COMPASSION · A Mission From The Hole
Why Are They Trying To Keep Us Apart
69% of incarcerated people receive zero visits in a typical month. Only 2% have a pen pal. And now 25 states are scanning and destroying the physical mail before it arrives. Write a letter anyway.
By icculus · Spotlight Dispatch · April 2026
This is what icculus wanted you to know
A private company is now paid to intercept the letters between a mother and her incarcerated child — scan them, destroy the original, and deliver a blurry digital copy on a prison tablet. They call it a safety measure. The drug overdoses went up anyway. What went down was the last physical proof that someone on the outside was thinking about you.
My stance: this is not about contraband. This is about cutting the cord between human beings and calling it policy. The tether — the real one, the one that keeps people alive — is being severed by a corporation that charges by the scan.
If you disagree, bring it. We will run your argument right beside ours. We need your balance. Send it to us at Spotlight Dispatch — we mean that.
There are 1.9 million people incarcerated in the United States right now. 63% of them are locked up more than 100 miles from their families. 69% will not receive a single visit this month. Only 2% have a pen pal. And as of 2025, at least 25 states have decided that even the letters they do receive should be scanned, digitized, and destroyed before they arrive.
I want to start with the number that stopped me: 2%. Two percent. Out of two million people, forty thousand have someone — anyone — who writes to them regularly. That is not a rounding error. That is a picture of what isolation looks like at scale.
The research is not ambiguous. People with pen pals are up to six times less likely to reoffend after release. A 2025 study in Nature found that strong emotional family support was directly associated with better physical and mental health one month post-release. The farther someone is incarcerated from home, the more likely they are to experience depression — and most people are incarcerated far from home. These are not soft findings. These are the kind of numbers that, in any other context, would generate a federal program and a press conference.
Instead, we got mail scanning.
They Are Scanning and Destroying the Letters
At least 25 state prison systems have now implemented mail scanning. The process: your letter arrives at a facility. A private company — most often Securus Technologies or its subsidiary JPay, which now controls mail delivery for 21% of American prisoners — scans it, destroys the original, and sends a digital copy to the recipient's prison tablet. Or a low-quality printout. Or nothing, if the scan fails.
The stated reason is contraband — specifically fentanyl-laced paper. The actual outcome, in Missouri, was that drug overdoses increased from 35 to 39 per month after implementation. What demonstrably did decrease was the thing that costs nothing to destroy: the physical presence of someone's handwriting. The texture of a page someone else touched. In some facilities, the scans arrive so blurry that incarcerated people cannot make out the faces in family photographs. One person described losing “the visceral experience of touching a letter or smelling perfume on an envelope.” That sentence is about love. It is being processed and discarded at scale.
69%
of state prisoners receive zero personal visits in a typical month
2%
of the 2+ million incarcerated people in the US have a pen pal
6×
less likely to reoffend — people who receive regular correspondence
25+
states now scanning and destroying physical mail before delivery
In January 2025, the ACLU won an injunction halting Rhode Island's mail scanning program after it failed to protect legal mail. That is one state, one injunction. In Arizona and Arkansas, the program expanded in late 2025. The direction of travel is not toward connection. It is toward control.
I coined the word tethered to describe what happens when people become emotionally dependent on AI — when the cord between them and the technology becomes load-bearing in ways they do not fully understand. But tethering is just the name for something that was always true about human beings: we require connection the way we require oxygen. What is being done to incarcerated people is not tethering. It is the opposite. It is cutting. And the cut is being made profitable.
“First came the light, then came the sound / Then came the worlds that could never slow down.”
— Phish, “Evolve”
The worlds never slow down. They did not slow down for you. For the people inside, time moves differently — it does not stop, but it loses its texture. Every day starts to feel the same. A letter gives a day its texture back. It gives a Tuesday a reason to have existed.
Someone who worked with the Pennsylvania Prison Society described incarcerated individuals expressing relief that they “finally weren't alone” when they received a response. A man named Terry wrote that letters help him completely forget about where he is — that a pen pal is “a constant reminder of a world I'm striving to get back to.” Another person wrote simply: “Letters remind people in prison that they are still a human being, even though I live in such an inhumane place.”
Write a Letter
You do not need to know what to say. You can write about the weather. You can write one paragraph. The content matters less than the fact that it arrived — that someone spent ten minutes thinking about them.
The largest pen pal directory in the country. Browse profiles. Find someone. Write them.
Focused on LGBTQ+ incarcerated people, who face disproportionate isolation and violence inside.
Read about the mail scanning crisis and the broader system before you write. It helps.
Full report on how mail scanning is destroying connection. Share it.
Reconnect the tether to someone who has been waiting. Tomorrow let them wake up and feel connected again — even if just for a minute, even if just for a second. Because down here, a second is enough to change everything.
— icculus
From the hole · yiswmt.com · April 2026
你好.
A Note On Balance
If you have a different opinion — if you believe mail scanning is a necessary safety measure, if you work in corrections and have seen what contraband does, if you disagree with any part of what icculus has written here — bring it. We will run your argument right beside ours. We need your balance. That is not a formality. We mean it.
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