NEW ALBANY, Ind. (WDRB) -- Southern Indiana jails are taking their inmate mail digital.
Starting June 7, Floyd County inmates will begin receiving most mail digitally instead of through traditional paper letters.
"Some of our decisions (behind going digital) are the drugs that are mailed into the jail," Floyd County Jail Commander Capt. David Furman said. "We frequently got paper that was soaked in some sort of narcotic or glued to books."
Furman said beginning in June, letters sent to Floyd County inmates must be mailed to a third party company in Missouri and be addressed as:
Inmate name and jail name number
C/O Securus Digital Mail Center - Floyd County Jail
P.O. Box 588
Lebanon, MO 65536
This change does not impact legal mail from attorneys or the court system. These types of mail, along with money orders, will continue to be accepted at the jail.
Aside of issues with drugs trying to be brought in, Furman said he believes going digital will cut back on time his staff uses now to inspect every piece of mail that comes in. The mail sent to Missouri will be inspected, scanned and then digitally sent to Floyd County inmates.
Furman said inmates were issued tablets this week to receive the digital mail.
Tablets at the Floyd County Jail can be used for inmates to access digital mail.
"There's no cost associated to the inmates or the county," Furman said. "We have a partnership with Securus Technologies, which provides our phone service. That contract was already there. That relationship was already there. What they did was acquired a company that offers this digital mail service, so it was another product that they offered. So no additional cost to us, it's just a service that an existing contract provides."
Across southern Indiana, the Clark County Jail switched to digital mail for inmates in March 2020.
"The main reason is we are constantly combatting people trying to enter drugs into our facility through the mail," Clark County Chief Deputy Scottie Maples said.
Instead of using a third party company, mail sent to Clark County inmates is still addressed to the jail and scanned in-house.
"The last two criminal cases we filed were people trying to send fake legal mail into the facility that we were able to catch," Maples said.
He said people attempting to smuggle drugs into jails is nothing new, but the way it's happening continues to change.
"They've got these synthetic substances that they'll soak papers with that are odorless. You really can't tell the paper's been saturated, so it's really hard to combat," Maples said. "So it takes measures like removing all the paper that comes into your jail that you can."
Inmates at both jails are still able to send paper mail out of the the jail.
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