The cards and artwork that Maggie Luna’s children sent to her in prison helped her make it through her sentence. “It was one of the few things I had to look forward to,” she says.
Now new mail and visitation rules in Texas prisons could further restrict what little contact family members have with loved ones in lockup. On Tuesday, without much discussion, the Texas Board of Criminal Justice approved rule changes aimed at cracking down on contraband, including a ban on sending inmates greeting cards and expanding drug dog searches to visitors. As Luna, a policy fellow with the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, told the board during the meeting, “We’re concerned that the family members are going to suffer.”
Inmate family groups and civil rights advocates began to push back against the new rules when the Texas Department of Criminal Justice proposed them last month. In addition to citing the dubious reliability of drug-sniffing dogs, critics say the focus on visitors is misplaced: Contraband often flows behind bars through prison staff, and inmates are already searched before and after visits. Ahead of this week’s vote, more than a dozen organizations, including the Texas Civil Rights Project and the ACLU of Texas, signed a letter urging Texas Board of Criminal Justice Chairman Patrick O’Daniel to reconsider the changes, calling them “detrimental and counterproductive to the rehabilitation efforts of incarcerated individuals.”
