We all send emails because they are faster and more convenient than snail mail. We don’t usually suspect that snail mail would send us to the hospital. However, for precisely this reason, one state representative is pushing for an electronic mail delivery system in the state’s correctional facilities. 

In Illinois prisons, physical mail can get you high.

In October, Illinois State Representative David Friess (R-Red Bud) introduced a bill to prohibit physical mail delivery for inmates. Instead, the bill provides that “mail shall only be received by committed persons in electronic form,” which would be done by scanning the mail and making it available to inmates through kiosks, tablets and such.

Why might Friess be so opposed to physical mail entering the state’s prisons? Well, the justification almost sounds like something from a movie. According to Friess, whose district includes two correctional centers, dangerous drugs have been sneaking into prisons via snail mail. 

Not just through the mail, mind you—on the mail.

NPR reports: 

“Paper is often sprayed or soaked in illicit substances, such as synthetic drugs or even roach killer, then mailed into prisons where people can get high by smoking it.”

Reports are coming out that marijuana, fentanyl, and even bug spray are entering secure facilities this way. Apparently, there’s even a dedicated service for purchasing sprayed-up paper, and the service will send the mail directly from an attorney’s office so that it’s classified as “legal mail” and won’t be opened (see p. 6 of this report). 

That’s right—prisoners are reportedly getting high by smoking spiked mail.

This is not just an issue of prisoners getting high—there are also accounts of inmates dying from overdoses of drugs they have smoked through the mail. 

Admittedly, this is just one way to get drugs into a prison, but it surely contributes to the increasing rate of prison overdose deaths in the country overall. In 2018, the number of U.S. inmate deaths from drug or alcohol intoxication was about seven times higher than it was in 2001 or 2012.

Even more alarmingly, though, the danger doesn’t stop with the addicts. Corrections staff are reportedly being harmed as well. The AFSCME union, representing thousands of Illinois corrections employees, recently published a 15-page report listing examples of corrections workers who have been hospitalized after suffering from drug exposure on the job (see especially pp. 7–10). 

Whether it be handling spiked mail, administering care to a doped-up inmate, or even just inhaling the smoke in the air, prison staff end up suffering symptoms from second-hand contact with the drugs. 

According to the report, the Menard Correctional Center (in Friess’s district) even went into lockdown in August after a mass drug exposure sent 12 corrections workers to the hospital to be evaluated (p. 11).

Friess doesn’t think this is worth it. He still wants to preserve inmates’ ability to communicate with the outside world, but for him, the need to protect prison workers is far more important than the benefits of physical mail. 

To those who say inmates need to be able to physically touch mail sent to them, Friess’s response is short and to the point: 

“I don’t buy it.”

Not everyone is on board with this, however. According to Center Square, Julie Anderson from Restore Justice argues that there is no evidence a physical-mail-ban will make prisons safer, and she contends instead that mail is a “lifeline” for the incarcerated. 

There are also conceivable legal challenges to this idea—what if attorney-client privilege is compromised for innocent inmates if even legal mail is opened by corrections staff?

I don’t presume to know the exact right solution to this problem, but it likely will have to combine multiple tactics at once, perhaps such as more protective equipment for mail processing staff, procedures for photocopying or scanning physical mail, and/or more effective drug demand reduction within prisons.

Yet, regardless of any disputes over specific steps the Illinois Department of Corrections should take, I think we can all agree on one basic premise: Corrections workers shouldn’t have to be hospitalized for drug exposure while simply doing their jobs. 

When a prison sergeant does CPR on an unresponsive inmate and then has to be driven off to the hospital himself to be treated for drug exposure (see p. 10 of the report), something is going seriously wrong.

Drug addiction is so prevalent that those who are enslaved to it—and those who profit from it—will find ways to keep carrying on business even in some of the nation’s most secure facilities. The illegal drugs are so dangerous that both guilty addicts and innocent prison staff are falling victim to its nasty effects. 

So just in case anyone’s being tempted to think along such lines, now is not the time to play nice and sentimental about the finer emotional connotations of physical versus electronic correspondence. 

The irony of ironies is that both innocent and guilty are suffering symptoms of illegal drugs while doing their duty in state correctional facilities. If we can find an effective way to keep prison staff from being harmed, then we should act quickly.