Civil liberties advocates are accusing the Alaska Department of Corrections of unconstitutionally limiting prisoners’ access to attorneys at the state’s only all-female prison. The American Civil Liberties Union of Alaska made the allegations in a letter to the department last month.
ACLU of Alaska Prison Project Director Megan Edge said her group hears from hundreds of inmates every month, but not uniformly.
“We always thought it was odd we weren’t hearing from many women,” Edge said in an interview. So Edge said the group did some digging.
“Through a variety of different investigations, what we started hearing from women was that they did not feel comfortable writing the ACLU of Alaska because of the Department of Corrections’ mail policies,” she said. “The Department of Corrections is scanning and reading every legal document that’s going through it.”
Department of Corrections policy prohibits mailroom staff from reading or searching legal mail marked “privileged,” including correspondence with the ACLU.
But Edge said staff at Hiland Mountain Correctional Center in Eagle River aren’t treating inmates’ letters to and from the ACLU as privileged communication.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held in 2014 that prison officials can inspect outgoing legal mail to ensure it doesn’t contain things like contraband, an escape plan or a map of a prison. But the ruling prohibits correctional officers from actually reading legal mail.
The ACLU raised the issue to the Department of Corrections last month in a six-page letter detailing a variety of other issues that the group said violate prisoners’ First Amendment right to free speech and Sixth Amendment right to counsel.
Edge said ACLU staff have also heard prison staff listening in on phone calls between clients and their attorneys. And she said prisoners have been ordered to keep the door to a visitation room open while meeting with attorneys.
In one case she called “alarming,” Edge said Hiland Mountain staff failed to delete confidential files from an inmate’s criminal case from a shared computer, allowing other prisoners and correctional officers to see them.
“These are details that are sometimes the most private details of somebody’s life,” she said. “It’s a dangerous situation for a variety of reasons, and that’s why discovery is supposed to remain confidential until it is allowed to be introduced as evidence in a court proceeding.”
According to the ACLU, the woman later received a letter from a senior Corrections Department official acknowledging the error. But the department did not outline steps to prevent it from happening again.
Asked for a response to the ACLU’s allegations, Department of Corrections spokesperson Betsy Holley said she had shared the letter with DOC Commissioner Jen Winkelman and the superintendent for Hiland Mountain, Brandon Jones. She said “matters requiring attention were addressed,” but did not respond to subsequent questions asking what was addressed, and how.
Edge said it’s possible correctional officers aren’t familiar with prisoners’ rights to communicate with their attorneys and that simply educating staff could go a long way. But failing that, she said, the group will take “the appropriate next step to fix it.” She declined to say whether the group would sue.
Eric Stone covers state government, tracking the Alaska Legislature, state policy and its impact on all Alaskans. Reach him at estone@alaskapublic.org and follow him on X at @eriwinsto. Read more about Eric here.
