TRI In The News

Jail's Mail Policy Revised

From Fredericksburg.com
Original article available here.

Two mail clerks sort through more than 4,500 pieces of mail each week at the Rappahannock Regional Jail. This week, their job got harder.

A new policy requires them to distinguish religious material printed off the Internet from pornography, gang information or messages that could impact jail security. The new policy should do more to protect inmates' religious rights.

Previously, anything cut and pasted from the Internet was removed and put in inmates' personal files but not given to them.

Under the new policy--crafted in response to an American Civil Liberties Union complaint--mail clerks will now check those copied pages for religious material and make sure faith-based details get to the inmates. In January, a clerk cut out a letter filled with biblical references, an act jail Superintendent Joseph Higgs called "a simple mistake." Civil rights activists called it unconstitutional.

The policy--which predated Higgs--was created for security reasons at the regional jail in Stafford County. "A lot of parents and friends send reams of paper, filled with stuff they copied off the Internet," Higgs said. Inmates used the pages to clog toilets, set off fire alarms and rolled them into balls and soaked them in water to throw at guards.

The blanket policy allowed the clerks to toss pages of Internet material. "It didn't have to do with religion at all," said William Hefty, attorney for the jail board. "It was simply a policy that said inmates couldn't get anything that was cut and pasted or taken off the Internet There was never an intent to keep any inmate from having religious material."

But such policies are unconstitutional and often interfere in religious rights, said David Shapiro, attorney for the ACLU's national prison project. "It's not out of the ordinary for prisons to have policies that are over-broad and, as a result of being over-broad, can exclude religious material."

Often, it takes only a letter or a phone call to change jail policy, said John Whitehead, director of the Rutherford Institute, which joined the ACLU in protesting the jail policy. The Charlottesville-based institute works on religious freedom issues.

In most cases, officials create offending policies out of ignorance, he said.

"Most of the people who work in jails have no understanding of what the First Amendment is," Whitehead said. "It shouldn't take four or five organizations getting together to get them to do their job and to give prisoners their rights."

Mail clerks get basic training in inmates' rights, Higgs said. In his five-year tenure as superintendent, this is the first complaint he's heard about the policy, he said.

Since the ACLU's complaint went public, he said he has received more than 100 e-mails, some of which condemn him to hell.

"I'm sorry this has got really blown out of proportion," Higgs said. "Our policy has been and always will be that we do not censor religious mail."