Patricia Marshall Vickers still remembers the week in late August 2018 when she stopped hearing from her son. Incarcerated in Pennsylvania since he was 17 years old, Vickers’s son faithfully called his mother from prison at least every other day — until suddenly, he didn’t. Vickers learned that other family members were also experiencing a communication blackout from their incarcerated loved ones. Still, she said, “It was scary because nobody knew what was going on.”
In a rare move, the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (PA DOC) had decided to place all 46,768 people held in its 25 state prisons on lockdown. As Vickers later learned, they were effectively subjected to 12 days of solitary confinement, locked in their cells for up to 24 hours a day, without access to work, programming, exercise, group meals, family visits, or even mail delivery.
And the barriers to communication did not end when the lockdown was lifted. In September, the PA DOC quickly instituted a set of new security policies and procedures that will cost the state a total of $15 million. All mail sent to people incarcerated in Pennsylvania is now being re-routed through the private company Smart Communications in Florida, which scans everything — including letters, cards, children’s drawings and family photographs — and transmits the scans to prisons, where they are printed out and delivered. The department is also installing airport-style body scanners for visitors.
The reason given for both the statewide lockdown and the enhanced security measures is a cluster of illnesses reported by corrections officers in the summer of 2018. Their symptoms were attributed to contact with synthetic cannabis, also known as K2 or spice, and the opioid fentanyl, which they asserted had taken place largely via contaminated mail. “Pennsylvania’s corrections officers put themselves in harm’s way to make our commonwealth safer,” Gov….