Banning paper from prisons is a bad idea

This spring, the Illinois House is set to take up a bill that would make all prisons in the state paperless. This legislation is sponsored by Republican lawmakers and supported by American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Council 31, the public-sector employee union that represents corrections officers. If it passes, new rules will ban all mail to prisoners until it is digitized, as well as books and newspapers.

Why would they do this? Ostensibly, it’s necessary in the name of public safety: keeping Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) employees and residents safe. A common refrain is that paper is a conduit for illegal drugs.

One of the things that happened in the wake of legalizing marijuana was the proliferation of synthetic cannabinoid products, which are largely unregulated. One, called K2, is a synthetic form of cannabis that’s illegal in Illinois. It gets sprayed on paper, and these pieces of paper can be eaten or smoked. It’s one way prisoners get high. They usually cut the paper into small pieces called “strips.”

Preventing K2 from entering prisons is part of the excuse behind the push to ban all paper products. Another reason put forth is that a paper ban is needed for the safety of correctional officers who handle the mail.

There have been numerous reports in local and nationwide media about officers in mail rooms in prisons throughout the country who have been made sick or died due to drug-soaked paper and things like that. At Shawnee Correctional Center in downstate Illinois, six correctional officers experienced “medical symptoms” while sorting mail in September. The prison was put on lockdown, mail rooms in prisons across the state were alerted, and all mail in that prison was temporarily stopped. This sounds like a reasonable response, right? However, the Illinois hazardous materials team that responded to the prison found no evidence of drugs on any paper or the officers’ clothes. 

These synthetic drugs aren’t as dangerous as they are being made out to be. How do I know? For the last 23 years, until its closure in September, I was in Stateville Correctional Center. “Strips” had permeated the prison. Many guys smoked these drugs; you could constantly smell the smoke throughout the joint. This wasn’t a problem the prison cared to address.

In 2020, the Wisconsin Department of Corrections (DOC) began sending all prisoner mail to a Maryland company called TextBehind. The company scans the mail and sends digital copies to prisoners. The nonprofit newsroom Wisconsin Watch reported that the DOC has paid nearly $4 million for those services since they began.

Going paperless is not only costly, it simply does not work. Evidence suggests that going paperless does not accomplish authorities’ stated end goals of stopping drugs. Wisconsin Watch reported that in 2021, the year the Wisconsin DOC began restricting prisoners’ mail, there were 49 incidents of drugs being found on paper. By October 2024, there were already 55 incidents.

A 2021 Marshall Project investigation found that restricting mail did not curb drugs found in Texas prisons. In 2023, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s Patriot-News reported that after the banning of physical mail in 2018, the number of Pennsylvania prisoners who tested positive on random drug tests actually increased.

Do you want to know why going paperless and restricting mail doesn’t work? Because most drugs are brought into the prison by the people who work here. At Stateville, staff had been fired for bringing in drugs, selling cell phones, or having sex with prisoners.

Make no mistake, this paperless agenda will affect more than prisoners’ personal letters. It will also stop us from being able to purchase books, magazines, and newspapers. IDOC has already severely curtailed our ability to get books. Everyone knows that buying used books is cheaper than buying new books. However, IDOC has employed a policy that will not allow any books with highlighted passages, underlined sentences, or stains. This seriously limits our ability to get used books, forcing us and our loved ones to spend money on new books, which many guys in this place can’t afford. This has made it extremely difficult for people in prison to get books.

Organizations such as Midwest Books to Prisoners take donations of lightly used books and send them to prisoners. Many of these organizations are spending thousands of dollars on postage only to have the books returned undelivered. 

This will also hugely impact education and learning in prison. Many men take correspondence courses from places such as Blackstone Career Institute, which certifies graduates to become paralegals. Various other colleges and universities across the country offer correspondence courses, like Colorado’s Adams State University and Colorado State University Pueblo. If this bill passes, such learning opportunities will be much more difficult to participate in.

It’s not just limited to correspondence courses either. There are higher education programs scattered across Illinois’ state prisons, such as Northwestern University’s Prison Education Program (NPEP) and Lewis University’s Prison Education Program. These programs largely rely on printed articles and course materials. This could also be threatened. The guys in these programs would not be able to do their coursework. It would have the larger effect of shutting down higher education in prison.

Some incarcerated people write books. I’m working on one, and my friend Michael Broadway, who died in July, was a published author. An NPEP graduate, Broadway self-published a semi-autobiographical novel about growing up in Chicago called One Foot In. Other guys have published poetry books or memoirs. Banning paper would stop all of that. It would stop incarcerated men and women from becoming better people, and worse still, stop them from expressing themselves.

Books are a huge part of prison culture. Good books, both fiction and nonfiction, are passed around. You have to while away the hours in prison, and many do that by reading. Once I set my mind to try to become a better person, I read anything and everything I could get my hands on. Reading books helped me get on a better path, grow, and become self-rehabilitated. Some books are so valuable in prison that I’ve seen them used as currency. 

That’s how precious books can be in a place like this, and lawmakers are trying to take that away.

Anthony Ehlers is a writer incarcerated at Sheridan Correctional Center. Find out more about incarcerated journalists through the Prison Journalism Project.

More reporting on prisons . . .

✉️ The fight to ban mail into Illinois prisons ramps up

⚖️ Remembering Michael Broadway

🧑‍🎓 Exonerated and graduated