I received a letter from Paizo Publishing today, concerning my subscription to the magazine. I ordered my subscription through Amazon.com. I was told I would have to wait the roughly 6 to 8 weeks it takes to process such orders.
But then today I received a letter that left me baffled and upset.
I will summarize its contents below:
After thanking me for my interest in one of your publications, you state:
“Because of your status as an incarcerated prisoner, we need you to read and sign this form…”
It goes on to explain that (probably for security reasons) “prisons have varying policies on what inmates receive”.
Then it says that by signing the document I agree to indemnify Paizo Publishing, LLC and not hold them responsible for the delivery of the “subscription or any premiums sent with or outside of the magazine” or demand that they replace any missing issues or premiums.
I was very disturbed by this letter. I have never been incarcerated; have never been found guilty of committing any crime punishable by federal law. I have never even been to a trial.
According to Paizo, what felony have I committed? In what prison am I incarcerated? The address the letter was sent to is not the address of any known prison. It’s a street address.
As an undergrad, I visited a prison for humanitarian purposes. Much later, as a graduate student, I worked with young men in a youth correctional facility in Passaic County, New Jersey. Prison, and anything related with it, is not something I would take lightly.
I am going to assume the letter was sent by an honest mistake. I sincerely hope it’s the correct explanation, as any other possibility is simply distressing.
Normally I would have just crumpled the piece of paper and tossed it to the trash. However, in the letter is stated that my subscription to Dungeon Magazine is conditional on signing the agreement.
If this letter is some type of joke (or some sort of role-playing test you guys send to aspiring subscribers) I find it of very, very bad taste. Not only not funny, but downright offensive.
Please clarify whether I do have to sign this letter to finally start receiving the magazine subscription I have spent my hard-earned money on, or if it can be disregarded completely. In the latter case, I would need a timetable that lets me know when to expect the arrival of the first magazine.
I want to subscribe and I would be willing to renew my subscription for years to come. But if I need to sign this letter as if I was some sort of prison inmate impersonator, you can certainly count me (and my money) out.
As I stated previously, I hope this is all a simple misunderstanding. I know Paizo and the magazines it publishes have many fans, and I have read dozens of posts where customers constantly praise your service and devotion to them.
Feel free to write me an email to if you need me to provide you my name, address, etc. If you don’t have my email, I can give it to you through this very post.
Your would-be customer,
Maximo D. Contreras
I received a letter from Paizo Publishing today, concerning my subscription to the magazine. I ordered my subscription through Amazon.com. I was told I would have to wait the roughly 6 to 8 weeks it takes to process such orders.
But then today I received a letter that left me baffled and upset.
I will summarize its contents below:After thanking me for my interest in one of your publications, you state:
“Because of your status as an incarcerated prisoner, we need you to read and sign this form…”It goes on to explain that (probably for security reasons) “prisons have varying policies on what inmates receive”.
Then it says that by signing the document I agree to indemnify Paizo Publishing, LLC and not hold them responsible for the delivery of the “subscription or any premiums sent with or outside of the magazine” or demand that they replace any missing issues or premiums.
I was very disturbed by this letter. I have never been incarcerated; have never been found guilty of committing any crime punishable by federal law. I have never even been to a trial.
According to Paizo, what felony have I committed? In what prison am I incarcerated? The address the letter was sent to is not the address of any known prison. It’s a street address.
As an undergrad, I visited a prison for humanitarian purposes. Much later, as a graduate student, I worked with young men in a youth correctional facility in Passaic County, New Jersey. Prison, and anything related with it, is not something I would take lightly.
I am going to assume the letter was sent by an honest mistake. I sincerely hope it’s the correct explanation, as any other possibility is simply distressing.
Normally I would have just crumpled the piece of paper and tossed it to the trash. However, in the letter is stated that my subscription to Dungeon Magazine is conditional on signing the agreement.
If this letter is some type of joke (or some sort of role-playing test you guys send to aspiring subscribers) I find it of very, very bad taste....
Chill man. This was obviously a mistake. This post would probably have been better sent as an email to customer service than as a public post.
El Skootro
Did any address you use on your order have the same address a correctional facility? For the mailing company I work for, frequently stuff gets mailed back for being shipped to a correctional facility. I would take a deep breath and contact Customer Service about this.
Thank you for your responses.
As I already said, Skootro I am assuming the letter was sent by mistake. However, it’s never advisable to simply jump into conclusions.
The guys at Paizo might provide a plausible explanation of this bizarre letter. I don’t hold a grudge or think there’s some sort of conspiracy theory going on.
Whenever you send a message to anyone, you usually double-check to make sure you are sending the appropriate information (canceling or renewing a subscription, answering a complaint, or contacting prisoners). I’m curious as hell to learn exactly how things got mixed up like that.
Hello, Lilith. I’ve read many of the things you’ve posted on this website. You usually write very thoughtful ideas. To answer your question, I used a single street address located in Florida, and to my knowledge does not correspond to any correctional facility.
Even if the address did correspond to a prison, I could be an employee at a correctional facility. In fact I am not, but the address itself does not tell that much about my status. Well, if my address was in Beverly Hills it would suggest that I’m probably incredibly rich, although the rich and famous have employees that live there as well.
So ruling out the address, if Paizo sends me a letter assuming I am a convicted prisoner, it means there must be some database somewhere that says I am one. That’s what disturbs me.
Let’s say I wanted to purchase airplane tickets or withdraw money from a bank. If the computer checks my ID and concludes that I am a convicted felon, people would assume I a criminal who has escaped from prison. Or how about applying for a job? A potential employer might discriminate against me if his records “showed” that I have been convicted.
So it’s very important for me to clear this up. Paizo should at least address my concerns and let me know how the error happened. Perhaps there is a prisoner with my last name and the letters got switched. I am not even asking for an apology, I just want to learn the exact nature of the mistake, so I can rest easy that my name does not appear on any of the police’s convicted felon list.
I admit I may have overreacted putting this here. I simply did not know how to react. Perhaps I would like to hear from someone else who has faced something similar.
I would have thought that writing my concern in a messageboard named “Customer Service” would guarantee that some employee would take a look at it. I’ve read the title in many of the posts, and they have numerous questions about missing issues, subscriptions, etc.
I still need to know when my subscription will start, if at all.
If you think it’s more effective to write Customer Service directly, then this is the last I will write about this weird incident.
In any case, thank you for your attention.
Hope your next five rolls are natural 20s.
So ruling out the address, if Paizo sends me a letter assuming I am a convicted prisoner, it means there must be some database somewhere that says I am one. That’s what disturbs me.
Scydrex, I've sent you an email about this unfortunate occurence (for which we are very sorry). I did, however, want to publicly assure everyone that there is no database or list. We ascertain incarceration status through educated guesses based almost solely, as Lilith correctly surmised, on the mailing address. Unfortunately, this can lead to errors. Additionally, since the letters are manually prepared and mailed, other errors can occur during the process (letters in the wrong envelope, copying the wrong address, etc.). We strongly encourage anyone who has received such a notice in error to contact us (customer.service@paizo.com or 425-289-0060) so that we may immediately clear it up.
Cosmo and Michelle are usually on top of things, but just in case, you could send an email to customer.service@paizo.com. :)
EDIT: Michelle beat me to it. :P
As Michelle has already stated, the matter is being handled. Thank you.
However, I would like to provide you with some free advice. If you are going to be making educated guesses about someone’s incarceration status based solely on people’s mailing addresses, I think it would be better to at least try to contact the person first. A simple email asking, “Hey, man, are you in jail?” would have much faster and easier.
I have used some of your products in the past (I’m currently DMing for a group playing the Shackled City AP) and hope to be one more of your customers for years to come.
Director of Sales
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However, I would like to provide you with some free advice. If you are going to be making educated guesses about someone’s incarceration status based solely on people’s mailing addresses, I think it would be better to at least try to contact the person first. A simple email asking, “Hey, man, are you in jail?” would have much faster and easier.
Actually... no, that is not the case.
A prisoner subscription (of which, we have a surprisingly large number) invariably will come in via snail mail or through a subscription service. Either way, there is not an email address associated with the order. Subscription service orders (such as those purchased through Amazon) just come in with an address and a note of which title and for how long. If there is no existing Paizo.com profile to associate the order with, then there is no indication of an email address.
Therefore, we have to make the educated guess based on the sole bit of information we have. In your case, your address is in the same format as a typical prisoner address. Your address appears institutional. As we did not have an email address, we sent correspondence to the only contact information we had, your mailing address.
While the assumption is already made that the recipient is an inmate, this is the first time since I've been with Paizo that we were wrong. I've always known that it's an imperfect system and that we'd eventually tag someone as an inmate who wasn't, but the further assumption we work on is that any false positive will have the ability to contact us and disabuse us of our incorrect notion. This is, in fact, what has happened.
The upshot is, once again, that I apologize for having mistook your address as that of an inmate. You will not experience any disruption in your subscriptions as a result of this, and I apologize for any inconvenience.
Thanks,
Cosmo
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Chief Technical Officer
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However, I would like to provide you with some free advice. If you are going to be making educated guesses about someone’s incarceration status based solely on people’s mailing addresses, I think it would be better to at least try to contact the person first. A simple email asking, “Hey, man, are you in jail?” would have much faster and easier.
For one thing, your e-mail address wasn't associated with your subscription request until a couple of hours ago, when I connected the two (and corrected the misspelling of your last name on the subscription request).
For another thing, most prisoners subscribe by mail or through third-party subscription services that don't provide e-mail addresses to us (which is the same way we get Amazon subscriptions). (And, for that matter, I don't think most prisoners even have e-mail addresses.)
At any rate, we apologize for the mistake.
-Vic.
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The woes of living on 123A - C Block, Penitentiary Road.
For one thing, your e-mail address wasn't associated with your subscription request until a couple of hours ago, when I connected the two (and corrected the misspelling of your last name on the subscription request).
For another thing, most prisoners subscribe by mail or through third-party subscription services that don't provide e-mail addresses to us (which is the same way we get Amazon subscriptions). (And, for that matter, I don't think most prisoners even have e-mail addresses.)
At any rate, we apologize for the mistake.
-Vic.
.
And if prisoners don't have e-mail addresses, how would they be able to order a subscription through Amazon? In the UK ordering is only through their website, a valid e-mail address is required. I assume the same in the USA?? So, I'm guessing, an order from Amazon couldn't come from a prisoner? Could it?
And if prisoners don't have e-mail addresses, how would they be able to order a subscription through Amazon? In the UK ordering is only through their website, a valid e-mail address is required. I assume the same in the USA?? So, I'm guessing, an order from Amazon couldn't come from a prisoner? Could it?
I would suspect that a prisoner might be able to obtain an e-mail address, depending on the facility they're incarcerated in. Most libraries have access to computers (and the internet) for educational purposes; since the understated goal of prisons is, ostensibly, rehabilitation--I would guess they're no different. That said, a Yahoo or Hotmail address would be just as easy for them to get as anyone else. From there, an Amazon.Com order wouldn't be much of a problem.
I admit that that's a theory based on more than a few suppositions, but I would think they're reasonable leaps of logic. I would think it could be done.
JD oot.
Although I think the reasoning in the system used to identify prisoners is a little flawed, it seems to be very accurate, at least according to Cosmo. He writes: ''this is the first time since I've been with Paizo that we were wrong''. That sounds pretty accurate to me, unless you have not worked at Paizo more than a few weeks of months, in which case I would be willing to wager more mistakes will happen…
Now, receiving a letter that incorrectly tags you as an inmate can be a simple annoyance or inconvenience, or maybe just something to laugh about if you find it funny. But I'd be very, very careful. Some people in the US (where I don't live) tend to sue companies over anything.
My guess is that having access to an email account would largely depend on the type of prisoner that you are. If you are a terrorist or member of a criminal organization, I don't think we would want you to be able to communicate freely with your colleagues –accomplices- to coordinate further attacks or crimes.
That said, email and instant messaging are fast and cheap ways to communicate with your loved ones. Perhaps with a proper amount of monitoring those can be allowed. How that can be done without unnecessarily violating people's right to privacy I will not discuss here.
To the guys at Paizo: Apologies accepted, Captain Needa
Might be a good idea to tag on the end of the prisoner form something to the tune of "If you believe you have recieved this letter in error..." etc., etc.
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Chief Technical Officer
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And if prisoners don't have e-mail addresses, how would they be able to order a subscription through Amazon?
Amazon subscriptions come to us by way of a third-party subscription service. That third party also resells subscriptions to institutions like libraries, school, and prisons. They don't tell us the source of each order, so to us, the only distinction between a prisoner, an Amazon customer, and a school is in the address itself.
Besides, while prisoners without e-mail addresses may not be able to order through Amazon directly, friends and relatives "on the outside" can certainly place orders on their behalf.
(By the way, we'd really much rather folks subscribe through us than through Amazon or other subscription services. Not only does subscribing directly with us give us a bigger cut of the subscription price, but your subscription may start sooner, and it'll also be a buck cheaper, so it's better for you. Plus, we'll be able to send you renewal notices by e-mail, too.)
-Vic.
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By the way, we'd really much rather folks subscribe through us than through Amazon or other subscription services. Not only does subscribing directly with us give us a bigger cut of the subscription price, but your subscription may start sooner, and it'll also be a buck cheaper, so it's better for you. Plus, we'll be able to send you renewal notices by e-mail, too.)
Damn, I didn't know that...
I really don't care about saving a buck. Not worth that much to me.But I would have certainly preferred you to receive a bigger share of the money I'm paying. You're the guys publishing the great magazines after all.
Sorry about that!
Maybe you can *cough* cancel my subscription so I can resubscribe *cough*...
Now it's too late, but I'll keep that in mind when it's time to renew next year.
Best regards,
Scydrex
A prisoner subscription (of which, we have a surprisingly large number)...
Sorry, just had to laugh at the irony of a prisoner subscribing to Dungeon Magazine!
If I was incarcerated, RPG's would go a long way to maintaining my sanity. Of course, I'd be in protective custody, so I would spend my days sending queries and writing adventures and detailing out my homebrewed campaign world down to the last peasant.
As an interesting side note, I remember reading somewhere that, pre-3.0/3.5, Dark Sun was the preferred setting among a much larger portion of inmates than among non-inmates. Kinda fascinating, with Dark Sun being known as a pretty harsh, unforgiving setting.