intent and more a matter of history. If you are a food bank, you recognize that your intended client base needs food. But, second-order to that, why do they need to come to you? Is it because they need a job? Well, they're already here, so why not engage in skills enhancement and training? And since you'll be at the city council anyway doing advocacy for access to food, why not also advocate for more housing? If those continue to be siloed, you wind up with three separate groups, working at separate-but-related aims, each with their own overhead and inefficiencies.

It's vertical integration, in the not-for-profit advocacy space.

Point of order: Is it not possible that Trump in particular just stood in opposition to the ACLU's worldview/mission statement? For that matter, they're not really keen on some of Biden's immigration policies either.

A large chunk of the visible mainstream Republican platform is not very civil liberty friendly at this point, and the Dems have not been let entirely off the hook.

From the ACLU:

"The American Civil Liberties Union is our nation's guardian of liberty, working daily in courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties that the Constitution and laws of the United States guarantee everyone in this country."

That sounds a lot like the position of the Republican Liberty Caucus. https://rlc.org/statement-of-principles-positions/

The only reasonable conclusion: They don't want your money.

It opposed everything trump did because Trump is a vile person who doesn't want equal civil rights for everyone, thus his clashes with the ACLU. He is a racist psychopath who needed to be fought on every front. ACLU is closely aligned with democrats because it supports civil rights and equality unlike the current iteration of the republican party (at least most of it, I know a few libertarian types who respect civil and personal rights as well)

We have such a vengeance and retribution obsession in the US. Priaon should be about rehabilitation. Nothing else seems to be bringing down the recidivism rate, maybe it's worth a try.

Sorry if this doesn't add to the discussion, but:

I read incinerated instead of incarcerated. I wondered for a couple of seconds what the hell it was about. Cremation?

To me, that seems to break a law about people opening First Class Mail addressed to someone else. I thought doing that was a Federal Offense.

There's probably some obscure exception for government purposes. Or the government just won't prosecute if it interferes with their interests. Pretty common in all aspects really, even really simple stuff like off-duty cops not getting speeding tickets.

Your state certainly has a law permitting letters sent to prisoners to be opened and inspected. Mine does:

  Incoming mail may be opened, inspected for contraband and read by authorized institutional staff within the guidelines set forth in this policy.

- RI Department of Corrections policy 24.01-7, 1.4.1.B.2 (authorized by RI General Laws 42-56-1)

I could be wrong, but doesn’t that violate the supremacy clause, since opening letters is a federal offense?

18 USC 1702 only applies if you are opening someone else's mail because you want to "obstruct the correspondence, or to pry into the business or secrets of another". Presumably the courts have determined that this does not apply to prison officials opening mail addressed to prisoners.

Parcels I can understand, but a letter? No.

Under 18 U.S. Code § 1702[0], it would appear to be illegal on-its-face for USPS mail to be inspected by prison authorities.

> Whoever takes any letter...before it has been delivered...with design...to pry...or opens...the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.

However, there's certainly more to be said about this, as the ACLU's prisoner rights page[1] has this to say about mail in prison:

> The First Amendment of the Constitution entitles prisoners to send and receive mail, but the prison or jail may inspect and sometimes censor it to protect security, using appropriate procedures.

I've been unable to find any resources identifying under what statutory authority a prison may inspect mail, but I'm unfamiliar with legal stuff, so I think this is a "me-failure". I did find a 2021 article from The Intercept[3] which was informative on giving a similar-perspective, different-author from the submitted ACLU page.

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1702

[1] https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/prisoners-rights#i-wan...

[2] https://theintercept.com/2021/09/26/surveillance-privacy-pri...

They're in jail, by definition they have a restricted set of constitutional rights (they are incarcerated, ie they are not free!)

For example, they can't own firearms. It may seem obvious that a person in jail can't possesses a gun, but this is a very specific and enumerated right in the Bill of Rights! This right is so enshrined that it is not obvious that it can be restricted after being released. See for example ACB's jurisprudence.

So, if even a person released from jail is denied an enumerated right of the Bill of Rights (2A), it stands to reason that many other rights, (especially ones not as obviously constitutionally mandated) are also forfeited whilst actually in jail as chosen by the legislators and agreed by the courts.

Example:

- Freedom against search w/out a warrant. Inmates' cells are searched without a warrant

- Right to life. Capitol punishment is (unfortunately) legal and certainly constitutional.

- Right to vote.

Note some of these are partially retained whilst in prison, just not in prison itself. For example, the cops cant search your house w/out a warrant just because you're in jail.

They also retain some rights, fully or partially

- They retain their fifth

- They partially retain their first (they can worship as they please, but their freedom of speech is restricted).

- They obviously retain their right against "cruel and unusual punishment", since the amendment's purpose is for the incarcerated. Devil's in the details, unfortunately.

- they even retail some right against search in jail, for example the police cant listen in to conversations with council.

So when the prison guards search one's prison mail, it is quite legal because you lost one's constitutional right against being searched.

> this is a very specific and enumerated right in the Bill of Rights

I don't want derail this with a discussion of a highly politically charged topic, but this is a very disputed (and modern) interpretation of the second amendment. I just bring it up because there's no consensus about it, and reasonable people have different opinions.

But, to be fair, the other interpretation is also a very disputed (and modern) interpretation.

As far as I know, the prohibition on opening someone else's mail (or interfering with delivery of the mail generally) is not based on the addressee's constitutional rights, but rather on an independent power granted to Congress by the Postal Clause. I assume there's some exemption to this for people in government custody, but I don't know exactly where it would be codified.

> The postal powers of Congress embrace all measures necessary to insure the safe and speedy transit and prompt delivery of the mails. And not only are the mails under the protection of the National Government, they are, in contemplation of the law, its property. [1]

[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C7-2/...

Sure, but my point is that if the highest of rights - the constitutional ones - can be forfeited in jail, surely rights set in law can be lost or suspended.

My point is that it's not obvious that this question even reaches the scope of "rights". Even if one were to suppose that citizens have no constitutional rights whatsoever under any circumstances, that would not imply that any state or local government has any authority to interfere with the exercise of the federal postal power.

As a prior ACLU supporter, I eventually switched over all of that monetary support to the EFF, whose litigation matches much closer to what I believe are broadly important civil liberties.

ACLU meanwhile seems obsessed with limiting my 1A right to free speech, which is baffling. Not even to mention 2A rights.

Out of curiosity, what did the ACLU do to limit 1A protections?

Absolutely nothing. The most damming thing you can really say they’ve been exercising their choice of what battles to fight to prefer sympathetic defendants when possible.

But they still go to bat for people you probably don’t like https://www.acluva.org/en/news/why-we-represented-alt-right-...

Here's a good article about the debate:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html

Basically, the ACLU used to be very focused on supporting the first amendment, and recently has shifted more to supporting progressive causes, even when they conflict with the first amendment.

Maybe they see that allowing literal nazi (by their own accord) organizations hasn't actually reduced their presence like some free speech absolutists seem to believe. If your ideology shows itself to not work, maybe you can change your ideology?

Did the first amendment change?

I don't think free speech absolutists believe that. I think I'm an absolutist..

Here's a question I like to ask people who aren't.

Which member of your family would you give the power to tell you what you can't say. Pick one. Once you pick, you can't change your mind. For the rest of your life you have to only say what they let you.

I for one would have donated to the old ACLU, but once I had grown up enough to be in the position to donate, they had changed their political strategy, so I will no longer donate to them.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html

They got a political rally in support of keeping civil war statues shut down by the government.

Their attorney stated that "Stopping the circulation of [Abigail Shrier's] book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on."

They applauded students and professors blocking reporters from documenting a protest.

They filed a brief in support of disciplining teachers for using the wrong pronouns.

They say they now consider various factors in whether or not to defend speech, including "the extent to which the speech may assist in advancing the goals of white supremacists or others whose views are contrary to our values".

> They got a political rally in support of keeping civil war statues shut down by the government.

The only thing similar to that in the article is the Charlottesville protests, which the ACLU defended.

What is baffling is your lack of provided evidence to that claim, which is a strong claim (which demands evidence) due to its conflict with the ACLU's own position document on the 1st Amendment:

https://www.aclu.org/other/freedom-expression-aclu-position-...

Shokie was almost 50 years ago. As an example, can you name a single recent court case where the ACLU defended speech against a "protected class"? Speech we all agree with doesn't need defending.

https://www.acluva.org/en/news/why-we-represented-alt-right-...

We're in the middle of a culture war here! there is literally no speech that we *ALL* agree on.

The ACLU just is obsessed with sending me "push poll" sort of "surveys" in which they goal is to rile me up before the important "And how much will you donate?" question.

They're the mirror image of the "push poll" surveys I get from conservative groups. The amount of junkmail I get trying to ensure I'm outraged enough to open my wallet, from both sides, is entirely absurd. I guess that's what I deserve for subscribing to a range of magazines instead of plugging into the online outrage engines.

Yeah, the ACLU definitely feels more like a political super PAC (the Democratic counterpart to the Koch brothers' Americans for Prosperity, perhaps) than it does a civil liberties union.

Land of the free.

Aryan Nation members once started a race war in the PA penal system by sending orders written in pee on otherwise innocuous mail

when exposed to heat, the letter in question revealed an order to go to war with a black prison gang

I agree with the EFF case, but this prohibition isn't just a random infringement

That seems rather straightforward to prevent without infringing on the right to receive mail itself. Letters are already inspected, if the prison is worried about hidden messages in the paper substrate, they can give the prisoner a monochrome photocopy with any extra noise scrubbed out.

I mean you can always find justifications for abuses of power/removal of rights.

Just look at points to the entirety of human history across all civilizations ever.

What's your point? That truly bad people can find fig leaves to provide people who agree with their bad beliefs but want to continue the appearance of civil society so they can go to the rest of the community and advocate for the bad thing?

Is that definitely true? It sounds suspicious to me.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-jun-27-me-code2...

Any communication channel could carry that same message encoded any number of ways that don't require sending piss soaked letters. Trying to stop every possible bit of crime even in prisons is impossible without unacceptable draconian conditions.

Here's an example.

Take the word "Attack".

In Morse it's:

  .- - - .- -.-. -.-

Now consider the phrase:

  Isn't the Japanese tea tradition pure artistry?

Remove all but the "i"s and "t"s:

  it t t titi iti

Replace all but the tittle of the i and the crossbar of the t, giving:

  .- - - -.-. -.-

Poof, side-channel communications in a way which gets through this filter.

Another tricky technique acronyms characters, kazaam!

Yeah this “digital solution” is just the prisons’ responding to current behaviors.

There’s a story that people were high as kites while incarcerated and no one knew why for the longest. Then an officer saw someone lite up a page of the holy bible that was shipped in, and it all clicked. Shipped in bibles were soaked in narcotics - no one thought to check.

So, it’s really not a nefarious conspiracy - it’s just trying to combat the ingenuity of the population. I wish that brain power was better tended to earlier in life since they’ve proven to be that brilliant.

> This lawsuit also marks EFF’s commitment to stopping the current trend that seeks to privatize aspects of the carceral system for profit as well as strip privacy away from incarcerated individuals.

Scope creep? [Clarification: Not the lawsuit itself, but the first part of this sentence.]

This is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, 'The leading nonprofit defending digital privacy, free speech, and innovation'.

Well, prisons are a good testing ground for these things.

edit: I should clarify that I don't support what prisons are doing, I think it's good that the EFF is opposing this, because prisons are exactly where you'd roll out this kind of technology firsts.

Here they're defending people from the electronic frontier, and this case would seem to be solidly within the scope of free speech. Specifically the freedom to express yourself without having to force your message through the sewer pipe of corporate authoritarianism.

Virtue-signaling messaging aside, do you feel that this _isn't_ a case that should be within the spirit of the EFF for defending "digital privacy"?

In my mind, there's a direct line from the government requiring someone to use a particular computer program for a particular purpose to the government requiring us _all_ to use a particular computer program. It would certainly be more cost efficient for the US Postal Service to stop delivering mail across the country and replace it by opening letters, scanning them, and making them available to me by email... but I would hope that the EFF would fight tooth and nail to prevent that.

Just as in so many things, these sort of technologies are tested first on those who can't easily say no—prisoners, students, the poor—before they are rolled out to us all.

The USPS will already scan envelopes en-route to you; I'm almost certain they could open them and do the same quite easily, maybe for a fee.

https://www.usps.com/manage/informed-delivery.htm

Seeing as how no one else is stepping up to prevent abuse of prisoners, seems like scope creep can be justified in this instance.

The ACLU is clearly no longer the institution it once was. Glad to see the EFF is stepping up.

You’re joking right?

https://www.aclu.org/court-cases?issue=prisoners-rights

There’s 11 pages of just cases from 1999 to today.

If someone hints at a recent decline, 24 year old cases are not going to convince them otherwise.

can you please provide evidence for your statement here

See for example [0]. The core concern is that the ACLU is going through an identity crisis as its membership evolves, and it is shifting strategy from defending the right of free speech for all (including the defending the right of free speech for speakers and statements its members strongly disagree with) to defending the right of free speech for those aligned with its values. That is a shift many long time supporters of the ACLU view as a dangerous failing of the organization because the key free speech cases frequently involve abhorrent speech, but that is where the case law for the rest of speakers is determined.

After working, as it historically has, to defend speech its membership considers wrong or unpleasant in connection with a 2017 Charlottesville VA case, "Revulsion swelled within the A.C.L.U., and many assailed its executive director, Anthony Romero, and legal director, Mr. Cole, as privileged and clueless. The A.C.L.U. unfurled new guidelines that suggested lawyers should balance taking a free speech case representing right-wing groups whose “values are contrary to our values” against the potential such a case might give “offense to marginalized groups.”[0]

Defending speech you don't like or agree with takes a strong stomach, but if you want to be a defender of free speech, those are the battles you must fight. If you let speech you disagree with be silenced, you give the government the tools it needs to silence speech, including speech you like and agree with.

[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html?...

good points and good link. thanks!

The groups that are almost always going to be test cases for more involved surveillance or severe constraints on specific freedoms: prisoners, sex workers, government assistance recipients, disabled people. If they're doing it to one of these groups they want to be doing it to you too, and probably will be in a decade or so.

What is the boundary between the analog and the digital if not the "electronic frontier". The EFF started by defending a physical book publisher that was accused of receiving a document about digital systems.

The rest of the sentence is relevant though (emphasis mine):

"This lawsuit also marks EFF’s commitment to stopping the current trend that seeks to privatize aspects of the carceral system for profit *as well as strip privacy away from incarcerated individuals*."

Since this is (by my count) at least the third time they've sued to block some kind of new surveillance by a for-profit prison, I think it's fair that they are calling out a pattern.

Perhaps I misunderstood it? Or it's poorly written?

I parsed this as two mostly separate commitments. Expanded the quote in the comment above.

To me this is still somewhat involved with “digital” freedoms. That freedom being the right to opt out or to not use “digital” systems.

The same thing applies to in other instances for example the move to a more cashless society I think the right to use cash is still important for a litany of reasons.

That right to opt out is important especially if it is even more invasive than the analog/real world equivalent.

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