It was brought to our attention yesterday that at least 3 of the letters that we have sent to Wes on your behalf were rejected by the employees of Valley Street jail in Manchester, New Hampshire, because they were "sent by third party." This news comes from a liberty activist who got this information straight from Wes while visiting him in jail (apparently the prison employees told Wes that they were rejecting 3 of his letters).

We always put your name and mailing address on the envelopes (if you provide them - if not, we put "John Smith" and use our own mailing address). We're not sure which letters were rejected, probably because they were either thrown away by prison employees or did indeed have your name and address on the envelope and were returned by US post office to you and we were not informed. Why would the jail reject letters with people's names on the envelopes as being sent from a third party? The Mail-to-Jail logo is on the envelope, and one possibility is that their arbitrary, bullying actions were predicated on merely seeing something they did not like (i.e., that the letters were in some way associated with an organization that supports liberty activists). Why should it matter whether a third party sends letters anyway? Jails require third parties to send books to prisoners, and other third parties to put money into prisoners' commissary and phone accounts.

Mail-to-Jail has experienced this once before - also at Valley Street jail. Our response then was to begin using the sender's return address instead of Mail-to-Jail's, and it apparently worked until recently. We also sent a communication to the warden* of the jail seeking resolution but we never got a response.

This time, we were informed by a liberty-friendly lawyer that such censoring of and tampering with mail by jail employees is illegal, and we are considering pursuing this through government's "justice" system in the hopes that jail employees will abide by a judge's decision to cease censoring mail.

We will keep you apprised of the situation.

Thank you for supporting liberty activists!

* Valley Street jail's website informed us to email a particular bureaucrat regarding such issues as mail blockage, but we no longer remember who we contacted, and currently their website is down.