A new freedom of information battle is brewing over prison inmates’ access to free copies of public documents.
The state Freedom of Information Commission has voided a prison policy that requires inmates to pay for copies of documents. Prison officials are appealing, saying the ruling undermines their need to control inmates’ access to documents and will prompt a flood of frivolous requests for paperwork.
Richard Quint, an inmate at Northern Correctional Institute, had requested documents about prison food and received 549 pages and a bill for $137.25, or 25 cents a page, as called for in the Department of Correction’s copying fee.
Quint, who is serving a five-year sentence for violating a protective order, said he is indigent and should not be required to pay.
The state Freedom of Information Commission agreed and in June voided a policy the Department of Correction uses to determine if inmates are indigent.
The Freedom of Information Commission allows public agencies to set standards of indigence if each standard is fair, objective and reasonable and is applied in a nondiscriminatory manner. The Department of Correction’s policy failed those standards, the commission said.
In a brief to the Freedom of Information Commission, Sandra Sharr, a lawyer for the Department of Correction, rejected Quint’s claim that he is indigent. The state spends more than $27,000 a year in housing, food, clothing and other costs for each inmate, which is more than double the poverty line, she wrote in a brief.
The commission ordered the Department of Correction to apply the same indigence standard to prisoners as it does to the general public. It said the cost of incarceration could not be counted as a prisoner’s asset in figuring his or her qualifications.
The Department of Correction adopted a policy in 2006 that defines an inmate as indigent if he or she has an account balance of $5 or less for the previous 90 days. Copies will be provided to those inmates, but 20 percent of any money they receive in the future will go toward the copying fee.
Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said in a statement Wednesday that prisoners’ requests for documents, which are funded by Connecticut taxpayers, have increased tremendously since 2004 and “frequently appear to be intended to manipulate and game the system with frivolous document searches.”
Inmates with valid requests are not denied documents and should not get free copies when the public is required to pay, he said.
