Inmate Manuscripts

By Elizabeth Franklin-Best, Esq., and Christopher Zoukis, JD, MBA

Program Statement	5350.27
Subject	Inmate Manuscripts
Current edition	July 27, 1999
Change notices	None
Supersedes	Rescinds PS 5350.07, Inmate Manuscripts (7/16/79)
Governing regulation	28 C.F.R. part 551, subpart H — §§ 551.80–551.83
Governing statute	None cited in the Program Statement
Related BP forms	None named in the Program Statement
Official PDF	https://www.bop.gov/policy/progstat/5350_027.pdf

Checked against the BOP policy set · 2026-09-07 · How we verify

A person in federal prison may write a manuscript — fiction, nonfiction, poetry, music, drawings — without asking staff for permission, and may mail it out as ordinary correspondence. That is the whole of the rule, and it is shorter than almost any other in the Bureau’s policy set; for how mail moves in and out generally, see writing to someone in federal prison and inmate correspondence policy.

The catch is not in this policy. It is in what the manuscript rule does not displace: the mail-rejection grounds in 28 C.F.R. § 540.14, the prohibition on running a business from inside, the personal-property limits, and — for anything aimed at the news media — 28 C.F.R. § 540.20. Most of what people call a “manuscript problem” is actually one of those. This page covers all of them, and it covers the one part of this area that genuinely changed: the Bureau’s byline prohibition was struck down as unconstitutional in 2007 and formally removed from the Code in 2010.

A Program Statement is agency policy; the regulation is what binds. PS 5350.27 states its own typographic key on p. 1 — “[Bracketed Bold – Rules] / Regular Type – Implementing Information” — so in this document, bracketed text is verbatim regulation and unbracketed text is the Bureau instructing its staff. Every bracketed passage below has been checked independently against the current text on eCFR.

The rule itself: manuscripts

The whole of 28 C.F.R. part 551, subpart H, as the Bureau reproduces it and as it reads today:

6. [DEFINITION. §551.80. As used in this rule, “manuscript” means fiction, nonfiction, poetry, music and lyrics, drawings and cartoons, and other writings of a similar nature.

7. [MANUSCRIPT PREPARATION §551.81. An inmate may prepare a manuscript for private use or for publication while in custody without staff approval. The inmate may use only non-work time to prepare a manuscript.]

8. [MAILING INMATE MANUSCRIPTS §551.82. An inmate may mail a manuscript as general correspondence, in accordance with Part 540, Subpart B of this chapter. An inmate may not circulate his manuscript within the institution.]

Part 540, Subpart B refers to the Program Statement on Correspondence.

9. [LIMITATIONS ON AN INMATE’S ACCUMULATION OF MANUSCRIPT MATERIAL §551.83. The Warden may limit, for housekeeping, fire-prevention, or security reasons, the amount of accumulated inmate manuscript material.]

The Warden may choose to address the issue of accumulation of inmate manuscripts in the Institution Supplement on Inmate Personal Property.

Reproduced from Program Statement 5350.27 at p. 2. Each bracketed rule verified against the current text at § 551.80, § 551.81, § 551.82 and § 551.83 — no divergence. The Program Statement opens a bracket at §551.80 that it never closes before §551.81’s begins; that is a typesetting defect in the 1999 PDF, not a change in the rule.

The Program Statement’s stated purpose, at p. 1, is “To encourage inmates to use their leisure time for creative writing and to permit the direct mailing of all manuscripts as ordinary correspondence,” and its Program Objective is that “Inmates will be afforded the opportunity to write and mail manuscripts for publication.”

What those four sentences actually give you, and what they do not

The rule says	So this is permitted	And this is not addressed here
§551.80 — “manuscript” means fiction, nonfiction, poetry, music and lyrics, drawings and cartoons, and other writings of a similar nature	Almost any creative or expository writing, plus lyrics and visual work	Letters, legal filings, grievances — those run under other rules
§551.81 — may prepare “without staff approval”	No permission slip, no pre-approval, no submission for content review before you write	Whether the finished manuscript can be mailed — that is § 540.14
§551.81 — “only non-work time”	Writing on your own time	Writing on a work detail, or on institution equipment assigned for other purposes
§551.82 — “may mail a manuscript as general correspondence”	Sending it out through ordinary mail, subject to the general-correspondence rules	Special mail, legal mail, or media mail — different rules
§551.82 — “may not circulate his manuscript within the institution”	—	Passing copies to other people inside. This is the sentence people miss
§551.83 — Warden may limit accumulation	—	How much paper you may keep. That is a personal-property question, capped locally

Two features of this rule are worth saying plainly. First, the “no staff approval” language governs writing, not mailing. Nothing in subpart H suspends the Bureau’s authority to inspect and reject outgoing general correspondence. Second, § 551.82’s second sentence is a real prohibition with real consequences — circulating a manuscript inside the institution is not covered by the permission in the first sentence.

What the manuscript policy means for you

If you are the person inside: you do not need permission to write

You do not need permission to write. That is the plain effect of § 551.81, and it is the most under-used sentence in the Bureau’s policy set. What you do need is to keep three lines clear.

Non-work time. Section 551.81 limits preparation to non-work time. A manuscript written on a UNICOR shift or during a detail is a different problem from a manuscript written in the housing unit at night.

Out, not around. Section 551.82 permits mailing out and prohibits circulating inside. Handing a chapter to a friend on the compound, running it past a cellmate, or leaving copies in a common area is the conduct the second sentence reaches. If you want a reader, mail it to one.

Nothing that reads like a business. The manuscript rule does not override 28 C.F.R. § 540.14(d)(4), which lets the Warden reject correspondence containing “Direction of an inmate’s business,” and provides that “An inmate, unless a pre-trial detainee, may not direct a business while confined.” Running a publishing operation, negotiating contracts, directing sales — those are business activities regardless of the fact that the subject matter is your own book. In Reynolds v. Young, No. 5:20-cv-00753 (S.D. W. Va. Dec. 20, 2022), a magistrate judge’s proposed findings put it directly: “Although 28 C.F.R. § 551.81 and § 551.82 allow a prisoner to prepare a manuscript for private use or publication and mail it as general correspondence, those rules do not override the prohibition on directing a business.” The corresponding disciplinary charge is Prohibited Act 334 — “Conducting a business; conducting or directing an investment transaction without staff authorization” (PS 5270.09 at p. 53; 28 C.F.R. § 541.3).

The practical line most writers use is delegation: someone outside handles the business, and the writer handles the writing. Whether a particular arrangement stays on the right side of § 540.14(d)(4) is a judgment staff make case by case, and it is worth getting advice on rather than guessing.

If you are the family: you are the other end of the envelope

You are usually the person on the other end of the envelope, and there are two things to know.

If a manuscript is rejected, there is supposed to be a letter. 28 C.F.R. § 540.13 provides that “When correspondence is rejected, the Warden shall notify the sender in writing of the rejection and the reasons for the rejection,” and “shall also give notice that the sender may appeal the rejection.” An appeal must go “to an official other than the one who originally disapproved the correspondence.” Rejected correspondence is returned to the sender unless it contains plans for or discussion of a crime, or evidence of one, in which case there is no obligation to return it or give notice. Contraband is not returned either. Keep the letter; it is the document everything after it is built on.

Second, do not become the business. If you are receiving pages and helping get a book into the world, you are doing something useful and lawful. If the correspondence starts to read as your loved one directing that operation — pricing, contracts, instructions to vendors — the mail itself becomes rejectable under § 540.14(d)(4). It is a distinction worth being deliberate about before it is tested.

If you are counsel: manuscripts

Three things to have in front of you.

The byline prohibition is gone, and the reporter prohibition is not. That distinction is the whole of the modern law here, and it is set out under “What changed” below.

Section 540.14(d)(4) carries a broken cross-reference. It reads: “Direction of an inmate’s business (See § 541.13, Prohibited Act No. 408).” Section 541.13 was removed when 28 C.F.R. part 541 was rewritten, and in the current prohibited-acts table at § 541.3, Code 408 reads “(Not to be used).” The business prohibition is now Code 334. The regulation still points at a section number and a code that no longer exist — an editorial artifact, but one that will confuse anyone who follows the citation.

The Program Statement is twenty-seven years old and its cross-references are dead. PS 5350.27’s Directives Referenced list (p. 1) points to PS 5265.10 Correspondence (12/18/97), PS 5270.07 Inmate Discipline and Special Housing Units (12/29/87), PS 5580.05 Personal Property, Inmate (9/30/96) and PS 5800.10 Mail Management Manual (11/3/95). Every one of those has been superseded. The regulation it implements has not changed; the operating environment around it has changed completely.

Applied Insight — Christopher Zoukis, JD, MBA, Managing Director: When a manuscript problem comes to us, the first question is never “what does the manuscript rule say” — it is “which rule was actually applied.” Almost always the answer is § 540.14, not § 551.81. Once you know whether the objection was content, business activity, circulation inside, or accumulated paper, you know which route the remedy takes and what evidence it needs. Getting that wrong is how people spend three levels of administrative appeal arguing the wrong regulation.

Christopher Zoukis brings a perspective few federal defense professionals can: he served roughly a decade in the federal Bureau of Prisons, wrote award-winning journalism and books from inside, and then earned his J.D. at UC Davis School of Law.

What has not changed in PS 5350.27

Program Statement 5350.27 has not been reissued since July 27, 1999 — twenty-seven years. It was not part of the Bureau’s June 2026 mass reissue, and the four regulations it implements read today exactly as they did then. What moved was everything around them, and one piece of it moved decisively.

The byline rule was struck down, then repealed

Until 2007, 28 C.F.R. § 540.20(b) told federal prisoners that they “may not act as reporter or publish under a byline.” An identical byline clause sat in the visiting regulation at § 540.62(d). Together they meant a person in federal prison could write for publication but could not have their name on it.

In Jordan v. Pugh, 504 F. Supp. 2d 1109 (D. Colo. 2007), the court held that the byline prohibition violated the First Amendment. Its judgment did two things: it declared “that the language of 28 C.F.R. § 540.20(b), ‘The inmate may not … publish under a byline’, violates the First Amendment to the United States Constitution,” and it enjoined the Bureau “from punishing any inmate for violation of” that provision. The court reached that result by finding the regulation an exaggerated response to the interests the Bureau put forward: “The Byline Regulation discourages all outgoing news media correspondence, even that which could, but never does, result in a publication or a publication under a byline.” The court also held that the plaintiff had standing to challenge the byline clause — he had been punished under it twice — but not the separate prohibition on acting as a reporter, which he had never violated. (Prison regulations that burden constitutional rights are ordinarily measured against the four-factor reasonableness test of Turner v. Safley, 482 U.S. 78 (1987); the Jordan court applied both Turner and the stricter outgoing-correspondence standard and found the byline rule failed either way.)

The Bureau then did three things on the public record:

Date	Document	What it did
Nov. 27, 2007	Mandatory guidance to Bureau staff	Told staff that “an inmate’s publishing under a byline, by itself, can no longer support disciplinary action,” and that staff should not discipline under the identical clause in § 540.62(d) either
Apr. 23, 2010	Interim rule, 75 FR 21163	Deleted the byline prohibition from both § 540.20(b) and § 540.62(d)
Apr. 3, 2012	Final rule, 77 FR 19932, effective May 3, 2012	Finalized the interim rule “without change,” reproduced the Jordan holding in the preamble, and declined to remove the prohibition on acting as a reporter

The 2012 final rule is the most useful document in this area, because in it the Bureau explains where it thinks the line now sits. It notes that the Jordan holding “was limited to invalidation of the ‘byline’ language, not the ‘reporter’ language,” and that the court had referred to a Bureau Office of General Counsel memorandum of October 20, 2006 clarifying to staff that “acting as a reporter” means doing so “on a regular or repeated basis,” as opposed to a one-time publication under a byline. The Bureau’s stated reason for keeping the clause is that “regular, repeated, compensated activity as a reporter signifies that the inmate is conducting a business.”

So the current text of § 540.20(b), verified today, is two sentences: “The inmate may not receive compensation or anything of value for correspondence with the news media. The inmate may not act as reporter.” And § 540.62(d) reads: “An inmate currently confined in an institution may not be employed or act as a reporter.” No byline clause survives in either. See news media contact.

Everything else the 1999 policy points at has been replaced

PS 5350.27’s own cross-references — the Correspondence, Discipline, Personal Property and Mail Management statements it names at p. 1 — are all superseded editions from the 1980s and 1990s. The live versions are inmate correspondence, the Inmate Discipline Program, inmate personal property and mail management. The 1999 statement also eliminated the requirement for an Institution Supplement, which means there is no local written manuscript policy to ask for — the local rules that actually bite are in the personal-property supplement, where § 551.83 tells the Warden to put them.

Where people get stuck mailing a manuscript out

“I wrote it without approval, like the rule says — and they still stopped it.” Section 551.81 removes the need for approval to write. It says nothing about mailing. Outgoing general correspondence is governed by § 540.14, which permits the Warden to reject correspondence “determined detrimental to the security, good order, or discipline of the institution, to the protection of the public, or if it might facilitate criminal activity,” and lists eight non-exhaustive grounds — including matter that is nonmailable under law or postal regulations; matter that “depicts, describes, or encourages activities which may lead to the use of physical violence or group disruption”; escape plots or plans to commit illegal activity; direction of a business; threats, extortion, obscenity or gratuitous profanity; a code; sexually explicit material that “by its nature or content poses a threat to an individual’s personal safety or security, or to institution good order”; and contraband. Route: get the rejection letter required by § 540.13, then cop-out → BP-8 informal resolution → BP-9 to the warden → BP-10 to the region → BP-11 to the Office of National Inmate Appeals (Administrative Remedy Program).

“I let someone read a chapter and got a shot.” That is § 551.82’s second sentence: “An inmate may not circulate his manuscript within the institution.” It is a flat prohibition, and it sits inside the rule people quote for the proposition that manuscripts are permitted. If a co-author is involved and the manuscript needs to move between two people inside, that is exactly the situation the regulation forecloses — the workaround has to run through the mail and through people outside.

“They told me I have too much paper.” Section 551.83 gives the Warden authority to limit accumulated manuscript material “for housekeeping, fire-prevention, or security reasons,” and PS 5350.27 tells staff that the Warden “may choose to address the issue of accumulation of inmate manuscripts in the Institution Supplement on Inmate Personal Property.” So the operative number is local, and it lives in a document you can ask for by name: the institution supplement to the personal property policy. Ask for that supplement in writing before arguing about a specific box. See inmate personal property.

“They say I’m running a business.” This is the most common serious manuscript problem, and it is a real rule, not a pretext. Section 540.14(d)(4) provides that an inmate “may not direct a business while confined,” while preserving “correspondence necessary to enable an inmate to protect property and funds that were legitimately the inmate’s at the time of commitment” — with the regulation’s own examples being that an inmate “may correspond about refinancing an existing mortgage or sign insurance papers, but may not operate a mortgage or insurance business while in the institution.” Whether writing, submitting and being published crosses into directing a business turns on the specific conduct. The disciplinary code is 334. This is one of the few areas on this page where the right move is a consultation rather than a form.

“I want to write for a newspaper.” That is a different regulation and a different page. The byline ban is gone; the compensation ban and the reporter ban are not. Section 540.20 still provides that an inmate “may not receive compensation or anything of value for correspondence with the news media” and “may not act as reporter.” See news media contact, and for how the firm handles press inquiries, our media guide.

Related BOP policy on manuscripts and correspondence

• Inmate correspondence — the general-correspondence rules § 551.82 routes you into
• Correspondence (PS 5265.14) — the current edition of the statement PS 5350.27 still cites in its 1997 form
• Mail management — how mail is processed, inspected and returned
• News media contact — § 540.20, the compensation bar and the reporter bar
• Incoming publications — the mirror-image rule for material coming in
• Inmate personal property — where § 551.83’s accumulation limit is actually set
• Inmate Discipline Program — Prohibited Act 334 and the incident-report process
• Administrative Remedy Program — BP-8 through BP-11
• Inmate legal activities — legal writing, which is governed separately
• Inmate library services — where the research for most of this writing happens
• Writing to someone in federal prison — the mail process from the outside
• Can prisoners publish articles, blog posts and books? — the same question in plain terms
• How to survive prison — daily life, including how time actually gets used
• The prison library — what is available to work from
• The Bureau of Prisons policy library — every Program Statement we have mapped

Frequently Asked Questions About Inmate Manuscripts

Reviewed for legal accuracy by Elizabeth Franklin-Best, Esq., Principal Attorney·September 2026