Mail and Photos at MDC Brooklyn

The Post Office Box, Not the Street

[Full Name, Register Number]
Metropolitan Detention Center
P.O. Box 329002
Brooklyn, NY 11232

Not 80 29th Street. That is the building you visit. Inmate mail goes to the post office box.

A second box exists for a narrow purpose: P.O. Box 329001 is the Health Services Administrator’s, used for prescription eyeglasses sent by an attorney. Nothing else goes there.

The register number belongs on the envelope next to the name. Write it as the locator shows it, with the dash, on mail. The undashed form is only for money transfers.

The Photocopier Step

The Bureau’s own wording, from the November 2025 attorney guide: all general correspondence will be photocopied, and the person will only be provided the photocopy. The Admission and Orientation handbook adds that greeting cards are included.

So the sequence is: you post it, the mailroom copies it, the person receives the copy, and the thing you actually sent does not reach them.

This is worth absorbing rather than skimming. A birthday card is delivered as a photocopy of a birthday card. A child’s drawing is delivered as a photocopy of a drawing.

Special mail is the exception. Properly marked legal mail is not photocopied, and is opened in the person’s presence.

Why Mail Gets Rejected Here

The rules are unusually specific about physical materials, because the photocopier is the constraint.

Rejected	Note
Non-white envelopes or paper	White only, both
Card stock	Rejected outright, even though cards themselves are copied
Glitter, stickers	Common cause of rejection
Lipstick marks	Including a kiss on the paper
Crayon or marker	Which rules out most young children’s drawings as sent
Perfume or fragrance spray	Any scent
Stains, oily substances	Including food marks
Postage stamps or stamped items	Cannot be received at all, treated as contraband

The stamp rule deserves its own line. Federal regulation bars a person from receiving stamps from outside; they may only be issued by the institution or bought from commissary. So enclosing stamps so they can write back does not help them, it creates a contraband problem.

Books, magazines and newspapers fall under the publisher-only rule and must be shipped directly by a publisher or a recognised retailer, never posted by you.

Packages need prior authorisation. Anything sent by FedEx or UPS goes to the warehouse rather than the mailroom and is slower than ordinary post, which is the opposite of what people expect when they pay for a courier.

Mail runs Monday to Friday. No weekend or holiday processing.

Photographs Under the Copy Rule

Allowed, within limits, and then copied like everything else.

• No Polaroids or other instant film.
• Nothing nude, partially nude, or depicting sexual acts.
• The Bureau publishes no numeric limit on how many photographs can go in one envelope at MDC Brooklyn, so send a reasonable number rather than a stack.

Because of the photocopy policy, a colour photograph posted here reaches the person as a copy of that photograph rather than as the print.

Sending Without Paper or Stamps

Through Pigeonly, you write or upload photographs from your phone and they are printed and posted to the facility under its own mail rules. No envelope to find, no printer, and no stamp to buy.

What that does and does not solve, stated honestly. The mailroom’s photocopy policy applies to what arrives however it was sent, and we have no basis for claiming otherwise. What it removes is everything on your side of the process: getting white paper and a white envelope, avoiding the marker and the glitter and the scented notepaper that get mail rejected, and the fact that you cannot enclose a stamp for a reply. For a family sending from a phone at eleven at night, that is most of the friction.

Legal and Special Mail

There is no separate address for legal mail here. What controls it is the marking.

The envelope must read “SPECIAL MAIL - OPEN ONLY IN THE PRESENCE OF THE INMATE”, and the sender has to identify themselves on the envelope as somebody entitled to invoke the protection.

The Bureau is pointed about one shortcut: using the title Esquire without any further indication of the sender’s occupation does not establish them as an attorney. A law office that marks an envelope carelessly has sent ordinary mail.

Attorneys can also use a legal depository box in the front lobby of the building.

What the Bureau Will Not Confirm Here

• A numeric limit on photographs per envelope.
• Whether the P.O. Box 329002 address has changed since 2021. It comes from the July 2021 handbook and is the only inmate mail address in any Bureau source, and the 329001 Health Services box on the live facility page uses the same numbering. A phone call to 718-840-4200 would confirm it.
• How long mail takes from arrival to delivery.

A Checklist for the Envelope

1. Check the locator. This building turns over 200 to 300 people a week.
2. Use P.O. Box 329002, not the street address.
3. White paper, white envelope, no card stock.
4. Nothing scented, glittered, stickered or written in crayon.
5. No stamps in the envelope, ever.
6. Name and register number on the outside, your return address top left.