this is a big story: biden admin is beginning to end physical mail for federal prisoners. there's a lot more to this, and it's a story of corporate profiteering off human caging (1) https://www.smartcommunications.us/mailguard.cfm 

the multi-billion $$ prison profiteering industry has long viewed mail as one of the last untapped cash cows. their plan? end all physical mail so that they can charge $$$ for tablets, scanning, and surveillance of mail into jails/prisons. (2) https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2015/jul/7/companies-pitch-tablets-prisoners-maintain-family-ties-aid-reentry-and-generate-profit/

this industry is barbaric. it has privatized medical care, food, phone calls, prison labor, and virtually every other aspect of US mass human caging for profit. learn more about the industry here: https://worthrises.org/courseintroduction

Update: we are hoping that a journalist will pick the mail story up and look into it more. from what we can tell so far: Biden admin transition team chose to keep this trump pilot program to begin end physical mail in BOP, as is already happening in cruelest state prisons

it was probably easiest for biden transition team to keep the company's contract: these companies are powerful, BOP wants to surveil prisoner mail, they don't care about families and prisoners, and b/c not enough people hold them accountable politically for this.

our staff still being barred from sending physical mail to a BOP institution and forced to send to this company--appears that BOP allows wardens to opt into or out of pilot program

we are all so desensitized to this stuff that we don't even recognize that, in a reasonable world, biden transition would have immediately announced investigation and end to this profiteering instead of quietly continued the contract that allows wardens to expand it.

keep in mind: biden issued very mild (insufficient) order re: private prisons but didn't touch all of the rampant profiteering inside and related to *public* prisons.