Abandon All Connection, Ye Who Enter Here: Digitized Prison Mail as Repression and Surveillance

In the mezzanine of our spooky three-story A.B.O. Comix headquarters is a stack of returned prisoner mail: books that didn't survive the round trip, birthday cards that were lovingly hand-drawn and defaced with a giant red DENIED stamp through the middle, and newsletters with queer art deemed too dangerous to the system to be allowed inside the electric fence and razor wire. 

The little punk cartoon monster drawings with birthday cake smeared across their faces, with the caption "Hope you can have your cake and eat it too! With love from A.B.O. Comix," is a threat to national security. Remembering a prisoner on their birthday with a simple card is a violation of prison rules. 

Years ago, I was asked to compile a document of all the rejection notices we have gotten from prison. I got tired after redacting the names and prisoner ID numbers of 50 pages and stopped there. It is disheartening to see the reasons why: comics banned because of cartoon nipples, "no personal correspondence allowed," "no greeting cards, only postcards," "mail conducts or establishes business," "encourages deviate [sic] criminal sexual behavior," "presents a clear risk of disobedience towards law enforcement officers," and my personal favorite, the "otherwise presents a threat…" written in after two pages of unchecked reasons a prison may choose to deny a prisoner their mail. 

Before prisons began contracting digital mail scanning centers and destroying the handwritten letters, holiday cards, photos, and artwork of the prisoner's loved ones, they were already censoring the contents and refusing entry. Now, they've found a more advanced way to do it, one that problem-solves for the prison guard shortage after COVID-19 and profits from human confinement in a sinisterly new way. 

A.B.O. Comix was founded because of cross-wall penpalling: sharing letters and art through the mail and finding ways to collaborate in conditions of severe confinement and control. It would not exist if not for two people on opposite sides of a wall sitting down and writing a letter, sealing it with love and sending it off with hope in the fickle hands of USPS. A project like A.B.O. Comix could never be created under current conditions, but that does not mean we do not persist and adapt. 

Since its founding in 2017, thousands of imprisoned people have come together for 10 years of collaborative comic-anthology making with A.B.O. Comix. Their art, poetry, and stories have been shared across the globe and sparked countless conversations in coffee shops, art galleries, college classes, and tattoo studios. But there has been a tangible shift in the public perception of queer artists working in these conditions. The ability to maintain connection and co-create across prison walls has become too dangerous to the narrative of the system. They are losing the thread of legitimacy and pivoting: two-way surveillance at the cost of both those the state holds against their will and the ones who love them.

For incarcerated queer folks especially, mail has been a life-saving system. Mail call used to signal to other people that there was someone on the outside who cared. A card or penpal letter from organizations like our sister collective, Flying Over Walls, was sometimes the only mail people would get, often abandoned by friends and family when they went in. Many people say they have saved every letter we've ever sent them, or cut out photos from our newsletters to create a collage or to tape up on their cell walls. When we sent out prompts for zines or creative writing, people were able to write directly on the form we mailed them and send it back, to save on paper and provide the option to those who couldn't afford their own. 

People got their independent news this way, through indie presses or alternative media. Now, they are limited to the corporate news channels on television or the prison-chosen news sources they can access on their tablet. Everything is run through a tighter filter, enhanced by AI technology to locate keywords that may trigger heightened inspection of the correspondence, and digitally log this data for future purposes of which we can only begin to imagine. 

Suddenly, we find our handwritten letters turned into ones that are expensive, typed, mass-surveilled by private corporations, and held indefinitely by the carceral state to be accessed by anyone in corrections at any time for any reason. No longer do our newsletters—with photos, art, resources, updates, and space built in to write or draw for those who cannot afford extra paper at commissary—make it into the hands of our contributors in prison. No longer do our books and zines, a lifeline of creativity from fellow LGBTQ prisoners, pass through mailrooms. No longer do people speak openly about their dangerous circumstances, the abuse they face, the medical neglect they endure, or the difficult questions that they wrestle with. Digital mail processing is equivalent to silence, increased fear, and severe penalties for everyone impacted by the prison system. 

The censorship we faced in the traditional prison mail system was already arbitrary, deeply anti-queer, and purposefully opaque. Now, this Hydra no longer inspects, rejects, and returns. Instead, it intercepts, scans, stores, searches, monetizes, and destroys. 

One friend in Texas wrote to us, using up his last stamp, to let us know "Texas is doing the digital shit now." He wrote that all personal mail would be scanned and sent to the tablet. "So no more keepsakes," he added. "It's all dependent on if the people scanning are not going to just destroy our letters without scanning them." Since it's not regulated by the postal service, he wrote, "there's no way of knowing if anything comes thru." 

Another friend wrote that TDCJ was already taking letters and photocopying them without any policy or explanation he could find. A friend had written him, and the prison held the letter for 12 days before he got it. Then they photocopied it, didn't give him the original, and the copy cut off mid-sentence after two pages. They were doing this to a lot of people, he wrote. He filed a grievance. He wanted me to know what was going on. 

The Beginning of the End

As always, there needed to be an excuse, one that threatens the "safety and security" of good law-abiding folks just trying to do their jobs. A news story that hits you right in the feels: there he was, an innocent prison guard going through prisoner mail. A father. A husband. A mentor. He never could have expected that envelope contained lethal traces of Fentanyl. And now, that prison guard is no more. RIP. 

And now we have a staff shortage because all these drugs keep killing all the prison guards! And there's riots and fires and stabbings and overdoses, and the whole dang thing is chaos! The only thing that can stop it is if no one's allowed to hide drugs in the mail anymore, because there is no prison mail! 

Now hold up because this didn't just begin in 2024 with the passing of CO Fischer from envelope fentanyl. All the way back in 2021, San Mateo County Jails in California barred prisoners from receiving physical mail, and started rolling out mail digitization and prison tablets. It was very slowly gaining some traction. 

But as always, Texas does it bigger. One friend inside TDCJ wrote to us after the notice reached his unit: "Just got an update and found out something disturbing. You know that whole 'mail scanning' thing that's been going around? It finally reached Texas." He typed out the lengthy notice to us, since tablets wouldn't allow copy and paste. 

It read, in part: 

"The Texas Department of Criminal Justice is excited to announce that we are moving to a digital mail platform to reduce the amount of dangerous contraband in our facilities. Effective September 6, 2023, all units will be moved to the digital mail platform. Incoming mail for all inmates should be sent to the digital mail processing center where it will be sorted, scanned, and uploaded to the inmate's secure tablet." 

On TDCJ's website is a dystopian video featuring Timothy Fitzpatrick, Director of Classification and Records, in a corn-flower blue suit with close-cropped hair and a wooden cutout of the state of Texas behind him. In this video, he robotically introduces the machines that scan and digitize correspondence, effectively eliminating the need for guards to sort through dangerous mail, and prominently displaying real letters, drawings, names, and addresses of imprisoned people and their loved ones. But it also shows employees, donned in lab coats, blue gloves, and masks, still opening up and sorting the mail, just not in the prison. Now it's a private company doing it. 

Shortly thereafter, prison tablets were rolled out through all the state units in Texas. But not just in Texas; they were popping up everywhere. Companies like Securus Technologies started making deals with correctional facilities all over the nation. 

The companies purport that the tablets "deliver educational, vocational, religious, and legal materials along with messaging and numerous other programs." Really seems like a win-win. No more drug smuggling through the mail, and prisoners get all these amazing benefits on their tablets. TDCJ Executive Director Bryan Collier said, "The COVID-19 pandemic revealed the need for greater connectivity and ways to deliver information to inmates. With this secure system, the agency expects to be able to streamline everything from the delivery of programs, to the ability to search for pre-release information, to enhancements in mail delivery." 

Dang, the carceral state has good PR. 

Times are clearly a-changin' in the land of mass incarceration. Prisons in the U.S. haven't seemed to progress much technologically since the '80s, but now, almost overnight, nearly every prisoner has a tablet with pay-to-play addictive content, hooking people who are starved of access and communication, and then upcharging them into oblivion for continued use. Simultaneously, they phased out all physical mail, newsletters, and books from being able to enter the prison system. If you think things are getting a little too Orwellian for your taste in society at-large, prisons are the testing ground. 

While writing this, I got a call from an unknown number in San Diego, my hometown. The voicemail said: "Hi, this is a quick message for families using the federal prison email system. ContactMeASAP just got better. Unlimited text, photo sharing and now AI-powered searches your loved one can use right from their unit. No more waiting. No more wondering if your message got through." 

The company lauds itself as a "federal inmate text messaging service," offering a unique phone number to the person in prison that they can keep upon release. I must have crossed into an alternate timeline, because I was still under the impression that prisoners found with cellphones, mostly used to text their loved ones, were very much frowned upon. Yet, here we are, a company offering a paid text messaging service on devices they provide for federal prisoners, profiting off the stoppage of physical mail being allowed into prison. 

But the truth is not quite as advertised. Our friends inside the prison system started reporting numerous issues. Screens bending and cracking from bare minimum use. $150 to replace. Headphones falling to pieces after one use. $20 to replace. Severe distortion over calls where one side or the other, or both, could not hear each other, requiring repeated calls just to successfully exchange a few sentences—all the time, racking up fees. Entertainment or education they paid for, on prison wages or family assistance, would disappear unless they started purchasing costly subscriptions to keep them. 

The mail they received, scanned and digitized on their tablets, was often blurry, cut off, and at such low resolution that it was impossible to read. All original mail was, of course, destroyed. Older family members who struggled with technology found it impossible to navigate the counterintuitive websites and costly payments and simply stopped trying to communicate with people inside. I received heartbreaking emails from loved ones begging me to walk their family members through the process just so that they wouldn't stop writing. 

There were supposed to be video visits, so much easier than visiting your loved one in prison where you gotta go through all those metal detectors and engage with prison guards with hot cheeto-dusted fingers. But the video visit apps on the tablets crash constantly, glitch, and won't allow you into the visitation room, then cancel your visit the day of for no reason, making you rebook another month out. And some people you can never visit. I have been refreshing the video visitation schedule every week for a year and still can't have a video visit with my best friend in prison. The prison blocked me on her phone list over three years ago, and no one has answered my numerous calls, emails, letters, or angry screams into my pillow. 

And things are wildly inconsistent. At one jail, prisoners can only access a tablet in the dayroom during certain hours on a limited supply. These tablets are often malfunctioning for one reason or another, and in full view of everyone else. Other prisons issue one tablet per person, yet these are often stolen, traded, trashed during shakedowns, or otherwise damaged thanks to planned obsolescence. 

One friend inside described the platform as funneling all communication to one point. "Mail goes to the tablet. Email goes to the tablet. Photos go to the tablet." When his cellmate was moved to another unit, he was told his tablet would be sent to him, but it was lost in transit. So he had no mail, no phone calls, and no contact with his family for weeks. 

Once, a prisoner could at least lie on their bunk, holding a letter from their spouse or child, re-reading it over and over again, a tangible connection to the people they love that the state won't allow them to be with. Now, there's just the hope you can fight your way to the prison tablet tomorrow and maybe, just maybe, there will be digital text blinking on the blurry screen for the few minutes you get to read it before you're elbowed out of the way. 

The Commodity of the Confined 

I won't pretend that mail digitization is the ultimate systemic sin. But it is another papercut in the slow and painful death the justice system imposes on those it kidnaps and encages. It's yet another way that system disconnects us; the proverbial last straw for many people who were already struggling with communication across prison walls. The system does this so well: annoy and push people just a little bit further until they give up completely and throw their hands up in despair. 

It is clear, and has been to me for the 16 years I've been in decarceration and abolitionist work, that the dehumanization of people the justice system deems criminal is a stain on the collective consciousness that we will never wash ourselves clean of. I've grown weary of watching people bicker over the sins of the past, but turn a blind eye to the ones happening now. Ones that are in our power to change. 

So when the chance came to do something about it, we did. 

In 2023, attorneys from the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University reached out to us with the concern that "eliminating physical mail harms the expressive rights of people that are incarcerated." Soon thereafter, alongside the incredible plaintiffs incarcerated there, and their loved ones, we launched a lawsuit against San Mateo County Jails, the Maguire Correctional Facility, and the Maple Street Correctional Center: A.B.O. Comix v. San Mateo Cnty., No. 23-civ-01075 (Super. Ct. of San Mateo Cnty.). 

Three years later, on July 30, 2026, our attorneys notified us that Judge Healy of the Superior Court of the State of California determined that we do not have standing to sue based on the fact that three years have elapsed and those that we communicated with in San Mateo County Jails are no longer incarcerated there, as jails typically house people only until their trial and usually only up to about two years. The order stated, "A plaintiff may lose standing even where an actual controversy originally existed but, by the passage of time or a change in circumstances, ceased to exist." 

A bold tactic, California. Dragging out trials until you can argue that it's a moot point, knowing the case is time-sensitive. 

People incarcerated in these jails are still suffering under these policies. MailGuard and other scanning and mail digitization companies are still profiting off the commodity of prisoner correspondence while helping increase the level of surveillance of millions of people held in bondage. 

We do not yet know if we will appeal. But that does not mean this is the end of the fight. In the last three years, we have painstakingly investigated and acquired the testimonies of countless imprisoned people who have been affected by this mail digitization and prison tablet exploitation scheme. We are starting to see other people challenge this as well. 

The Fight to Write campaign, now Right to Write (as the digital mail AI censorship big brother kept flagging the word "fight" and not allowing it to be written in messages), launched to oppose these policies and highlight the numerous negative impacts. Through campaigns like this and other people and organizations fighting against the digitalization of prison correspondence, we have exposed that this policy is not about curbing the flow of drugs and contraband into the system via mail at all. 

Let's not forget that drug addiction is a horrific epidemic within the system. Our friends incarcerated in Texas have seen some of the worst of this (RIP BeBe and many others who the state has killed through the flow of lethal drugs into the system). K2, or synthetic marijuana, is one of the worst culprits, with reports of overdoses and episodes of psychosis where people have fallen off third-row tiers to their deaths, dove headfirst off their bunks onto the floor, and attempted to fatally attack others while in the midst of an overdose—just a few of the situations that have happened to close friends of mine inside. 

But the prison system doesn't actually care about the deaths and overdoses of people they imprison. They do, however, understand the concept of good PR in keeping the general public from looking too closely at what happens behind those closed gates. 

Jason Renard Walker, an incarcerated journalist in Texas, wrote that TDCJ officials linked increasing violence to drugs entering prisons, using that as justification for a statewide lockdown and mass cell search. He also noted that this lockdown came amid the new policy that stopped friends and family from sending mail directly to TDCJ units. Instead, all mail of this variety would be sent to a digital processing center, inspected, scanned, and electronically sent to Securus tablets. TDCJ claimed this would help curtail drugs being used, sold, and distributed throughout the system. Walker called it "a measure that failed miserably within the first 90 days of the new policy." 

It is not a secret to anyone who has experience with the prison system that drug smuggling is not efficient through USPS; the much better route is through the guards bringing them in directly and selling for a nice profit. But in order to appear as if they've done something about it, they've implemented a policy that punishes families and helps the prison system keep better tabs on people's conversations, personal lives, hopes, dreams, words, and art. 

We have been paying attention to places like Pennsylvania, which has seen positive drug tests triple since implementing mail scanning. Or places like Illinois, where drug deaths and overdoses have remained at the same rate since physically destroying prisoners' mail. 

Fighting Back Against the Matrix of State Slavery 

We are watching the prison system undergo a tech revolution, and what a crazy timeline it is to be in. We are co-existing in the breeding ground for the weaponization of the smartest technology we have ever known to exist on this planet. We live in a society that experiments on people the state can somehow dehumanize.

This is where the elite rehearse what they want to normalize for "free" society—what they can get away with, what everyone will just go along with, testing how far they can push before there's pushback. 

We're watching Flock cameras go up all over the town. We're getting tickets in the mail from surveillance cameras with no human viewer or oversight. Our communication is being privatized and sold and extracted for data. We are addicted to our screens with typed text and have lost the scent of parchment and the feel of a pen in our hands. We are rapidly losing the ability to exist without machines. 

But we also have these tools at our disposal, and we have to learn how to stop being two steps behind the government and start being proactive. Start building. Start planning. Start learning. When the people band together, we win. 

So please join in the fight. Preserve your right to write. Remember the pen is mightier than the sword. 

Join us at our new home, where you can find people to write in prison via our penpal portal: Abolition Archive.