The Federal Bureau of Prisons has quietly but steadily been implementing a nationwide policy that silences the voices of people incarcerated in federal prisons by preventing them from sharing the same email and phone contacts for people on the outside, also known as a “double contact ban.”
This latest move to ban prisoners from contacting prominent legal and advocacy groups locally and nationally raises severe concerns about the First Amendment rights supposedly guaranteed to all Americans. “These decisions are not made in haste and without first considering all parties or policies involved,” retorted Emery Nelson of the BOP Office of Public Affairs in Washington, D.C. “The specific problem is very thoroughly investigated, and a corrective action plan that fits within the scope of the policy is set in motion that is designed to combat the issue at hand and not unnecessarily limit privileged telephonic or electronic communication.
By regulation, the BOP is supposed to provide some kind of explanation as to why correspondence does not reach the person to whom it is intended. Not one of these situations yielded any kind of an explanation from the BOP, thus lending even more weight to the sense shared by prisoners that everything they write, say and do is being watched and controlled in a way that can be described as mass prison surveillance.
Fathi noted that the NPP has “sometimes noticed a sudden drop in mail we receive from a given prison or jail … when we have active litigation at the facility and are encouraging our clients to write to us with information or concerns. While we have often suspected affirmative interference by staff … we have never obtained definitive proof that it was intentional interference rather than negligence or carelessness.