Citing the need to keep out drug-soaked paper, state prison officials have expanded the opening and scanning of confidential attorney mail to incarcerated clients in every Ohio prison.
Since 2021, Ohio prisons have required attorneys to obtain control numbers that, when added to envelopes, are supposed to verify the authenticity of the sender and ensure that letters are only inspected, not read, before being handed to incarcerated people.
That process changed in 2024 when state officials directed staff in four prisons to open, copy and digitize all mail from attorneys, even letters arriving with a valid control number. Prison officials declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.
Attorneys for Ohio Justice and Policy Center, a statewide advocacy organization for prisoners’ civil rights, said they first noticed its confidential letters being opened and read by staff in December. The organization, claiming a constitutional violation of attorney-client privilege, sued the state prison director and the four prison wardens in federal court.
State officials responded by eventually expanding the practice to every Ohio prison. In response, the attorneys refiled their lawsuit, arguing that incarcerated people seeking legal advice on sensitive matters like alleged abuse and mistreatment should be free from eavesdropping mailroom staff.
Meanwhile, there’s little evidence that legal mail is a major pipeline for drugs, according to state data. In fact, there have been few drug seizures from legal mail since 2021, though the number of overall drug confiscations has climbed each year since the crackdown began in 2021, the Marshall Project – Cleveland reported in June.
“The policy at hand is too burdensome for justification,” Cleveland attorney Louis Grube wrote for the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association, which filed a letter in late September supporting the Ohio Justice and Policy Center lawsuit.
This article was first published by The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletters, and follow them on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Facebook.