This summer, the ACLU Foundation of Kansas & Western Missouri (the ACLU) has been collecting and reviewing the inmate mail policies in place in Kansas’ jails.
Using the Kansas Open Records Act, the ACLU requested inmate mail policies from the Allen and Atchison County Jails. Both jails had policies that required all inmate mail – both outgoing and incoming – had to be written on postcards-only.
Inmates have the same problems as other people. They want to correspond about family matters, interpersonal issues, religious questions, and health problems. But postcard-only rules impose an enormous burden on inmates and their friends and relatives because postcards are too small to allow for meaningful correspondence about complicated personal subjects that inmates and their families want to write about. Postcards also offer no privacy.
Inmates and their families and friends have a right to correspond that is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Although jails can adopt reasonable rules aimed at maintaining security, they cannot violate constitutional rights willy-nilly. Recent case law has held that postcard-only rules go too far and are unnecessary to reasonable jail interests.
Based on that case law, the ACLU contacted the Allen and Atchison County jails and urged them to drop their postcard-only mail rules. In August 2013, after Legal Director Doug Bonney visited with the policy-makers in each county, the Allen and Atchison County jails decided to rescind their postcard-only mail policies. Now, inmates in both counties can send and receive regular letters.