DISCLAIMER#1: I do not know anyone in prison, save for one of Papparasta’s brothers to whom I hadn’t spoken in years even before he molested those girls and got a one-way trip to Joliet.
DISCLAIMER#2: Mahnattan, I know you’re squeamish about posts that even hint at illegalities, but I promise you this is all hypothetical.
What are the laws regarding correspondence to and from prison? Is the mail read/edited on the way in, on the way out, or both? Suppose I sent a prisoner a message in some obscure language, such as Klingon? Would they hire a person to read/edit it, or just throw it away?
Also, what if my correspondence involved criminal activity? In other words, if I sent #24601 a message saying “Hey, where can I find the best crack?” and he wrote back saying “Go to manhattan’s house at such-n-such address,” would myself, manhattan, or #24601 have to answer for this in some way?
ALL mail incoming is opened, and at least checked for contraband.
All outgoing mail is subject also to search.
ANY of it can be read at any time, including during routine searches.
you’d be amazed at how quickly this can be done - most of the mail recieved by inmates is pretty much the same damned letter (from what I recall from doing those searches) “hope this letter finds you in the same spiritual place…, be strong, be brave, I know that when we can be together, we can be all things … blah blah blah” I actually once found a notepad with 5 letters started to 5 different guys and the only thing that was different was the salutation.
So, if a letter went through in another language, they may choose to : a. hold onto it for a while. B. find some one to translate and/or c. send it back. AND ALL of that person’s mail would suddenly get more interesting to closely look at.
Whoa, wring :eek:! You’re a guard at a prison??? Wow.
So, tell me: if one of your inmates sent me a letter stating that “The dealer at the corner of Gangthta & Hood streets will give you 10% off your first ounce of crack,” does that mean that cops are going to show up at my house and his soon?
Inmates would be very unlikely to try such a thing as they are pretty paranoid anyway.
Phone calls can be monitored as well but usually special arrangements are made when intelligence is recieved regarding certain individuals.
This might come from the Police who have their own methods of gathering information or it might come from staff observations on an inmates behaviour and his associates, or it might come from another inmate who will pass information in a confidential manner.
Some inmates dislike certain types of behaviour in other inmates, for instance an armed robber will regard a junkie as lowest of the low and the dealers as little better.There is a hierarchy of offenders in jail.
Most of the passing of your type of information would be likely done on a visit and usually through a third party, someone who is more likely to be a less suspicious individual.
Any message intercepted is collated and evaluated along with any other information to hand and a picture begins to build up.
This may result in a police operation but would only be a part of it.
Just because someone is in jail that does not stop them carrying out illegal acts. The fact is that drugs in prison usually have a better mark-up and there are always lots of customers.
Just as a matter of interest can i ask where white collar criminals come on the hierarchy? Are they considered differently or more like free game?
Sorry for the Hijack.
In terms of internal communications do the ahem…“screws”…understand the codes that seem to be used between solitary prisoners in different cells? Im talking about the wierd knocks and taps that I heard on a recent overnighter in a holding prison. There was definitly something being communicated but im damned if i could figure it out
Working in a public library, we get lots of letters from people in prisons. The mail is almost always stamped with big print saying that it is coming from a prison and it usually has already been opened.
Not that you couldn’t tell from the return address. When you see “Pelican Bay” on the return address, you take notice.
Most requests from prisoners are usually to see if there were newspaper accounts of their trials. Some people though just have hobbies and want information about them.
In California, prison libraries are usually pretty nice. They’re are often like the one depicted in “The Shawshank Redemption”. At the end of the movie, that is.
Just a WAG, but I don’t think that the addressee could get into any sort of trouble as a result of anything a prisoner writes, except possibly as circumstantial evidence. Otherwise, what’s to stop a disgruntled prisoner from writing that “10% off your first ounce” letter, and addressing it to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? Of course, it might lead authorities to pay a little closer attention to the corner of Gangthta and Hood, but they’d still need to rely on evidence gathered in the usual ways.
whether prisoners try to set up their associates this way. I understand down here in San Diego that moving drugs and illegal aliens up through L.A. is big business. The problem is that they have to go through check points on the I-5 and I-15 freeway getting up there. What supposedly happens is they get one guy to take 10% of the drugs/ illegals and the other to take 90%. Then the 90% guy phones in a call on a cell phone on the 10% guy ahead of him on the road and gets the check point people on alert. This, of course, gets the 10% guy busted and calls attention away from the 90% guy who could be minutes, hours, days away (or on a different freeway) at the time of the call.
If I were the 10% guy who got busted, you’d think that I would want to get even with the person who busted me by writing cryptic notes to my former ‘friends’ at known locations where they hang out or where I used to meet them to get them busted, or at least call enough attention to them to really cause them grief in conducting future business.
All incoming and outgoing mail is searched for contraband.
A convict cannot write to another convict without the permission of both prisons. All letters between convicts are read.
Convicts must include a return address on outgoing mail identifying the letter as coming from a prison.
Convicts are forbidden from requesting any goods or services from anyone except immediate family memebers without the permission of the prison.
Convicts are allowed to send and receive letters in foreign languages. However, they are prohibited from writing in code. In my opinion (and I am one of the people who makes these decisions) Klingon would qualify as a code not a language.
When convicts discuss criminal activities in a letter or during a phone call, we act on it (if it’s an internal matter) or pass it along to the appropriate police agency.
as I always pointed out “I can’t write a violation without your full and complete cooperation”. So, If inmate sez so and so is doing such and such, and the person IS, yep, they’re busted, but if they’re NOT, then no, they’re not busted.
In our state, in addition to the letters being searched etc. pretty much any phone call made from the prison/jail A> comes “collect”, and B. has a message interrupting every few moments saying “this call is coming from a correction center”
no, I wasn’t a prison guard, I ran a correction center (similar but the folks could come and go with restrictions, in some ways meant more dangerous because of the flow of contraband etc) for 14 years. currently work w/offenders helping them find jobs.