No Opened Envelopes: Hawai’i Prisons Get New Mail Scanning Technology
The Hawai’i Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (DCR) announced in September 2024 that it would purchase nine machines to scan inbound prisoner mail—including legal mail—for drugs. The new scanners claim to detect letters soaked with drugs without opening envelopes. The DCR purchased one for its administrative office and each of the state’s eight prisons.
The DCR also rents space to confine some state prisoners in an Arizona lockup privately operated by CoreCivic. That prison was already using the “MailSecur” device to scan prisoner mail. Sold by private vendor RaySecur, the machine uses terahertz or “T-ray” imaging technology to create a picture of mail contents, which can be examined for indications of tampering. The scanner was demonstrated to DCR officials at Halawa Correctional Facility in Honolulu in February 2024. Suitably impressed, they then spent nearly $970,000 on the devices, according to state procurement documents.
Those documents also claim that demonstration scans detected “illegal substances” in two envelopes with legal offices as their return address. The Supreme Court of the United States has held for over five decades that a prisoner’s legal mail is protected from inspection by prison officials, who may open it only in his presence. See: Wolff v. McDonnell, 418 U.S. 539 (1974).
But various Honolulu lawyers have been notified by the DCR that packages claiming to come from their law offices were intercepted and found to contain drugs or drug-soaked paper. One intercepted envelope used printed lettering crudely cut and pasted to form a return address from attorney Myles Breiner, who called it “clearly a hack job.”
“The right to legal mail is part and parcel of the constitutional right to have access to the courts,” explained Wookie Kim, legal director for the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. “So there’s a strong presumption under case law that legal mail should not be tampered with unless there is a clear, documented indication that it’s being abused or it’s being used for contraband.”
Since the new scanners don’t need to open the mail to detect drugs, only corrupted mail will be intercepted, the DCR claims. Kim agreed this was “less troublesome,” but said the paramount concern was DCR transparency about its mail handling procedures. After all, if the scanned contents are clear enough to examine for drugs, they also might be read by guards. “If people don’t have trust that mail won’t be read by prison staff, then they’re not going to be able to exercise their rights,” Kim said.
RaySecure contracts also include some county election offices, which need to examine incoming mail for dangerous chemicals and explosives. Expanding to prisons represents a huge profit opportunity for the firm, but the value for prisoners is less clear; mail bans in Missouri and Pennsylvania prisons did nothing to lower the number of overdoses, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Apr. 2023, p.60; and Sep. 2023, p.35.]
Source: Honolulu Civil Beat, Inc.
As a digital subscriber to Prison Legal News, you can access full text and downloads for this and other premium content.
Already a subscriber? Login