NEW YORK (1010 WINS) — The Board of Correction, the oversight body tasked with monitoring New York City prisons, on Tuesday refused to vote on the Department of Correction’s proposal to do away with physical mail for inmates.
The plan would hand over mail screening to a for-profit company with a history of alleged privacy violations. The company would go through mail, digitize it and give a copy to prisoners via tablet.
Mayor Eric Adams and DOC Commissioner Louis Molina were also seeking to restrict prison care packages to those purchased through a third party and to lower the number of times the BOC meets annually from nine to six.
The BOC blocked these proposals by refusing to vote on them. When the chair brought up the requests, each of the seven members declined to bring the issues to a vote.
Molina launched his efforts to limit mail to prisoners in October, framing the change as a tool to combat drug smuggling.
The proposal drew condemnation from a number of City Council members and other elected officials as needlessly cruel, invasive and unlikely to reduce overdoses.
“These proposed variances would deny people in custody access to correspondence from their loved ones, raising serious privacy and civil rights concerns, and further fray the social bonds that are necessary for people’s mental health,” said New York City Comptroller Brad Lander in January.
Opponents of the change point to corrections officers, a number of whom have been arrested for smuggling contraband, as the most common way drugs enter New York City prisons.
“Recent reports from the Department of Investigation found that officers exploit weakened security checkpoints in order to smuggle contraband,” Public Advocate Jumaane Williams said at Tuesday’s hearing, according to The City.
Securus Technology, the Texas-based prison communication company that would be contracted to scan mail, was selected in a no-bid process behind closed doors. The DOC has refused to say how much it would cost to hire the firm.
“The variances would not actually make DOC facilities safer; in fact, they may make them less safe,” said Lander. “The variances would, however, function to reward a private contractor with a history of severe privacy and contract breaches, without an appropriate competitive bidding process.”
The firm has paid millions in settlements to prisoners who sued the company for allegedly illegally recording calls.
The BOC’s rebuff of the change comes as the mayor and the DOC work to curtail the scope of the board’s oversight.
Molina in January abruptly and unilaterally announced limits to when and where the BOC could access surveillance video from city jails. The other request brought by the DOC and Adams on Tuesday — to reduce the frequency with which the board meets — also raised transparency concerns.
"The Board of Correction seems to be moving away from a model of transparency, towards secrecy," Williams said during his testimony, according to Hell Gate.
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