Incoming letters from the states we serve (AZ, AR, FL, IA, IN, KS, KY, MN, MO, ND ,NE, OH, OK, SD, TN, WI) at Pages are sorted as follows:
- Letters from women and juvenile inmates, as well as those in jails (identifiable by a lack of DOC# or stamped with "X County Jail"), are separated and placed at the front of the inbox (just behind the Looked up until here separator).
- Letters directed to a particular volunteer should be separated out. If you recognize the volunteer's name, or the monitor recognizes it, remove the letter and put it in the personal letters binder. Otherwise, cross out the volunteer's name on the envelope and keep the letter with the others.
- Keep your eye out for letters that seem to be from other organizations rather than inmate requests. Pull these out and ask the monitor what to do with them.
- The remainder are sorted by date and placed in the back of the inbox.
Requests from states we no longer serve are counted and recycled, as we do not have the resources to reply to them all. (Prisoner resource guides which feature MWPPP have been updated to list the states we no longer serve, but this information has taken a while to disseminate.)
The simplest pre-sorting that could be done is to separate letters from the states we no longer serve. If time is short, a very simple rule of thumb that catches most of them is: we don't serve any state that touches an ocean except Florida.
submitted on Wed, 2009-02-25 03:54
