Queensland wants to expand its power to scan legally privileged mail sent to people in prison, and to do it without creating a record that the search ever occurred.
Buried inside the Protecting Queenslanders from Dangerous Prisoners and Strengthening Victims’ Rights Amendment Bill 2026 is an amendment authorising corrective services officers to electronically scan privileged, or supposedly privileged, correspondence.
Privileged mail can include communication with lawyers, courts and oversight agencies. It exists precisely because people must be able to communicate confidentially with those capable of advising them, representing them or investigating the institution holding them.
The government says the scanners will be incapable of reading the written contents of correspondence. It says they will be used to identify dangerous or prohibited objects and may reduce the need for officers to open mail manually. However, the Bill also provides that electronic scans will not need to be entered in the existing register of searches of privileged mail.
That should immediately raise suspicion.
If the practice is safe, limited and legitimate, why must it be made less visible? Why should a physical search leave an audit trail while an electronic search disappears from the record?
The easier surveillance becomes, the stronger accountability should become. This Bill does the opposite.
Prison takes possession of every connection
Mail is not a minor administrative matter inside prison. It is one of the few ways people retain relationships with children, family, friends, lawyers, advocates and community.
When the state imprisons someone, it does not only control their body and movement. It places itself between that person and almost everyone they love.
A letter does not simply travel from one person to another. It passes through the institution. It can be delayed, inspected, photocopied, withheld, returned, interpreted or used as intelligence. The person writing it knows that somebody may be reading over their shoulder. The person receiving it knows that anything written might later be stripped of context and turned against them.
This changes what people are able to say.
An incarcerated person may avoid describing violence by officers because the complaint must pass through the institution they are complaining about. They may not tell their family how badly they are struggling because they fear intervention, punishment or placement in isolation. They may avoid writing intimately to a partner because prison staff can turn affection, sexuality and vulnerability into gossip or intelligence.
Prison surveillance does not merely observe communication. It disciplines it.
What happened to Kathleen Folbigg’s privacy?
The recent public excavation of Kathleen Folbigg’s relationships in prison demonstrates what can happen when the private lives of incarcerated women become available for institutional and media consumption.
Folbigg was wrongfully imprisoned for 20 years following the deaths of her four children. Her convictions were eventually quashed after scientific evidence created reasonable doubt about her guilt.
She has now spoken publicly about relationships she formed with women while imprisoned. She described these relationships as forms of connection developed in an artificial environment marked by isolation, uncertainty and the belief that she might never regain her freedom.
However, Folbigg did not suddenly decide, in a vacuum, that the public was entitled to an account of her sexuality and intimate relationships. She said that commentary about her prison life resurfaced after her marriage and that she wanted to correct the record.
RAD Faction understands that private inter-prison correspondence involving Folbigg and another incarcerated woman had been leaked or circulated beyond its intended recipients, contributing to the renewed discussion. The published media reporting does not clearly explain how information about these relationships originally entered public circulation.
That demands questions.
Who accessed the correspondence? Was it copied or retained? Who disclosed it? What protections applied to the other woman, who may not have consented to public exposure? Was any investigation undertaken? Does the prison system even maintain an adequate record capable of establishing who handled the material?
This is not prurient background detail. It is the story.
Even after the state wrongfully imprisoned Folbigg for two decades, her relationships, sexuality and survival strategies remained available to be pulled into public view. Her wrongful conviction was not enough. Her imprisonment was not enough. Her grief was not enough. The public was invited to inspect how she sought warmth and connection inside an institution designed to deprive her of both.
Folbigg’s private writing had already played an extraordinary role in her criminalisation. Her diaries were taken from their context and relied upon as evidence of guilt. Later, more than 130 pages of correspondence between Folbigg and a childhood friend were placed before the inquiry examining her convictions. The same written interiority once used to condemn her was revisited years later in the process of establishing that her convictions were unsafe.
Her experience shows why incarcerated people cannot assume their writing will remain theirs.
A private thought can become evidence. A letter can become intelligence. An intimate relationship can become a headline. Context can be removed while the institution retains the words.
Not all prison mail has the same legal status
There is an important legal distinction between Folbigg’s inter-prison correspondence and the privileged mail targeted by the Queensland Bill.
Correspondence between prisoners is generally monitored and does not receive the same protection as confidential communication with a lawyer, court or oversight body. The Queensland amendment is especially serious because it reaches correspondence that is supposed to receive heightened legal protection.
However, the distinction does not make the experiences unrelated. Both reveal the power imbalance created when the state controls the infrastructure of communication. Prison authorities decide what can be sent, how it will be inspected, what will be recorded and what happens when information is found. The person in prison has almost no control over what is copied, retained, inferred or circulated.
The government wants the public to focus on whether a scanner can technically read words printed on paper. That is far too narrow.
We need to know what the technology detects and records. Does it create or retain an image? Is metadata stored? Can scans be retrieved? Who can access them? How accurate is the equipment? What produces an alert? Can handwritten material, photographs, legal documents or enclosed objects become visible? Is the system connected to any broader intelligence database? How is information deleted? What prevents officers from using one form of scanning as the basis for a more intrusive search?
The Bill and its explanatory materials do not provide a sufficient accountability framework. They offer a legislative assurance that the device cannot read written contents while simultaneously removing the requirement to record each use.
We are being asked to trust both the machine and the institution operating it.
Prisons have not earned that trust.
Privilege means little without confidentiality
Legal professional privilege is not a courtesy offered to people the state considers deserving. It is essential to the administration of justice.
A person cannot obtain meaningful legal advice if they reasonably believe the prison may intercept or analyse communications with their lawyer. Nor can people safely report mistreatment if correspondence with an inspector, ombudsman or human rights body must move through an opaque institutional search process.
The chilling effect matters even when an officer never reads a single sentence.
If a prisoner believes their documents may be scanned by technology they do not understand, by officers who are not required to record the scan, they may withhold information. They may remove details about violence, sexual abuse, self-injury, medical neglect or misconduct. They may decide it is safer not to complain.
That silence benefits the institution.
The issue is therefore not only whether the scanner can read the text. It is whether people can communicate freely and confidentially with those positioned to challenge the prison’s power.
Surveillance without a record is power without accountability
The government says electronic scanning will make prison operations safer. “Safety” is the word prison systems use to end scrutiny rather than begin it.
Safety can justify almost anything behind a prison wall: strip searches, solitary confinement, restraints, mail interception, phone monitoring and restrictions on visits. Measures introduced as exceptional become routine. Technologies described as limited acquire new functions. Records are gathered for one purpose and later used for another.
There is no meaningful accountability without documentation.
Every scan of privileged correspondence should be recorded. The record should identify the legal authority, operator, equipment used, reason for the scan, outcome, information retained and any subsequent action. The person whose correspondence was scanned should ordinarily be notified. Records should be available to independent oversight bodies and subject to regular public reporting.
There should also be strict prohibitions on copying, retention, secondary use and disclosure. Any unauthorised access or leaking of prison correspondence should attract serious consequences for the officials responsible, not punishment for the person whose privacy was violated.
Instead, Queensland proposes to make electronic surveillance less accountable than a physical search.
That is not a technical amendment. It is a deliberate transfer of power.
The state should not own our words
People in prison do not stop needing intimacy, family, legal advice or connection. Their letters are not raw material for institutional gossip, intelligence gathering or media spectacle.
The public often accepts prison surveillance because it has been taught that incarcerated people have forfeited privacy. However, a prison sentence is a deprivation of liberty. It should not be a licence for the state to possess every relationship, private thought and attempt to seek help.
Kathleen Folbigg’s experience shows the danger of written words being removed from the circumstances in which they were created and made available for the judgments of strangers. The proposed Queensland amendment expands the technological capacity of prisons to interfere with correspondence while reducing visibility over when that power is exercised.
We should not be debating whether unrecorded scanning is administratively convenient.
We should be asking why an institution with almost total control over people’s lives is being handed another invisible power.
Prison mail is not state property. Neither are the relationships, fears, grief, legal instructions and fragments of hope contained inside it.
