What happens to a letter you mail to Sacramento County Jail (digital scanning, rejection, and retention)
Mailing a letter to someone in Sacramento County Sheriff's custody works differently than you might expect. Your envelope goes to a Digital Mail Center, gets scanned, and arrives as a digital copy on the person's tablet—not as paper in their hands.
At Sacramento County Jail, incoming mail sent to the Digital Mail Center is sorted and scanned in full color. Instead of handing the original paper letter to your loved one, the jail uploads a digital copy to the eMessaging application on the incarcerated person’s tablet.
The Digital Mail Center aims to upload mail within 48 hours of receipt (weekends and holidays don't count). Want your letter processed without delays? Include the incarcerated person's X-Reference number and housing location on the envelope. The Main Jail houses a large population, and missing details slow down the matching process.
Tip: Put the incarcerated person’s X-Reference number and housing location on everything you mail to the Main Jail. It’s one of the simplest ways to prevent delays.
Once received, your mail gets inspected. If anything violates facility rules - the letter's content or something you included with it - the jail can reject the entire submission. That means your letter and all photos go together. The incarcerated person will be told why it was rejected.
Warning: Rejection isn’t “partial.” If something in the envelope violates the rules, the whole letter and all photos can be rejected.
Your loved one gets a digital copy, but what happens to the actual paper? The Digital Mail Center holds physical mail for 30 days, then destroys it. If you want it back, include a self-addressed, stamped envelope.
- ✓ Include a self-addressed, stamped envelope (SASE) if you want the physical letter returned.
- ✓ If you don’t include a SASE, expect the physical mail to be held for 30 days and then destroyed.
Mail access can also be affected by discipline. If someone is on discipline for violating correspondence regulations, their mail privileges may be suspended for up to 72 hours.
If the person you're writing to gets released or transferred, they don't keep access to their digital mail forever. They have 60 days to log into the SECURUS Digital Mail Center and download everything - after that, it's permanently deleted. To access it, they'll need their x-reference number and the password they created while setting up the Digital Mail Center on their tablet during custody.
Reminder: After release or transfer, download digital mail within 60 days using the x-reference number and the password created in custody. After that deadline, remaining mail is permanently deleted.
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