Enhancing Mail Security:
New Approaches to Combat Drugs and Contraband in Correctional Facilities
Alex Sappok, PhD
Jails, prisons, detention centers, and other corrections facilities are all supposed to be highly secure environments. Yet drugs, weapons, and other dangerous contraband continue to flow into these facilities in alarming numbers.
The main culprit: incarcerated individuals’ mail, including cards, letters, packages, and legal correspondence. Recent research found that 96% of drugs and contraband smuggled into corrections facilities came in letters and small packages not detected by conventional screening approaches.1
This trend isn’t just a logistical challenge, it’s a growing public health crisis with potentially fatal consequences for incarcerated individuals and staff. In August of 2024, a corrections employee died after exposure to an unknown substance while processing mail.2
With nearly two million people incarcerated in state and federal corrections facilities in the United States, staff must now handle tens of millions of pieces of mail each year, if not more.3 Screening such a high volume of mail is challenging enough in the best of times, yet many new and emerging trends now make these efforts extremely difficult:
• As opioids and other drugs become increasingly potent, smugglers only need smaller amounts to achieve the same effect. This makes it even easier to conceal small quantities and evade detection.
• New innovations in drug-smuggling methods, such as the prevalence of drug-soaked paper, are also hard to detect, especially using conventional screening methods.
• The use of fraudulent legal mail as a drug-smuggling channel. Individuals simply look up a law firm online and attempt to use its name on the envelope to bypass security screening under the guise of privileged communications.
• When successful, drug-smuggling can be extremely lucrative, motivating criminals to keep up their attempts.
• Budget cuts, staff shortages, and changes to drug enforcement policies have made effective screening nearly impossible for some institutions today.
This article will further examine these trends and challenges related to common screening methods while also highlighting how a new approach can successfully overcome them.
Hidden in Plain Sight: The Rising Threat of Drugs in Jails Today
Drugs smuggled into jails and correctional facilities are becoming more potent and harder to detect, leading to new challenges related to maintaining security and safety. From highly toxic drugs like fentanyl to the increasing use of drug-soaked paper, the overall threat is evolving in ways that now demand increased vigilance and new detection methods.
Increased Potency of Drugs
The increased prevalence of fentanyl, often combined with other drugs, poses a significant safety threat due to its extreme toxicity, even in trace amounts. Distributed in forms such as pills, powder, liquids, or applied to paper, fentanyl is just one part of a larger trend of increasingly dangerous narcotics now entering correctional facilities.
Even more potent narcotics such as isotonitazene, xylazine (“tranq”), and medetomidine are beginning to find their way into the mainstream. Worse, many of these do not respond to naloxone, which is commonly administered to reverse opioid overdoses.
This growing prevalence of extremely potent drugs has contributed to serious safety risks for staff and persons in their care alike, where even minimal exposure can result in severe harm or death. In addition to the death of a corrections mailroom supervisor last year from handling laced mail, nine staff members of an Illinois facility were hospitalized after exposure to drugs—most likely fentanyl—while processing the mail.4 Unfortunately, cases like this occur all too often.
Drug-Laced Paper
When it comes to smuggling drugs into correction facilities, drug-laced paper is the most prevalent smuggling method. Additional research found that 55% of drugs smuggled in mail items were drug-treated paper—more than double the amount from 2022.5
Paper sprayed or soaked in drugs is also extremely difficult to detect because, once dried, the substance is imperceptible to the human eye. Complicating matters is the fact that once drug-laced paper makes it inside a correctional facility, it can be easily hidden in plain sight. Adding to the challenge, smugglers are now using common household chemicals like formaldehyde, bug spray (such as Raid or other similar products), and other toxic substances to alter paper and evade detection by conventional drug test kits.
Correctional facilities have reported numerous incidents of drug-laced paper making its way inside, posing serious health and security risks for staff and incarcerated individuals alike.
• Drug-soaked papers were intercepted at the Butte County Jail using a K-9 unit. The soaked papers were later found to be methamphetamine.6
• An incarcerated individual attempted to smuggle drug-soaked paper with the help of a corrections officer. The officer was offered $2,000 for facilitating the transfer.7
• A drug-soaked greeting card was discovered in the possession of an incarcerated individual during medication distribution at the Cook County Jail.8
• A man who was already in custody on an aggravated robbery charge has been indicted by a Cook County Grand Jury after authorities found drug-soaked papers and other contraband hidden inside his boxer shorts.9
These incidents highlight the pressing need for enhanced mail screening technologies to detect and prevent increasingly sophisticated smuggling tactics such as drug-soaked paper. Yet correctional facilities also face other challenges that further complicate common screening approaches.
The Challenges Related to Screening Legal Mail
The need to screen legal mail also presents real challenges and the potential for loopholes to exploit the process.
The Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution ensures the confidentiality and privilege of attorney-client communications. Legal mail, which is defined as correspondence from an inmate’s legal counsel or the court system, is protected from traditional screening methods. Not only does this require more time-consuming, resource-intensive manual inspections, but it has made legal mail a prime channel for smuggling drugs and dangerous substances into jails and correctional facilities today.
A significant challenge in correctional facilities is the rise of fraudulent legal mail—correspondence that appears to come from an attorney when in reality no lawyer was involved. Smugglers simply search for a law firm’s name and create realistic envelopes that may have a better chance of bypassing traditional screening protocols under the guise of attorney-client privilege. For example, in one recent case, eight people were charged with sending drug-soaked paper disguised as attorney mail into Berks County Jail.10
Attorneys can also be responsible, although these cases tend to be the minority. The following are real-world examples of attorneys smuggling drugs into correctional facilities:
• A Houston attorney was accused of smuggling over 150 drug-laced papers into the Harris County Jail during many different in-person visits.11
• Two defense attorneys were banned from a D.C. jail after drug residue was found on paperwork they brought into the facility.12
• A Massachusetts lawyer was charged with scheming to smuggle legal papers soaked in synthetic marijuana into a Rhode Island jail.13
In many cases, these attorneys were unwitting middlemen who didn’t know that they were playing a role in these efforts and were not familiar with drug-soaked paper and other smuggling methods. However, simply not knowing is not a valid excuse in the court of the law, and many lawyers have been arrested and disbarred for participating—knowingly or unknowingly—in drug-smuggling schemes.
Financial Motivations
One thing remains clear: The bad guys will never stop, especially those motivated by the financial gains and fast profits they stand to reap from successful smuggling efforts.
For example, consider the case of papers sprayed or soaked with synthetic cannabinoids known as K2 or “spice.” The demand for these drugs inside correctional facilities is thriving, with a single sheet of drug-treated papers selling for up to $35,000. It’s possible for many laced sheets to be sent in one package, showing just how profitable it can be, even if just one piece of mail bypasses detection.14
With so much to gain—and seemingly not much to lose—criminals and incarcerated individuals continue to seek financial rewards from smuggling drugs and contraband into corrections facilities.
Conventional Screening Methods Don’t Get the Job Done
Despite these conditions and challenges, it is still surprising that most correctional facilities aren’t better equipped to detect drugs in the mail. Why does this problem still exist, and how are so many drugs still getting in?
The answer lies in the fact that most, if not all, mail-screening approaches and technologies in place today simply can’t keep up with the new ways criminals are smuggling drugs and illicit substances into these facilities.
Once accepted as the best way to detect mail-based threats, the following mail-screening technologies and techniques are extremely limited in their efficacy.
• Tactile inspections: Smuggled substances are now being sent in increasingly smaller quantities or on laced papers, making them difficult to detect by tactile inspections. Requiring staff to physically open and handle suspicious mail may put them in harm’s way and may violate the rights to privacy for privileged legal communications. All it takes is for one accidental exposure to cause an officer to become sick or worse.
• Photocopying or digitizing mail: Many corrections facilities use in-house teams or outsource mail screening to a third party to photocopy or scan mail contents before passing them on to inmates. However, this approach still exposes human screeners to potentially hazardous substances. It also raises concerns about incarcerated individuals’ rights, especially restrictions on copying or digitizing legal mail.
• X-ray screening: While X-ray scanners are effective at detecting objects such as weapons or explosives, they are unable to detect small amounts of powders, liquids, or suboxone strips as well as other drug-soaked papers.
• Canine units: Some facilities utilize drug-sniffing canine units to detect drugs with some success. However, the rapidly evolving nature of synthetic drug compounds, particularly new strains of K2 and K3, and the increased use of household chemicals, means those substances flood the market before the dogs can effectively be trained to detect them. Safety is also a concern, both for the dogs themselves and their handlers, for potential exposure to fentanyl and similar narcotics.
It all adds up to a system that wastes time and reduces staff productivity, but worse, contributes to substantial safety risk for inmates, officers, and corrections staff alike.
New Technology to Combat New and Emerging Smuggling Methods
Recent developments in imaging technology now enable corrections facilities to implement a solution that allows for mail inspection without the need to open letters and packages. New, terahertz (T-ray) screening systems enable corrections staff to “see inside,” without the need to open mail items to detect threats that X-rays, and other scanners can’t find, including small quantities of powders, liquids, electronics, contraband, and even drug-laced papers.
T-ray screening is safe for human operators, unlike X-rays which generate harmful radiation, making it possible to touch and interact with letters and packages while they’re being screened. Since it doesn’t generate harmful radiation, T-ray systems eliminate the need for specialized requirements such as radiation training, certifications, licensing, and safety programs.
T-rays are also 300 times more sensitive than X-rays to detect small quantities of powders, liquids, and other drugs. With T-ray screening, operators view a live, 4D video (3D plus motion) of an object, and can manipulate the item to gain different views in real-time. It’s life-like and instinctive, making the system very easy to use, and allowing for corrections staff to quickly become proficient with the system.
Leading correctional facilities are now beginning to adopt T-ray screening technology to simplify their mail inspection processes. Operators use T-ray systems to quickly screen objects to discern normal mail and packages from those that are abnormal. Because of the superior imaging capabilities, the number of abnormal exceptions is a small fraction of the items requiring further investigation. Normal items can be cleared with the screening system in a matter of seconds, and delivered to the inmate in their original, unopened packaging.
By significantly reducing the number of mail items flagged for secondary inspection, correctional staff spend less time handling and reviewing mail in the presence of incarcerated individuals. This accelerates mail processing times and minimizes direct interactions, reducing potential security risks and confrontations during screenings.
The Ideal Screening Process: Mirror Accepted Industry Best Practices
The blueprint for the best mail screening approach for correctional facilities is one that mirrors what every correctional facility already uses today to screen their email for viruses and cyberattacks.
Each day, hundreds of millions of emails are screened for cyber threats, and when a suspicious email is detected, it is held aside or quarantined for further inspection while normal, safe messages are routed directly to the recipient’s inbox. This process is highly effective, does not impede email delivery, and limits the scope of what IT needs to focus on to keep their networks, data, and infrastructure secure from a myriad of cyberattacks.
Physical mail-screening workflows should work in the same way. Facilities can use new T-ray screening technology to quickly process incoming unopened mail items. This process now allows normal safe mail items to be routed for immediate delivery directly to the incarcerated individual. Suspicious mail and packages can be flagged for quarantine and further inspection. By detecting contraband, drugs, and other illicit items within mail packages—without the need to open them—using T-ray screening, correctional facilities can improve both staff safety and detection effectiveness, while also maintaining privacy and confidentiality for legal mail and privileged communications.
Enhancing Safety with Advanced Screening Technology
Current mail-screening methods struggle to detect small quantities of drugs, laced papers, or other contraband, creating unsafe conditions for incarcerated individuals, corrections officers, and staff. Jails and other correctional facilities need proven technology as part of their mail security programs that reduce contraband, optimize resources, and preserve incarcerated individuals’ rights to receive mail and legal correspondence.
T-ray scanning solutions offer a faster, more effective way to overcome today’s mail-screening challenges. Widely used by leading state corrections departments, these systems streamline operations by enabling real-time inspection of unopened mail. This technology not only improves detection rates and saves time, but it successfully overcomes challenges posed by conventional screening methods, and as a result, enhances overall safety for staff, officers, and the entire facility.
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Alex Sappok, PhD, is the CEO of RaySecur, a company specializing in advanced security imaging technology. Before leading RaySecur, Sappok founded FST, Inc., an MIT spin-out focused on advanced RF sensing technology, which was later acquired by CTS Corporation (NYSE: CTS). He holds over a dozen patents and two R&D100 awards and has both S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, where he also held the Cummins-MIT Fellowship. Alex can be reached at alex@raysecur.com
References
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