REDWOOD CITY — San Mateo County is being sued again over its jail mail system, this time by civil rights advocates and a high-powered legal coalition alleging that it violates the privacy and human rights of a vulnerable jail population reliant on physical mail as a lifeline during incarceration.
Letters and other paper correspondence is scanned electronically, reviewed for content, then entered into a system at the jail where it can be viewed with vendor-provided tablets. The actual paper material is shredded after 30 days, but electronic records are retained for at least seven years, according to the contract.
Approved and instituted by the county in fall 2021 with little public fanfare — which critics attribute to the public policy fog of the pandemic — the MailGuard system was the subject of a lawsuit last fall by a group of criminal defense lawyers who alleged that the sheriff’s officelawsuit was later settled