Inmates at the Will County, Ill., Adult Detention Facility won a partial legal victory Monday, with a federal judge ruling that several of the jail's media and mail policies violate their civil rights, Courthouse News reports. U.S. District Judge LaShonda Hunt found the jail placed unconstitutional barriers on inmates' access to certain forms of media and mail sent from post office boxes. The judge allowed the jail's ban on "sexual and inappropriate material" to stand. "Having considered the arguments of the parties and the applicable law, the court finds that plaintiffs’ claims are justiciable, the Sexual and Inappropriate Content Policy is constitutional, but the Media Policy and the P.O. Box Policy are unconstitutional," Hunt wrote. A Will County inmate first sued the jail, located in the Chicago suburb of Joliet, on civil rights claims in 2017 after he was denied mail because of the jail's media restrictions. These included, among other rules, a ban on newspapers, internet printouts, social media materials and all mail from P.O. box return addresses.
The case gathered steam in federal court for nearly four years, eventually becoming a class action. In 2021, U.S. District Judge Andrea Wood certified a class of current and future Will County jail inmates affected by the same media rules. By that point, the inmates had expanded their claims to challenge unreasonable delays in the jail's mail processing and its ban on sexual content or other materials deemed inappropriate by staff. One inmate said the jail used the "inappropriate" rule to confiscate pictures of his wife; the inmate who originated the 2017 suit said in a separate filing he was unfairly denied a book on the history of tattoos based on the same rule. Judge Hunt used the "Turner test," based on the 1987 Supreme Court case Turner v. Safley, to evaluate the prisoners' claims. In Turner, the high court upheld restrictions on correspondence between inmates at a Missouri jail, but also found that inmates had a constitutional right to get married.