by Pa Rock
Missouri Citizen
There was a disturbing story this week in "The Defender," a minority-owned-and-run newspaper out of the Kansas City area. The Missouri Department of Corrections is preparing to stop allowing prisoners in the show-me state to receive books as gifts from friends and relatives on the outside. Beginning on September 25th, if an inmate wants a particular book that isn't available in the prison's limited library, he will have to order it himself through a short list of outside vendors.
If Gramma wants to send him a book through Amazon, she can just go pound sand.
The decision to stop books from friends and family has been criticized by outside agencies because many prisoners do not have the means to purchase their own books, and the argument is also made that books bring a stabilizing influence into the prison system and often function as gateways to the future as they help prepare prisoners for life and work on the outside. Books also provide an emotional release from the rigors of living in a caged environment.
The Department of Corrections says that it is attempting to stop the flow of drugs and contraband into the prison system, and last year, as a part of that effort, it instituted a program that stopped most physical mail from reaching prisoners. Now all mail, except for legal correspondence, is opened and electronically scanned onto computer tablets for the prisoners to read.
Prisoners respond that most of the drugs entering the prison system are brought in by prison employees.
I'm not sure how Gramma buying a book through Amazon and then having them ship it to her convict could result in drugs coming into the prison. But I am admittedly naive. Jeff Bezos, are you working a new hustle?
Reading inspires and gives people hope - and ultimately helps to create better citizens. Keeping even one person down hobbles us all.
1 comment:
A prison inmate retains only those First Amendment rights that are not inconsistent with his status as a prisoner or the legitimate penological objectives of the corrections system. Restrictions on the First Amendment rights of prisoners is supposed to be narrowly tailored to achieve a legitimate state interest.
A Missouri case, Turner v. Safley, 482 US 78 (1987), SCOTUS held that a standard that is more deferential to the government applies when the free speech rights only of inmates are at stake. In this case the court sided with Missouri on the facially neutral scheme of restricting mail between two inmates at different prisons depending on their classification.
No doubt the prisoners will have good counsel who will argue that books sent from an approved vendor, like Amazon, do not pose a security risk. That means the regulation would fail the rational basis test.
Hopefully the Attorney General's Office doesn't read the exception clause of the Thirteenth Amendment, where slavery was socialized, and realize that prisoners are slaves, slaves are property, and property has neither rights nor dignity.
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