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At prison's aging post office, mail's the only thing that routinely gets out

By JIM SUHR
The Associated Press

Wednesday, September 21, 2005 6:46 AM CDT

CHESTER - After dutifully doing time for well more than a century in this Mississippi River town, a tiny post office tucked behind a maximum-security prison's walls - perhaps the only such site in America - again is helping the mail get out.

The post office dating to 1884 inside the Menard Correctional Center reopened Saturday after a two-month effort to replace its lone worker.

Open a couple of hours in the morning and afternoon, the post office handles mail for the 3,450 inmates and 860 employees at Menard, a 127-year-old prison about 60 miles southeast of St. Louis that is the state's oldest still in use.

"It's a unique post office," said Larry Lankheit, a U.S. Postal Service manager of postal operations for Southern Illinois.

Not accessible to people off the street, the post office is "basically a one-customer office, even though that one customer is large," he said.

The operation isn't much. Barely the size of a big bedroom, the post office is part of the prison's administration building and has a safe, a sorting table and a filing cabinet, postal officials said. It sells stamps and money orders to employees and inmates who are allowed to enter the post office when they are supervised, Lankheit said.

The post office handles a few thousand pieces of mail daily and is the inmates' "only link to the outside," Lankheit said.

The Menard post office's roots reach to a time when mail delivery often was handled by railroad, with crews actually sorting letters and packages in boxcars - sometimes for up to 1,000 different towns and ports - as the trains rolled, said Nancy Pope, a historian with the Smithsonian Institution's National Postal Museum.

"It's is something you'd see in the early 1900s," Chester Postmaster Tony Hughes said of the prison post office. "It hasn't changed any. It's really an eerie looking place."

Lankheit and Hughes said the post office may be the nation's only one behind a prison's walls; Pope said she's unaware of any research done on post offices behind bars.

"It's an unusual topic," she said.

Still, Lankheit said he wouldn't mind seeing the post office quietly phased out.

"We just like to have a post office that serves more customers than that one serves," he said. "But with the laws on the books, we have to have a good reason to close it, and I don't."