One morning, in October 2022, a memo hit my tablet: Effective immediately, all letters coming into the prison would be scanned and printed by facility staff. Instead of receiving the original mail itself, photocopies would be delivered instead.
I read the email twice in my cell, the words blurring on the small screen. I had been waiting three weeks for a birthday card from my son, his first letter since I started my 11th year at Shawangunk Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison about 80 miles north of New York City.
I walked back to my bunk, sat on the thin mattress, and stared at the empty slot where real envelopes used to arrive. That night I wrote to my son, explaining that his handwriting would now be a photocopy on plain white paper — no more colorful crayon drawings, no more scent of his mother’s perfume on the seal. (Colored scans were recently introduced and are now being distributed, as long as the copy machine is functional.)
Adjusting to the news, I felt a pain in my stomach, the kind I had previously only associated with the end of a visitation day. In many ways, these letters were my last physical threads to the outside. I now no longer have a card I can keep and cherish, no folded page I can tuck under my pillow or pull out on a bad day. No way to remind myself that someone on the other side still draws hearts and writes “I love you, Daddy” in his own hand.
When the card finally arrived a week later, I pulled a single black-and-white photocopy from the mail slot. They had even copied the envelope, capturing his childish yet legible scrawl across the front.
Nicole Whitaker, a spokesperson for the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, told PJP editors that the mail-scanning policy was part of a larger zero-tolerance approach to drugs and violence in state prisons.
“The Department has been proactive in enhancing contraband prevention through introducing body-image scanners at all facilities, expanding K9 screening, copying and then delivering all regular mail, legal mail screening, and a vendor package program that has reduced package room contraband by 96% since 2020,” she wrote in an email to a PJP editor.
But from what I have observed, the change has done little to reduce overdoses at Shawangunk, which houses roughly 500 men. It’s been over three years since the policy went into effect. Almost every week there’s a medical emergency that staff eventually tell us was an “epi,” meaning a drug overdose.
In my memory, it was never as bad as it is now, suggesting that photocopied mail did little to reduce drug circulation inside Shawangunk. Instead, many of us here are left with longer waits for mail, colder connections and proof that even small moments of humanity can be erased by a single policy stroke.
The absurdity isn’t new. New York talks reform while weakening the everyday threads that keep us tied to the world outside these walls. We already navigate incentive wages that top out at 45 cents an hour for most workers, antiquated programming and rising commissary prices that nibble away at every paycheck. Now even the mail, once the most reliable bridge to family, has been thinned into something flatter and less human.
A photocopy cannot replace the weight of construction paper or the faint smell of home. It cannot replace the quiet dignity of holding something your child touched. And once that small dignity is taken, it is hard to believe it will ever be handed back.
