Battling censorship behind bars

In November 2008, a mail-order book addressed to Lou Johnson arrived at the Hilltop Unit, a state prison for women located in Gatesville, central Texas. Written by investigative journalist Silja Talvi, the book was titledWomen Behind Bars:The Crisis of Women in the U.S. Prison System, and chronicled the past decades sweeping upsurge in female incarceration as told through the stories of prisoners across the country. Talvis interviews cast light on the common threads of trauma and abuse these women shared, the increase in nonviolent drug charges that put them behind bars, and the troubling conditions they found inside.

Johnson, one of the women interviewed for the project, described the harsh and humiliating circumstances she endured at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) facility. Denied adequate medical care, refused meals for minor infractions such as talking in line, and forced to clean pipe chases covered with fecal material without gloves, Johnson summed up her experience as cruel and unusual punishment.

But Johnson was barred from reading her own account in print, as well as from accessing the testimonies of the one hundred other female prisoners interviewed forWomen Behind Bars. By the time her copy arrived at the Hilltop Unit mailroom, the book had already been censored at another TDCJ facility. Johnson received a form explaining that an offending passage on page 38 depicted sex with a minor, therefore the publication as a whole was detrimental to offenders rehabilitation because it would encourage deviant criminal behavior. She attempted to appeal the decision to no avail; having never received the book to review the contents of page 38, she was in no position to present a compelling rebuttal.

Prison walls do not form a barrier separating prison inmates from the protections of the Constitution, the U.S. Supreme Court found in its 1987Turner v. Safleydecision. While inmates are not entitled to full First Amendment rights, any encroachment on their freedom of speech must be reasonably related to legitimate penological objectives.

While both publishers and prisoners have standing to challenge prison censorship policies that restrict opportunities to send and receive literature, in practice publishers are far better equippedthey are free from the legal restrictions that bind the incarcerated, and can actually access the material in question. But commercial magazines and booksellers rarely act upon notice that the material theyve mailed has been seized or withheld; prison inmates dont represent a sufficiently marketable demographic.

Women Behind Bars, however, was distributed by Prison Legal News (PLN), which, as the only national publication whose majority of contributors and subscribers are state and federal prisoners, is deeply invested in combating prison censorship. Thats our core constituency, says editor Paul Wright. Wright founded the magazine in 1990 while serving out a sentence for first-degree murder in Washington State. As a twenty-one-year-old military policeman, Wright was broke and a week away from completing his service when he tried to rob a cocaine dealer who turned out to have a gun. Wright panicked and shot first, and was sentenced to twenty-five years.

In prison, he worked as a book fetcher at the facilitys law library, and grew interested in prison conditions litigation. With fellow inmate Ed Mead, he began PLN as a ten-page hand-typed newsletter with a readership of just seventy-five aimed at raising political consciousness and informing prisoners of their rights. The censorship was immediate. In 1991, Wright reported on pervasive racism at Washingtons Clallam Bay Corrections Center, and a specific incident in which a group of white guards brutalized a black inmate. Prison authorities redacted the incriminating sections for circulation inside Clallam Bay, and when they found out that PLN had been distributed to subscribers outside of the facility, subjected Wright to three weeks of solitary confinement.

Wright, who was released in 2003 after serving seventeen years of his twenty-five year sentence, says that over the past few decades, censorship practices in prisons and jails have grown startlingly worse. PLNwhich now has 7,000 print subscribers in all fifty states, with reader surveys indicating that each issue is passed around to ten different inmateshas faced blanket censorship in over ten state prisons systems, and countless bans in local jails across the country. The magazine was impelled to establish the Human Rights Defense Center, a legal nonprofit dedicated to protecting subscribers right to read. It also launched a book publishing operation to distribute titles that, despite limited commercial appeal, are vital to incarcerated populations, such asPrisoners Self Help Litigation Manual,Hepatitis and Liver Disease: What You Need to Know, andBeyond Bars: Rejoining Society After Prison. Which brings us back to Texas.

Page 38 ofWomen Behind Bars, it turned out, described the childhood ordeals faced by Tina Thomas, a neurologist and professor in a teaching college who battled drug addiction late in her career:

What is even more remarkable about Thomas is that she had overcome the kind of childhood trauma that might have completely derailed her adult life. It might have been precisely that background that first propelled her to become an overachiever and attain a high level of professional success, but then came back to haunt her just as she had gotten to where she wanted to go. The dark secret of her life was that she had been forced to perform fellatio on her uncle when she was just four years old. Thomas explains that this unresolved trauma became the template for a lifetime of distrust, fear, uncertainty, and a spirit of self-negation.

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Battling censorship behind bars