“Instead, family and friends were required to mail their letters to Smart Communications, a private for-profit company based in Florida that would scan and destroy those letters so that incarcerated people would be required to access them digitally through a limited number of shared tablets and kiosks in public spaces within the jails.”
San Mateo County sends letters to its 850 Redwood City inmates through a Florida contractor that scans them and shreds the originals. The letters then sit on a few shared tablets in public areas of the jail. Of the 500,000 people in US county jails, 427,000 have not been convicted of anything. Smart Communications gets a contract, and families lose the privacy of a sealed letter.