by Douglas Ankney

In a settlement agreement that took 15 months for PLN to obtain, Illinois’ Will County Adult Detention Facility (WCADF) agreed to reverse policies challenged in a suit by a group of pretrial detainees at the jail, which prohibited them from receiving copies of materials printed off the internet or any mail at all from senders with P.O. Box addresses. The settlement, which was fully executed on November 26, 2024, included $111,825 in costs and fees for Plaintiffs’ attorneys.

The agreement was reached after the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois granted Plaintiffs summary judgment on July 15, 2024, in their long-running class-action suit challenging the “Media Policy” at WCADF; the suit was also successful in challenging the jail’s “P.O. Box Policy.”

Derek Walsh, Shane Mitchell, Terrell Hill, Brian Engelsman and William Hinton were subject to the policies while detained at WCADF as far back as 2013. They sued Will County and Sheriff Mike Kelley in 2017, alleging that the Media Policy and P.O. Box Policy violated their rights under the federal constitution’s First Amendment; the latter policy, they said, also violated the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), 42 U.S.C. § 2000cc, et seq.

WCADF’s Inmate Handbook said that the Media Policy barred “any printed material from the Internet, media articles, or pages torn from books or magazines.” Unlike bans on printed materials at other lockups aimed at stopping contraband drugs, the stated rationale for the media policy was “to prevent detainees from receiving information about other inmates’ cases, victims, other detainees’ partners, or gangs and gang activity because such information would likely circulate in the facility causing potentially disruptive conduct and violence.”

But Plaintiffs contended there was no security interest served by the media policy’s “extraordinarily broad ban” on all media articles and materials printed from the internet. They cited as an example denied printouts sent to Walsh of “get-well messages” that had been posted on Facebook when Walsh’s son broke his leg.

District Court’s Ruling

The Court observed that in Turner v. Safley, 482 U.S. 78 (1987), the Supreme Court of the U.S. (SCOTUS) held that a prison regulation may impinge upon prisoners’ constitutional rights only if it is “reasonably related to legitimate penological interests.” To access this, the Turner Court articulated four factors, which the Seventh Circuit recognized in Munson v. Gaetz, 673 F.3d 630 (7th Cir. 2012): “(1) the validity and rationality of the connection between a legitimate and neutral government objective and the restriction; (2) whether the prison leaves open alternative means of exercising the restricted right; (3) the restriction’s bearing on the guards, other inmates, and the allocation of prison resources; and (4) the existence of alternatives suggesting that the prison exaggerates its concerns.”

In the instant case, the Court determined that the media policy satisfied factor (1) but failed to satisfy factors (2), (3) and (4). The Court recalled that SCOTUS, in Packingham v. N.C., 582 U.S. 98 (2017), “recognized that banning mail that includes internet media accounts” risked impermissibly “keeping detainees from ‘accessing the world of ideas’ and ‘explor[ing] the vast realms of human thought and knowledge.’” That risk became a constitutional violation when there was no alternative means for WCADF detainees to access the information from the internet or receive media articles or clippings/pages from books and magazines, since the jail allowed them no direct access to these sources.

Furthermore, taking factors (3) and (4) together, the Court found an easy alternative to the blanket ban—if WCADF staff simply reviewed incoming internet materials and media clippings for anything that poses a security risk. In fact, staffers already performed just this sort of review for other mail, making the burden on staff and resources de minimus, the Court said.

Turning to the P.O. Box Policy, which provided that mail “delivered from a P.O. Box will be returned to sender,” the Court noted that Defendants asserted “security concerns” with “unidentified senders” as their rationale. But Plaintiffs contended, and Defendants admitted, that mail was rejected because of a P.O. Box return address even when senders were easily and clearly identified—such as issues of PLN. The Court concluded that the Defendants failed to “present some evidence to show that the restriction is justified,” citing King v. Fed. Bureau of Prisons, 415 F.3d 634 (7th Cir. 2005).

“Without knowing more about the ‘security concerns’ that mail from P.O. Boxes might pose, or about how having a street address on the correspondence alleviates those concerns,” the Court said that it “cannot draw a reasonable connection between this policy and the objective”—meaning “the first Turner factor is not satisfied.” That was sufficient to invalidate the policy, but the Court also concluded that it failed to satisfy factors (3) and (4) because WCADF staff could review incoming mail with P.O. Boxes just as easily as they currently did incoming mail with street addresses.

As for the claimed RLUIPA violation, the Court noted that the P.O. Box Policy applied to mail from religious organizations, too. Walsh, a practicing Buddhist, was denied correspondence and spiritual guidance from Zen Mountain Monastery based on the policy. But under RLUIPA, a jail “cannot impose a substantial burden on the religious exercise of a person residing in or confined to an institution … unless [it] demonstrates that the burden … (1) is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest; and (2) is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest,” the Court said, quoting Jones v. Carter, 915 F.3d 1147 (7th Cir. 2019). In the instant case, Defendants failed to show any compelling governmental interest served by the P.O. Box Policy or that the policy was the least restrictive means of furthering a compelling governmental interest, the Court said. Accordingly, Plaintiffs were granted summary judgment on both claims. See: Walsh v. Kelley, 2024 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 123907 (N.D. Ill.).

The parties then proceeded to reach their settlement agreement, which included fees and costs for Plaintiffs’ Chicago attorneys, Adele D. Nichols and Mark G. Weinberg. See: Walsh v. Kelley, USDC (N.D. Ill.), Case No. 1:17-cv-05405.  

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