Recently the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction (ODRC) changed the policy on how and what they deem to be “legal mail.”
All legal mail is supposed to be opened in the presence of the recipient, but Ohio no longer recognizes any mail coming into the prison from courts, lawyers or any legal entity as legal mail unless it has a control number.
This is what happens when a court decision or transcripts of proceedings without control numbers get sent to an inmate: The mail room opens it and places it on a copier and copies it. If the copier grabs two pages and one never gets copied, we would never know.
This is a problem especially when we have to respond to a decision about a motion within 14 days. It takes four days for it to arrive at the prison and two days for it to get from the mailroom to the inmate. Because access to the law library has been very limited due to the COVID-19 outbreak, it takes two to four days to mail out your response.
That only leaves four days to research and write the response if the law library is open and space is available.
The U.S. Supreme Court has clearly established what prisons cannot do, and opening legal mail outside of our presence is one of them. But when this issue was brought to ODRC’s attention, the response was, “We know you will file suit but it will take two years before the courts will hear it. So until we hear something, this is what we’re doing.”
We are now in the process of filing an injunction. Many inmates don’t know what to do. We need help.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Here are our ground rules:
- You must credit Prison Journalism Project. In the byline, we prefer “[Author Name], Prison Journalism Project.” At the top of the text of your story, please include a line that says: “This story was originally published by Prison Journalism Project” and include a link to the article.
- No republishing of photographs, illustrations or graphics without specific permission. Please contact inquiries@prisonjournalismproject.org.
- No editing the content, including the headline, except to reflect changes in time, location and editorial style. For example, changing, “today” to “last week,” or San Quentin to San Quentin, California. You can also make minor revisions for style or headline size, and you can trim stories for space. You must also retain all original hyperlinks, including links to the Prison Journalism Project newsletters.
- No translation of our stories into another language without specific permission. Please contact inquiries@prisonjournalismproject.org.
- No selling ads against our stories, but you can publish it on a page with ads that you’ve already sold.
- No reselling or syndicating our stories, including on platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. You also can’t republish our work automatically or all at once. Please select them individually.
- No scraping our website or using our stories to populate websites designed to improve search rankings or gain revenue from network-based advertisements.
- Any site our stories appear on must have a prominent and effective way to contact you.
- If we send you a request to remove our story, you must do so immediately.
- If you share republished stories on social media, please tag Prison Journalism Project. We have official accounts on Twitter (@prisonjourn), Facebook (@prisonjournalism), Instagram (@prisonjournalism) and Linked In.
- Let us know when you share the story. Send us a note, so we can keep track.
Ohio Prisons Violating Rights of Incarcerated Persons
