I am having great difficulty communicating with my clients in state prison under new policies that restrict lawyer-client communication. This is becoming a major problem. What can I do?
Samuel C. Stretton.
Yes, it appears it is a major problem. This writer over the last four or five weeks has received maybe 20 or 30 more returned letters from the state correctional institutions. The envelopes are open and it has a form letter stating “the enclosed correspondence is the original legal correspondence sent by you to the address. Under the DOC policy, that was in effect at the time, the correspondence was opened in the presence of the addressee and copied. Copies were provided to the addressee and the resealed original was retained for confidential destruction. The addressee subsequently requested that the original be returned to the sender instead of being destroyed.”
