Sending an Inmate a Care Package

Each individual, whether or not they are a citizen of the United States, is bestowed with certain rights that can never be taken away from them, according to the US constitution. This also applies to offenders in prison and temporary detention facilities. Among them is the privilege of receiving mail and care packages.

Most prisons let relatives and friends send loved ones in prison certain items that the offender may need during their rehabilitation process. These items are regarded as inmate care packages.

However, the constitution does not influence the prison where the inmate is incarcerated issue these rights and freedoms unless the prison or the state department of correction defiles the inmate’s Eighth Amendment. Ideally, prisons have been using these rights to control how inmates behave.

Considerations to make before you can send a care package to an inmate

Each prison has its own policies to guide the sending of inmate care packages. In addition, this will differ with states as some items that can be included in one prison in a state can be regarded as “prison contraband.”

To prevent unlawful items like narcotics or weapons from entering the prison, correctional facility officials and personnel will constantly inspect the contents of inmate care packages. Thus, to ensure that your inmate will get everything you send, it must be crucial for you to familiarize yourself with the rules and limitations of sending care packages to the inmate.

Before you can send anything to prison, you must know the following;

What to send as a care package
Where to send the care package
How to send it

What can you include in an inmate care package

When an inmate is arrested, denied bail, or cannot afford it, and charged and sentenced, they may be imprisoned without any preparation and gathering the essential things they may need in prison. At times, inmates are arrested at a certain age, body size, and weight. The clothes and shoes they were detained with can no longer fit them. In that case, they need new clothes and shoes on their release date.

However, the kind, amount, and time you can send these items differ with the prison system, state, or offender classification level. Nonetheless, most inmate care packages contain reading materials, medical prescriptions, clothes, shoes, money orders, pictures, letters, envelopes, and plain paper.

You can also send personal hygiene care packages containing toiletries such as tissue paper, toothpaste and toothbrush, soap, shampoo, and deodorant. Some prisons will allow inmates to own items like guitars, guitar picks, headphones, art supplies, iPods, cd players, mp3 players, and hand-held video games.

On the other, if your loved one is nursing, you can send an inmate care package containing children’s supplies such as toys, diapers, feeding bottles, new baby clothes, children reading materials, baby shampoo, and soaps.

In addition, some prison allows inmates to receive food supplies like seafood and tropical fruits.

To know what to send, you can check the official website of the prison where your inmate is incarcerated.

What not to send as a care package

You should be careful with what you send as in prison; there are people of different fears, phobias, ages, sexual orientations, and races. For instance, if you send reading material, you should be careful with the content of the books or magazines.

Do not send any material that contains any form of discrimination against any person of gender, race, sexual orientation, or ethnicity.
In addition, do not send materials that may promote or condone violence.
Inmates in prison share some items they receive as a care package, especially books, and food.
Do not send any foods containing specific allergens per the prison’s guidelines.

Where to send the care package

You need to know where and to whom you send the care package. Inmates may be incarcerated in county jails, state prisons, federal detention facilities, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities, which means you will need the prison’s official physical or mailing address.

In addition, you will require the inmate’s information, such as their names, prisoner ID, gender, offender level, housing unit, and race.

To know all the above information, you may run a quick inmate search to determine the information about the inmate and the prison where they are incarcerated. You can access this information as inmate and jail records are public records in the United States, per the Freedom of Information Act and the Public Records Acts.

You can perform an inmate search using the following:

The inmate’s names
Inmate’s arrest or incarceration date
Prisoner number or ID
Prison search
The physical description using the advanced inmate search options

How to send the inmate care package

Knowing how to send a care package to your inmate is guided by the set rules and regulations of the prison your loved one is incarcerated in. To understand these guidelines, you need to contact the correctional facility where the inmate is. You may get in touch with the prison:

Online via their official website
By phone
Through Fax
Email
Visiting the prison in person

Different corrections organizations establish different rules regarding the quantity and frequency of care packages that prisoners may receive. Inmates who qualify for care packages, often those with the lowest danger and exhibit excellent behavior, may get them once every three months in certain prisons; weekly deliveries are permitted in others, especially nursing prisoners.

In addition, most prisons will not allow you to hand-deliver the inmate care package to the inmate in prison or the jail lobby. This is true, especially for adult incarceration facilities at the state and federal levels. The main reason why prisons discourage this mode of delivery is to reduce the amount of prison contraband that passes through the gate walls.

How to ensure your inmate receives the care package?

There are several companies and approved vendors that you can utilize to ensure that an inmate receives what you have sent them. Some of these vendors and companies include:

Note that different states, departments of corrections, and county jails may have their specific approved inmate care package vendor where you can place an order. Ensure you inquire about the companies the prison has authorized to handle inmate care packages.

How to Place an Order for a Prisoner’s Care Package

You may utilize your local care package vendor or the one the prison offers. You may create an account either:

A credit account where the vendor may be sending the same number of items to the inmate quarterly and charge you before they can be delivered; or,
A debit account, where they send the inmate the items, and they can charge your account when there is money.

Nonetheless, you may add or deduce items as per the property order request sent to you by the inmate. However, some prisons allow you to randomly send these items without being requested. Besides, if the inmate can receive the care packages, it is only about the number of things they may receive afterward.

To ensure the inmate receives these items, you need to contact the jail or prison where the inmate is to ensure that the inmate will receive these items before you can place an order. The United States Postal Service (USPS) handles all mail to US Prisons.

Some of these vendors, such as Access Securepak, deliver religious items and supplies such as the Bible, rosary beads, and necklaces. Some have their own programs, such as the “Heat and Eat” program package offered by iCare. You can also send inmates cooked hot food through iCare.

Companies frequently provide their services to correctional institutions in exchange for a cut of their revenues.

Acceptance of postal packages

For you to send a care package, your prisoner must fill out and submit a property request form. This form contains all the items they want you to send them. The request form is then sent to the prison warden or any relevant authority, such as the jail administrator or the prison manager, for review and approval.

If the request is approved, it will be sent back to the prisoner, who must then send it to you so that you can start organizing the items they requested.

For the care package to be received in prison and be given to the inmate:

The parcel delivered to the prisoner must include the property request form the prison manager approved.
The items in the package must correspond to those listed on the authorized form.
Gift-wrapped items are not permitted, and correctional personnel will open and scan all deliveries.

If the items in the parcel do not correspond with those on the property request form or do not comply with the prison property rules, the same procedures that apply to the excess property will be followed:

The jail may mail back the excessive property or dispose of it if it contains items that may spoil within days.
The inmate may receive the items but be forced to return them as mail and incur the mailing charges.
The parcel may be destroyed if the package contains narcotics or other materials that violate Act of 1982.

Limitations of sending an inmate care package

The timeframes are stringent and require care as the items you send to your inmate may never be delivered until the right time the inmate can receive the item. Since receiving care packages in prison is a privilege like other in-prison privileges prison administrations utilize to keep inmates in shape, the prison may suspend an inmate care package delivery for some time.

The weight, cost, and number of items in a package can all constitute restrictions. Facilities frequently prohibit packages weighing more than 30 pounds.

The number of items in the package is frequently capped; in some prisons, it’s $50 weekly, while in others, it’s $150 every three months. Additionally, the number of goods may be limited.

Family members also complain that they frequently have to pay for basic that the jail should provide for their loved ones. Another concern is the prices of these basic necessities. According to relatives, certain items in catalogs that prisons have authorized cost more than they would at a store. These variations result from the unique contracts that correctional agencies and their contractors negotiate.

In some regions, pricing standards demand that prices stay within 10% of the current selling price and utilize the fair market price of an item as a baseline.

What if the inmate did not receive the care package?

The United States Postal Service (USPS) sends all care packages to the prisons. Even though the company has a highly accurate system to process each of the 6,000 parcels and envelopes processed every second, the mail is too much to handle, and sometimes the parcel can go missing.

For instance:

The mailing label or address may have come off
the address may not be legible enough for the post office computers to read.
Some details may be missing from the envelope
Sorting errors may happen either manually or electronically

However, you can still recover the mail, depending on how your shipment was dispatched, through retrieving it.

When the parcel cannot be traced back to the address required, these items are delivered to the Mail Recovery Centers within the postal office where they were posted.

The postal office must scan the parcel at these centers to determine its worth. Sometimes, they may open the mail to try and recover the mailing or recipient address, and if they cannot find any, they provide a grace period of six months where the owner may try and come to recover it.

Getting Your Lost Package Back

You must visit your local post office and request to fill out a lost package form if you wish to try to retrieve your missing parcel. You’ll need both phone numbers, addresses, the recipient’s name, and the destination address (if possible). The postal service will manually search its Mail Recovery Centers once you complete your form to locate your shipment.