Mail addressed to inmates in Montana's prisons will be processed 2,000 miles away in Maryland beginning next week.
TextBehind, the Maryland processor, will on May 1 begin scanning inmates’ personal mail into digitized files for Montana's three state-run prisons: Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge, Montana Women's Prison in Billings and the Pine Hills Youth Correctional Facility, which began housing adult inmates in a separate area of the Miles City prison in recent years.
The Montana Department of Corrections announced the change on its website, directing those seeking to send mail to inmates to do so at the following address: Facility name and state; inmate name, inmate ID number; PO Box 247; Phoenix, MD 21131.
TextBehind is a subcontractor with ICS Corrections, Inc., which runs other communication services for the state prison system here.
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Advocates for incarcerated people have raised questions about mail scanning services, contending the emotional benefits of holding and rereading physical mail has benefits for behavior and mental health in prisons.
But the corrections department said this week the new process will curb contraband infiltrating the state's prisons.
"The DOC’s top priority is to keep staff and inmates safe," DOC spokesperson Alex Klapmeier said in an email Monday. "Throughout the country, mail is unfortunately being used to introduce drugs into prison facilities. That is why prisons all over the country are moving to off-site scanning processes."
Klapmeier added that inmates' legal mail will still be delivered directly to recipients at the prison where they are housed. The two prisons DOC contracts with, Crossroads Correctional Center in Shelby and Dawson County Correctional Facility in Glendive, will receive and scan mail at their own facilities.
Staff members will still open that legal mail in the presence of inmates, "as inmates continue attempts to receive drugs via counterfeit legal mail," Klapmeier said.
The department provided two photos of a red envelope Klapmeier said had been soaked in suboxone and sent to an inmate at a DOC facility. Both images are dated February 2020.Â
Suboxone is a prescription medicine primarily used to treat opioid addiction symptoms such as withdrawals, but can still provide a high and as a film is sometimes smuggled into prisons or jails.
The new process will not, however, represent a major change in how inmates are able to communicate with people outside of the facility, Klapmeier said.
"Since inmates at our secure facilities have access to their own tablets, they can receive photos and emails directly to their tablets," she said.
By increasing the number of tablets it received in its last contract renewal with ICS Corrections, the TextBehind mail scanning service was available at no cost to the department, Klapmeier said Monday.
TextBehind, the company now in business with Montana, says on its website the service is free to correctional institutions because its operations are paid for by the family and friends of incarcerated people using the company's website or mobile app for convenience.
In October, the company's "no-cost agreement" was central to the impasse that briefly jeopardized its contract with North Carolina’s corrections department, according to reporting by NC Newsline. Days later that state said it had reached an agreement to continue using TextBehind's service at no cost "for the foreseeable future."
The Prison Policy Initiative published a report in 2022 that found issues with scanning mail pushed incarcerated people's friends and families to use other, paid communications services provided by those companies.
The Dallas Morning News in October reported inmates complained of months of delays by a different mail scanning company, Securus Technologies, three months after the state prison system introduced the new process.
The Prison Policy Initiative's November 2022 report that found 14 states had moved to scanning mail, listing TextBehind and three other companies, but said that state tally was certainly an undercount. Montana was not yet on that list. A Google search shows scores of county jails have enrolled in the scanning service, as well.
The report's authors also asserted that mail scanning strips away the "sentimentality" of physical mail.
Some state prison systems scan the mail themselves while others, like the Montana Department of Corrections, have contracted with a third party. In this case, when the mail arrives in Phoenix, Maryland, it's uploaded to a digital file inmates can access from the tablet.
Klapmeier said TextBehind will make technical decisions, but DOC staff will still review the digital scans to determine if mail is undeliverable due to violation of prison mail policy.
"For example, if a check was sent to the Maryland facility, it would be returned to the sender," Klapmeier said Monday. "The mailroom staff at each facility will determine if mail is undeliverable based on factors including threats of physical harm against another, blackmail or extortion, or plans for activities in violation of DOC policy."
Set to go into effect May 1, the scanning service was added last June when the Montana Department of Corrections renewed its contract with ICS Corrections, Inc., for another three years. Another change to the contract is an acknowledgement that ICS Corrections may enter contracts with Montana counties, as well.
The initial Department of Corrections contract with ICS was signed in 2017 and expires in 2027.
More information on the new process can be found at https://cor.mt.gov/FriendsandFamily/Mail