And Now a Word From Our Sponsor – Update for July 28, 2025

We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.

NEWSLETTERS HANGING BY A THREAD

I’ve been writing the LISA Newsletter for nine years and seven months now. Whether I will make it to 10 years is anyone’s guess.

Back in the day, the Federal Bureau of Prisons provided inmates with the weekly BNA Criminal Law Reporter, first in print in the facility law libraries and later on inmate computers. Bloomberg acquired BNA in 2011, and the CLR ceased publication seven years later. As I recall (and my memory may be faulty, as my wife will attest), the BOP dropped CLR in about 2015 or 2016 when Bloomberg jacked up the subscription fee).

Any number of legal newsletters from law firms, paralegal services, and advocacy organizations have popped up in the last decade, chiefly because inmate email made distribution inexpensive and quick. LISA’s was one of them. None of us had the staff and resources of Bloomberg BNA, but then no one was charging for the service, either. The newsletters filled a void.

I sent the first LISA weekly newsletter out on November 29, 2015, to 13 subscribers. That was about 502 newsletters ago. My subscriber count went up quickly, leveling off somewhere beyond 10,000 prisoners and another 500 people outside of prison.

The BOP Corrlinks system helped a lot. It was clunky, the kind of thing you would expect to find on a Commodore 64 running Windows 3.1 (circa 1992), but it allowed the formation of groups of up to 1,000 people per group.

Until the end of last September, I could distribute 12,000 newsletters on Sunday night in about 15 minutes, sending to 12 groups of 1,000 subscribers each. But then progress…

At that time, the BOP dramatically changed its Corrlinks program to only permit 10 prisoners in each group. The only way to send the newsletter was with an outside service that could dedicate computers to the task, automatically logging on and sending to group after group after group. Even with 2024 computing power, we could only send about 2,000 newsletters a day, and some were missed as the Corrlinks system would lock out accounts for hours if it detected that too many emails had been sent in a given period.

It was messy but survivable.

Then, two weeks ago, the BOP changed the Corrlinks system again. Now, no email may be sent to more than one inmate recipient at a time. This means that we would have to send over 10,000 emails each week in order to deliver the newsletter to everyone who wants it. Our delivery people at Contxts (gocontxt.com) – a great group who had been providing computer delivery services to LISA and other legal newsletters without charge while they perfected their inmate messaging system – had been delivering about 2,000 newsletters a day until last week. Under the new system, we were lucky to get more than 400 a day sent out without being locked, and even that effort required substantial computer resources.

Last Thursday night, Contxts reluctantly informed us that newsletter delivery was soaking up a lot of resources for a frustratingly small throughput of newsletters. return. The company could no longer provide the newsletter distribution service.

For now, I will continue to write the newsletter. I post it online every Sunday night and email it to about 500 people outside of the BOP system. If you want your people to forward you the email, have them send a request to newsletter@lisa-legalinfo.com or cut and paste right from the LISA website at http://www.lisa-legalinfo.com.

We are working on finding a way to deliver the newsletter again. Printing and mailing the newsletter costs well over $1.50 per mailing, and that does not include the cost of labor. Email delivery is essential to the future of the newsletter.

~ Thomas L. Root