On a recent Friday morning, I went to the email kiosk to check for new messages. 

Once I signed in, I saw a message from JPay, the company that provides a limited email system to prisons around the country. The email had three lines:

EMAIL CENSORED

REASON: Other

COMMENTS:

At first, my brain went to work trying to figure out who might have sent me an email that would be censored. I looked at my contact list to see if someone new had logged on, someone who might not know the many rules for sending prisoners email. But there were no new contacts.

I was worried. In prison, if you are even suspected of wrongdoing you can get cuffed and taken to solitary confinement for “investigation.” Could an email that the system flagged as “threatening” bring that kind of tornado to my trailer park?

I needed to find out who sent me this email and why it was flagged, but how? My PC, or prisoner counselor, is the kind of guy who tries to be helpful and might look it up for me; but he doesn’t work on weekends. I’d have to wait until Monday to see if I could find out who the offending email was from. 

I tried to put it out of my mind, but I’m a pretty good worrier. All weekend, concerns about the email lurked around the edge of my awareness. When Monday rolled around, I was early in line outside the PC’s door.

After I explained my issue, he punched a few keys on the computer. I leaned forward to see what he was looking at. 

It was an article I wrote and sent to a publisher. Now here it was on a staff computer, captured and slashed through with accusing red highlights, pointing like fingers back at me.

I felt a mixture of alarm, guilt and embarrassment, but I also couldn’t understand what I’d done wrong. “Did I violate any rule or policy?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “It’s just that certain words trigger the system and it censors your email.”

“Words? What words?”

“Stuff like ‘corrections officer,’ ‘suicide,’ things like that,” he said, indicating the email.

“Can I appeal it?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “JPay’s a privilege, not a right. You can’t grieve or appeal anything they do.”

I went on: “Yet if I did nothing wrong, there’s no reason I can’t type up this same article and mail it out via the U.S. Postal Service? There’s no problem?”

“Not as far as I’m concerned,” he said. 

So I typed it up, still beset by a vague sense that I was doing something wrong. Ultimately, the piece I had written wasn’t accepted for publication, but the incident got me thinking about this underreported aspect of prison censorship. 

Typically, issues of prison censorship have to do with what is and isn’t allowed into prisons. There are endless stories and studies on the banning of certain books and the major limitations on physical mail flowing into prisons. We don’t hear as often about the censorship in the other direction: keeping prisoners’ voices from getting out to the public. 

JPay may be a privilege. But it has also become the primary means of written communication for incarcerated people, at least in Michigan prisons. 

As a “privilege” provided by a private corporation, the service comes with zero free speech protections. Such protections were hard won by prisoners in lawsuits like Procunier v. Martinez, which established a protective standard of inmate First Amendment rights of free speech and were almost all based on the U.S. Postal Service being a government agency subject to respecting the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens, including prisoners. Of course, the court later reduced these First Amendment protections for inmates. 

If mail is being carried by the U.S. Postal Service, such actions are subject to some oversight to protect not just prisoners’ rights but those of journalists, government officials and others who may communicate with prisoners. With e-comms provided by private companies, prisons can dispense with all that pesky government oversight. For the most part, the shift has been total. 

Very few typewriters are left in my prison. Few people keep pen and paper anymore. As a result, when an email is censored, prisoners are likely to just move on rather than go through the trouble of typing or writing the message or article and sending a physical copy through the post office. 

Another consequence of this is prisoners attempting to censor themselves — as I did in this very article. Consciously or unconsciously, we shape what we say to appease what the censors may or may not allow. There are no clear rules offered, and this ambiguity amplifies the effectiveness of this indirect censorship.

Ultimately, it adds up to censorship of prisoner’s voices. Isn’t that a free speech issue?