Personal mail at the Butler County Prison is getting digitized.

Starting next month, all personal mail will be rerouted to a company in Texas, Securus, to be uploaded onto tablets for inmates to read. Currently, mail handling at the Butler County Prison can be a dangerous task for workers processing personal letters for inmates to provide them with photocopied versions of the original material.

Last year, several jail guards became sickened after being exposed to what jail officials confirmed was synthetic marijuana sprayed onto inmates’ mail.

“Any time we can reduce risk to our employees, the better,” Warden Joe DeMore said. “I’m all for that. It’s just a safety thing for us.”

DeMore noted that, unlike state prisons, the county jail never interfered, perused or withheld any dispatches between inmates and their lawyers. Legal mail, DeMore said, is protected by the attorney-client privilege, a rule that ensures privacy between a lawyer and their client.