Mail and Photos at Fishkill Correctional Facility

Use the Right Address

Fishkill publishes two, and only one of them takes mail for an incarcerated person.

[Full Legal Name, DIN]
Fishkill Correctional Facility
271 Matteawan Road
P.O. Box 1245
Beacon, NY 12508

18 Strack Drive is the prison’s street address. It is what a map gives you, it is what the facility page leads with, and it is where you drive for a visit. It is not where a letter goes.

The DIN matters as much as the name. Directive 4422 has staff check, before opening anything, that the addressee can be accurately identified and is currently at the facility. A letter with a name and no number, addressed to a common surname, is a letter that may not get where it is going.

Your own return address goes in the top left corner. This is a requirement, not a courtesy.

What Happens to It

Incoming mail is opened and inspected at Fishkill by Fishkill staff, looking for cash, checks, money orders, printed or photocopied material over the limit, and contraband.

That inspection is the whole of the process. Nothing is scanned, photocopied or digitised, and no third-party vendor handles it. In a growing number of states a posted letter is opened in another state by a contractor and delivered as an image on a tablet; in New York the paper itself still arrives.

It is worth saying plainly because it changes what is worth sending. A child’s drawing sent to Fishkill is a drawing when it gets there.

What Fishkill Sends Back

Item	Why
Polaroids and instant photographs	Prohibited outright
Postage stamps	Cannot be received from outside
Cash, checks, money orders	Returned to sender with a deposit slip
A letter written by someone else and enclosed	Third-party mail is not permitted, with an exception for children
More than five pages of printed or photocopied material	Over the limit
Nude or sexually explicit photographs	Prohibited

The five-page cap catches people out. Printouts, articles, court documents, anything photocopied: five pages. A longer document needs another route, and a book or magazine has to come from an approved vendor rather than from you.

Stamps are worth a second look. You cannot send them in, which means the person you are writing to has to have bought their own from commissary before they can write back. If letters have stopped coming from their side, an empty commissary account is a more likely reason than anything else.

Photographs, and What Survives the Post

Photographs are allowed and they arrive as photographs, which is not true everywhere.

The rules that apply: no Polaroids or instant film, nothing nude or sexually explicit. New York does not publish a numeric limit on how many photos can go in an envelope at Fishkill, so send a reasonable number rather than a stack.

Writing From Your Phone Instead

You can write and send from your phone through Pigeonly instead of finding an envelope, a printer and a stamp. Upload a letter or photographs, and they are printed and posted to the facility under Fishkill’s own mail rules.

The stamp point is not a slogan here. New York will not let you send stamps in, and a person with no commissary balance has no way to buy them. A letter that arrives without needing you to own a stamp book is worth something in a system built like that.

Packages Are Not Mail

Families treat these as the same thing and they are not, and getting it wrong wastes both the money and the parcel.

You cannot post a package to someone at Fishkill. New York moved to approved vendors only. A package must ship from a vendor by USPS, FedEx or UPS. Nothing can be brought to a visit either.

The statewide volume limits are three food packages a month, no more than 40 pounds combined, and two non-food packages a year from family or friends.

DOCCS publishes a disapproved vendor list rather than an approved one, which is the opposite of what most people expect. The check before you order is that your vendor is not on it.

Some units allow no packages at all. Shock incarceration, drug treatment, work release, CASAT and I-ASAT are excluded under Directive 4911, and Fishkill is also classified as a Work Release and Residential Treatment Facility, so confirm with the person before ordering anything.

Mail From a Lawyer or a Court

Correspondence from an attorney or a court is handled separately from ordinary post, and it is opened in the person’s presence rather than out of it.

For that protection to apply, the envelope has to show it is legal mail and identify the sender as someone entitled to send it. A letter from a law office in a plain envelope with no markings is treated as ordinary mail.

Gaps in the Mail Rules Here

• A numeric limit on photographs in a single envelope.
• A package room address for this facility.
• How long mail takes from arrival to delivery.
• Any facility-specific mail rule at all. Everything above is New York’s statewide policy, applied here.

Before You Post Anything

1. Confirm in the lookup that they are still at Fishkill.
2. Use 271 Matteawan Road, P.O. Box 1245, not Strack Drive.
3. Put the full name and DIN on it, and your return address top left.
4. Count printed pages, and stop at five.
5. Keep cash and money orders out of the envelope entirely.