By Doug Livingston for The Marshall Project.
Broadcast version by Farah Siddiqi for Ohio News Connection reporting for the Marshall Project-Public News Service Collaboration

To appeal his conviction for burglary and related charges, James Bishop needed the legal papers a Jefferson County court clerk had mailed him in prison. But mailroom staff at Ohio's Noble Correctional Institution decided there were too many pages.

They gave Bishop two options: Have the legal documents destroyed, or pay $4.61 in postage to send them back to the court.

When he refused either choice, correctional officers labeled the more than 60 pages from the court "contraband" and charged Bishop with "abuse of the mail system." After filing a formal complaint, officers put Bishop in a lockdown cell for four days with a man accused of "inflicting harm on another inmate" and manufacturing a weapon, according to court and prison disciplinary records.

"I got a ticket for contraband," an incredulous Bishop told The Marshall Project - Cleveland after getting out of the segregation unit in April. "Yeah, for the court sending me mail."

As of mid-June, Bishop remains incarcerated, still waiting for the records he needs to appeal his conviction.

Prison walls shouldn't stop a person from appealing a conviction or alleging civil rights abuses while incarcerated. But a 2021 pandemic-era crackdown on drug smuggling in the mail has delayed or prevented basic legal documents from reaching people inside Ohio's 28 state prisons.

The rights to petition the courts, to due process, and attorney-client privilege are pillars of the American justice system. "Having policies that unnecessarily restrict that is a big problem, and that's true under the federal Constitution and our state constitution," said Ben Cooper, a Columbus attorney who successfully challenged how the state prison system is handling what used to be protected mail.

Access to information, including a person's own legal records - which are usually available online to the general public - is significantly restricted in Ohio prisons.

Incarcerated people might get a couple of hours a week to conduct research on a prison law library computer. However, there's no unfettered access to the internet to search for legal arguments or visit a court website to view case files. Instead, there's LexisNexis, a third-party legal research tool. It doesn't always show every time-stamped entry on a court docket, including prosecutorial motions and lower court judgments that, if responded to in time, could aid people convicted of crimes in future appeals.

That's why incarcerated people rely heavily on the mail. Under the enhanced scrutiny though, legal records can take weeks or months to arrive, instead of days. Public court records, now treated like regular mail, can be denied for delivery if they exceed five pages. Because these records are now scanned, letters previously handed over in person are sometimes delivered to the wrong person, have pages missing, or come with a bill for copying and printing costs.

The Marshall Project - Cleveland interviewed or reviewed lawsuits and official complaints filed since 2021 by 33 people confined in nearly half of Ohio's state prisons. They said staff violated their rights by opening and reading their legal mail. Prison disciplinary records showed that correctional officers punished those who criticized the mailroom or filed lawsuits claiming their mail was mishandled.

Staff at Marion Correctional Institution, for example, disciplined Chad Messenger twice in 2022 for "disobeying a direct order" and "use of telephone or mail to threaten, harass, intimidate or annoy another." He had repeatedly supplied the mailroom with stamped envelopes and postage funds to forward legal mail to his family instead of returning it to the courts or having it destroyed. Messenger even filed a court motion accusing a local county clerk of dereliction of duty.

The conduct reports, or prison rules violations, could be used against an incarcerated person when they seek an early release from prison.

"Sometimes our cases are determined on our behavior in here, as well as our past history," Messenger said of early release and parole requests. If the people rack up too many conduct reports, "it looks bad."

Incarcerated people who challenge the handling of their mail in court are rarely afforded attorneys. They represent themselves, often losing, based on judgments that grant the prison system the latitude to keep facilities secure and free from contraband.

"Courts have consistently held that the maintenance of prison security and prevention of contraband from entering the prison are 'legitimate penological' interests," U.S. Magistrate Darrell A. Clay ruled in February.

The state prison system adopted tighter restrictions for legal mail in 2021 to keep out paper dipped in hard-to-detect synthetic drugs.

Drug seizures traced to legal mail - a tiny fraction of drug activity documented by correctional staff - did fall sharply, from 165 seizures in the first half of 2021 to 35 total in the next three years. Overall drug seizures, however, have continued to climb.

"They're trying to say that they want to do this to prevent introduction of contraband and the drug problem," said Richard Whitman, who is incarcerated at Belmont Correctional Institution. It's "worse than it ever was with the previous legal mail policy."

Incarcerated people, advocates and defense attorneys say the 2021 legal mail policy is an unconstitutional violation of the attorney-client privilege. The Marshall Project - Cleveland found that judges regularly extend filing deadlines for incarcerated people who miss filing deadlines due to slow-arriving court mail. Even with deadline extensions, people suing the state prison system or trying to overturn convictions are left with days, not weeks or months, to prepare and respond to complex legal questions and arguments raised by judges, prosecutors and attorneys who defend state-employed correctional staff.

"All they do is lie to us, and spin us," said Jason Monaco, an incarcerated man who works in the law library at Noble Correctional Institution, where he helps others, like Bishop, fight for their mail. "These people do not care about the Constitution or anything it stands for."

Monaco is among dozens of incarcerated people suing state prison officials, wardens and mailroom staff for disobeying a 2024 court order to deliver all federal court mail with as little interference as possible.

And it's not just incarcerated people who are complaining. Last month, lawyers with the Ohio Justice & Policy Center alleged in a lawsuit that, despite their staff attorneys following the new rules, staff at 11 prisons have been opening their confidential letters to clients for months.

State prison officials declined to comment for this story due to pending litigation. Under oath in a lawsuit settled last year, a top corrections administrator defended new restrictions on legal mail as "pretty clear" and "narrowly constructed to go after a particular issue."

Regular mail, which generally cannot exceed five pages, is scanned on site or forwarded to a processing center in Youngstown, where a private company opens, reads and scans the mail to be delivered electronically on digital tablets. Legal mail must be opened in front of the addressee, checked for contraband and, if clean, handed over without being read.

In order to send legal mail, which, unlike regular mail, is certified as delivered and processed swiftly, the 2021 policy required attorneys and court staff to obtain a control number from the prison system. Each number expires in 21 days, can only be used once, and verifies legal mail when placed on the outside of an envelope.

Under the old policy, which larger prison systems in California and Texas also use, legal mail only needed the valid return address of a law office or court.

In the early days of Ohio's new policy, prison mailrooms lacked guidance on how to handle court mail, which generally involves publicly available entries on court dockets. A one-page memo in September 2021 directed all mailroom staff to process all court mail as regular mail. Unless court staff marked the mail as confidential and requested a control number, the letters would be opened, scanned and read before the incarcerated person knew it had arrived.

The narrower definition significantly reduced the volume of legal mail, slashing the pieces arriving in the months before the new policy from over 10,000 to less than 3,000 by the end of last year, according to state data filed in the Ohio Justice & Policy Center lawsuit.

State prison officials could allow defense attorneys and courts to send confidential legal mail directly to incarcerated people on their electronic tablets, which would cut out the paper altogether. But there's no immediate timeline to implement that solution.

Four years after the start of the 2021 policy, the Ohio Supreme Court and a smattering of county courts use control numbers, even though it takes additional staff, time and resources. Several courts, including Cuyahoga County Common Pleas, do not, which means the timely delivery of court mail depends almost entirely on where an incarcerated person was convicted.

"I handle a lot of the inmate mail, but not all of it," said Susan Ayers, chief of compliance for the Hamilton County clerk of courts office. "And I will tell you that we almost exclusively send control numbers on there. I always assumed that was for ease of routing."

Several court clerks surveyed by The Marshall Project - Cleveland pointed to the 2021 memo from prison officials stating that they don't need control numbers because they're not sending legal mail.

"We don't even know how to do that. We don't do that. We just file what the judges give us," said Alicia Anderson, office manager at the Jefferson County Clerk of Courts Office, which repeatedly mailed Bishop envelopes that the prison mailroom labeled as "contraband" because they "were too large to scan."

In June 2024, federal Judge Edmund A. Sargus Jr., of the U.S. Southern District of Ohio, approved an agreement between Ohio prisons Director Annette Chambers-Smith and El-Barseem K. Allah, whose federal court mail had been withheld by the mailroom at Southern Ohio Correctional Institution. All federal court mail would be treated as legal mail "whether or not it was assigned a control number," the agreement stated.

The Ohio prison system, however, is not consistently holding up its end of the bargain, according to multiple incarcerated people who have referenced the ruling in subsequent lawsuits. Bishop, for example, sent The Marshall Project - Cleveland a photo and scanned copy of mail from a federal courthouse in Cleveland. The mail was opened and read outside of his presence, then scanned and delivered with two pages missing.

"I know they are in contempt," Bishop said.

In a lawsuit deposition last year, Brian Wittrup, the chief of strategy and policy for state corrections, told attorney Robert Salem that he could not say how many prisons were adhering to Judge Sargas' order.

"It is up to 28 separate prisons and their leadership to enforce those things and know whether or not they're being followed," Wittrup said. "There's just no way for me to know every day if policy is being adhered to, and that's true of any policy we have."

Attorneys with the Ohio Justice & Policy Center say that despite using control numbers, staff at 11 prisons have in the past few months started opening, scanning and reading attorney-client legal mail. In their May lawsuit, they argue that effective legal counsel requires clients who "feel comfortable communicating fully and frankly with their attorneys."

While visiting the Lebanon prison, attorney Angela S. Larsen, a lead attorney on the Ohio Justice & Policy Center lawsuit, said the prison staff told her to give the warden copies of papers her client needed to sign.

"No, this is confidential," Larsen said. "They just don't seem to get it."


Doug Livingston wrote this article for The Marshall Project.


This collaboration is produced in association with Media in the Public Interest and funded in part by the George Gund Foundation.


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Some 7,000 people are expected to attend this week's Psychedelic Science conference in Denver and public health activists are spotlighting the potential for mind-altering medicines to help address the nation's overdose crisis and end decades of mass incarceration.

Amanda Hall, senior director of national campaigns for the advocacy group Dream.org, said Colorado is on the front lines of psychedelic drug therapies, which she said can improve mental health, treat post-traumatic stress disorder and help people overcome addiction to opioids and other harmful substances.

"Psychedelics can help with substance use disorder, help people really get on that road to recovery and get their life back," Hall explained. "We've seen studies that it can reduce alcohol consumption by over 80% for heavy drinkers."

In 2022, Colorado voters decriminalized the use of psychedelics, including psilocybin mushrooms, mescaline and DMT for people 21 and older. The state has started licensing healing centers, expected to open as early as this summer.

Psychedelics are still illegal under federal law, but U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has supported decriminalization.

Hall believes psychedelic therapies forged in Colorado could work hand in hand with efforts to reverse the punishment-based approach in what she called the nation's "failed war on drugs." In addition to addressing addiction, Hall emphasized it is important to make sure people arrested for drug offenses have access to resources which could improve their chances to reenter and remain in communities.

"To recovery resources, to housing, to employment," Hall outlined. "Things that research show actually makes us safer as well, as opposed to just continuing to incarcerate people."

Drug offenses are a leading cause of arrests in Colorado and across the U.S., and people of all ethnicities and backgrounds use illicit drugs. Those who are prosecuted are disproportionately people of color. The U.S. has the world's highest incarceration rate, with more than 2 million behind bars at any given time. Nearly two million are Black, up from 360,000 during the 1970s.


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A new study highlights the high price of incarceration, and says the annual total cost to families of Americans behind bars is nearly $350 billion.

The study from the nonprofit FWD.us says one in two American adults has seen incarceration in their immediate family, with higher rates among Black Americans.

Families with a member in jail or prison spend about $4,000 a year, and the report says for Black families, the cost is more than double due to longer sentencing.

Zoë Towns - executive director of FWD.us - said expenses like phone calls, care packages, long-distance travel, and new costs at home all contribute to the exorbitant price.

"It also includes depressed wages over the lifetime of the person who's incarcerated, who's no longer able to contribute," said Towns. "But also to all the other members of the family who oftentimes are also now experiencing lower pay, just because of all of the shock of incarceration and the disruption that comes with that."

She added that the children of people behind bars usually see their own wages depressed throughout their lifetime, even after a parent is released.

Wisconsin's incarceration rate is among the highest in the nation. Black Wisconsinites are locked up at a rate nearly 12 times higher than whites, despite making up just 6% of the state's population.

The report shows incarceration rates are also higher for people in poverty, with subsequent expenses eating up more than a quarter of the family income.

Towns said the stigma around incarceration often means it's overlooked in discussions about household budgets.

"This report comes at a time when lawmakers and the American public are really thinking seriously about spending, about the price of everyday costs, they're thinking about affordability," said Towns. "And this is just one of those key drivers of affordability that is pretty significant and also under-discussed."

Towns noted that after 15 years of bipartisan criminal justice reforms to reduce incarceration, some political leaders are pushing to re-embrace it.

But she pointed out that states that have reduced incarceration have seen faster declines in their crime rates.

"And this is just another reminder of the harms of going backwards," said Towns. "It's not just that we don't need it, that it can't be defended on public safety grounds, it's also that it's coming at an extraordinarily high cost - not just to taxpayers, but directly out of the pockets of family members who are impacted by it, which is a great many people in America."

Towns said she hopes the research lifts up the stories of these families so policymakers can begin to address the issue more fully.



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By Alyssa Burr for the Michigan Independent.
Broadcast version by Chrystal Blair for Michigan News Connection reporting for the Michigan Independent-Public News Service Collaboration

Renee Chelian, founder and CEO of Northland Family Planning Center in Sterling Heights, has been an abortion provider for more than 50 years. During that time, she says, anti-abortion groups have harmed and harassed her, as well as her staff, patients and family, with constant threats of violence, including large blockades, arson attempts, and even death threats.

It wasn’t until the federal government enacted the 1994 Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which sought to address the harm individuals obtaining and providing abortion care were facing, that she saw the violence lessen.

“Once the law went into effect, the violent blockade stopped immediately,” Chelian testified during a May 22 state Senate Civil Rights, Judiciary, and Public Safety Committee hearing. “We still had protesters, but they were not physically attacking our clinics, staff and patients.”

Three decades after the FACE Act took effect, Democrats in the Michigan Senate are working to create state-level safeguards that would protect Michigan abortion care providers and their patients in the event that the Republican-led Congress struck it from the books.

Republican-sponsored legislation to repeal the FACE Act is currently moving through the House of Representatives. Earlier this year, President Donald Trump pardoned 23 individuals who had been convicted of violating the FACE Act on charges of harassing pregnant patients, physically blocking clinic entrances, and breaking into medical facilities. Four of the pardons were for individuals charged with blockading Chelian’s Sterling Heights clinic in 2020.

Recalling the day of that blockade in committee, Chelian said that patients were stuck in their cars, including three women who had come in for abortions following the detection of fatal fetal anomalies in their pregnancies.

“One woman was leaking amniotic fluid and blood and was scheduled for the second day of a two-day procedure, and she needed immediate medical care. She huddled with her mother and her husband, trapped in the parking lot while extremists plastered signs of fake fetuses on her car windows and shouted, ‘God loves you, God loves your baby,’” Chelian said.

She added that day was traumatic for herself, her staff and her patients, with some even seeking mental health treatment. After Trump pardoned those convicted of attacking her clinic, she said it left them reliving their trauma and “feeling abandoned by the government.”

In March, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, a Royal Oak Democrat, introduced Senate Bills 154 and 155, which mirror the FACE Act. The bills would do three things: prohibit a person from threatening, intimidating or interfering with someone obtaining or providing an abortion; prohibit an individual from intentionally damaging a health care facility that provides abortions; and create penalties for those who violate the bill’s provisions.

The legislation does allow certain exemptions for picketing or other demonstrations protected under the First Amendment, and it also specifies that a parent wouldn’t face any penalties so long as their interference is only directed toward their minor child.

“We cannot rely on federal protections that are actively being dismantled and pardoned away,” McMorrow said during the May Senate committee hearing.

The committee hearing featured testimony from Chelian, as well as other Michigan abortion providers who fear that extremism from anti-abortion groups could severely escalate if the FACE Act is repealed.

Dr. Neha Thawani is completing her obstetrics and gynecology residency at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. Since beginning her medical training eight years ago, she said, she’s passed through dozens of medical facilities offering a wide range of services, but it wasn’t until she spent time providing abortions in an outpatient clinic that she was “exposed to emergency lockdown protocols, a daily gauntlet of protesters, or saw patients escorted through side doors for their safety.”

Shelly Miller, executive director of the Scotsdale Women’s Center, a clinic in Detroit, said abortion providers have to go further than other parents in teaching their children safety measures: “It is not safe to open the mailbox alone. Never open a package without your parents, and you should certainly never discuss your parents’ line of work.”

“I need you to know there is nothing peaceful about these groups,” Miller told the Senate panel. “These are not kind-hearted people praying outside. These people scream horrible things at our patients, their chaperones and our staff. They shove their bodies close to us and our building entrances with force. … They post photos on social media, send hateful mail to our homes and aggressively run up on people as they try to get out of their cars. They have made recordings and then edited those recordings to use against us. They have been responsible for fires and bombings and ultimately killings of clinic staff and doctors around the country.”

If it enacted the law, Michigan would join 14 states and Washington, D.C., in providing legal protections to abortion clinic staff and patients from harassment or physical harm, according to McMorrow.

Genevieve Marron, legislative director for Right to Life Michigan, an anti-abortion group, submitted written testimony to the committee in opposition to the bills. In her letter, she said that the legislation is a “solution in search of a problem” because the FACE Act already covers the same area of law and that it would limit the reach of “sidewalk counselors,” anti-abortion activists who stand outside clinics and try to convince patients not to have abortions.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, ending the federal right to an abortion, Michigan lawmakers have taken steps to preserve reproductive health care in the state, including enshrining abortion access in the state constitution.

Even though the current bills are unlikely to make it through the Republican-controlled Michigan House of Representatives, McMorrow said the issue isn’t about ideology or politics; rather, it’s about continuing to provide basic safety and access to medical care.

“When activists can physically block patients from entering clinics, when they can break into medical facilities, when they can harass vulnerable patients without consequence, we have failed in our duty to protect both patients and health care providers,” McMorrow said.


Alyssa Burr wrote this article for the Michigan Independent.


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