This is the third of MIM's regular reports on censorship in the Amerikan prisons. MIM sends in our newspaper, MIM Notes, free to prisoners who ask for it. We also send political books and pamphlets (by MIM and by others) to politically active prisoners. We face tremendous censorship in this work with prisoners. Prisoncrats across the country frequently refuse to deliver books, magazines and newspapers. At the same time we work with our comrades behind bars, sending many letters back and forth discussing politics, global affairs, the criminal injustice system and organizing work. Even these letters are frequently censored.
This censorship is not surprising since prisoners are a group of people in Amerika with much revolutionary potential. Prisoners are disproportionately oppressed nationals, primarily Blacks and Latinos. And their interaction with the criminal injustice system and forced confrontation with the political nature of the system instills a strong interest in politics and a drive for justice. The prisons have to resort to censorship to keep prisoners from learning more about politics and applying their knowledge to fight the injustice system. This is what the prisons mean when they reject MIM literature as "a threat to institutional security" or "threat to legitimate penological objectives" as the Washington state Department of Corrections is fond of stating. Nowhere in any literature MIM sends to prisoners is there anything advocating violence or illegal acts in the prisons, contrary to many prisoncrats' claims.
Frequently we get justification like this one from Illinois: "Return to sender; Items not permitted in institution" giving no explanation for the censorship. MIM and the prisoners affected are then forced to send protest letters demanding to know why the literature was rejected and attempting to appeal the decision. Sometimes these letters succeed, sometimes the prison bureaucrats respond defending the censorship, but most often our protests are just ignored.
Occasionally prisons are honest in their reasons for rejecting MIM Notes such as the California prison which explained censorship of MIM literature because "material has revolutionary articles and articles based on or about violence." The second half of this justification is meaningless unless they are going to censor all mainstream newspapers as they contain stories about murder, war, rape and all types of violence. But it is the revolutionary content that sets MIM's literature apart and singles us out for more censorship than any other distributor in the prisons.
Censorship differs from state to state and within states from prison to prison. In some states like Oregon they consistently reject any mail that MIM does not publish as well as some political literature they don't like (such as the MIM Theory on Anarchism). Other states, like Illinois censored items include MIM Notes, MIM Theory, Black Panther Party literature, and letters from MIM describing our organization and our program. In some cases in Illinois, the prisoncrats were deliberate about which MIM Notes were censored (a few different Illinois prisons censored the same issue of MIM Notes at the same time), but in more recent cases (May, 2003), there is a trend of blanket censorship of all MIM materials including the MIM standard prisoner introductory letter which was returned with a stamp on the envelope saying "Return to sender; Items not permitted in institution".
Over the past 12 months we have record of censorship of MIM Notes and/or MIM Theory in the following states: Alabama, Arizona, California, Georgia, Indiana, Illinois, Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Washington.
The following states have been censoring books or other non-MIM published literature sent in by MIM: California, Illinois, North Carolina, New York, Nevada, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas, and Wisconsin.
In the six months prior to that the following states (in addition to those listed above) also censored MIM Notes. We have no proof that these states stopped censoring MIM Notes: Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota and Ohio. In Arkansas a victory was won to receive MIM Notes again.
MIM has not given up sending MIM Notes or MIM Theory to any states but there are several states where MIM no longer sends literature we do not publish because of prison regulations. More and more states are implementing policies that require all literature to come from the publisher or to come from a few selected distributors like amazon.com. This is just another excuse to censor revolutionary literature and deny prisoners access to alternative education. Amazon.com and other similar big capitalist distributors are not running books for prisoners programs, and the price of books there (as well as the inaccessibility from prison) keeps virtually all prisoners from receiving books.
States where MIM no longer sends literature it does not publish include: Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and Oregon.
States known to have censored MIM-sent materials over the last year are colored black. Those known to have censored MIM in the six months prior to that are colored grey. Since prisoncrats don't always write to say they are censoring us, we can't say for sure other states aren't censoring.
A number of victories over censorship were won this year. Of greatest note is the victory in Pennsylvania at SCI Green where censorship has been going on for years and MIM had stopped sending in MIM Notes. Green is one of the prisons that admitted it censored MIM Notes because of its political view that armed struggle will be necessary to eradicate oppression. The prisoner who pursued this victory to the end wrote "the Department has resolved the lawsuit [against censorship of MIM Notes]. They released to me on April 4, 2003 the disputed MIM Notes. I would like to say how persistence pays off to those who are willing to make sacrifices for their First Amendment rights to read MIM Notes [and, MIM adds, our right to speak to prisoners via MIM Notes]."
Attica prison was censoring all MIM mail across the board, but this past year we won a victory there with the prison finally responding to our protests by admitting that MIM is subject to the same laws of all other incoming mail and each item must be reviewed individually. In Oklahoma both MIM Notes and MIM Theory were censored in the past year, but with protest letters from MIM and a prisoner we succeeded in getting both publications delivered.
In Alabama after receiving a rejection notice from his prison for MIM Theory 8 (on anarchism) and MIM Theory 11 (on the criminal injustice system), one prisoner filed a protest and described what happened: "I filed my protest on September 9, I received it back the 16th of September. It stated that correspondence from MIM is denied and that no mail from MIM will be allowed!" He followed the battle through enlisting the help of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and in April of 2003 he wrote to inform us "The Southern Poverty Law Center has gotten it approved for prisoners to receive MIM Theory."
Prisoners in California have been very aggressive about fighting the censorship. In Corcoran both in the SHU and CSATF we won censorship victories to get MIM Theory in after prisoners filed protests. But elsewhere in California we continue to face censorship of MIM Theory and political books. As one of our comrades behind bars explained "I have taken this matter to the director's level in Sacramento, California in a 602 inmate appeal process. Informal, formal, first, second and third levels. The outcome ended in denial. This mail issue is filed and pending in court under civil rights act 42 U.S.C 1983. My complaint so far is mail tampering (especially legal mail), refusal to give access to legal and regular mailing supplies, and censoring certain mail. If there are any more complaints in the mail area, please file and help this struggle on this part. This is a very important thing so people on the outside and inside let's work to win our mail rights inside prison."
For more details on prison censorship, examples of the censorship notices we receive, and up to date information on the censorship battles we are fighting, visit http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/agitation/prisons/censor.
MIM Congress resolution:
Amerikan prisons censor MIM Notes, MIM correspondence
Excerpted from a resolution by the MIM 2001 Congress.
President George W. Bush is not being censored in prisons despite his philosophy of violence as demonstrated in his bombing of Iraq. Newspapers quoting Bush or endorsing him or his opponent [Al Gore] who also favored the war in Iraq-these papers and television stations are not so often censored. Hence when prison wardens say we should be censored for threatening "security" through our "philosophy of violence," they are attempting selectively to oppose violence of the oppressed and exploited. In addition, prison wardens are contradicting the stated beliefs of the authors of the "Declaration of Independence" and Abraham Lincoln, who said explicitly in his first inaugural address that the people have a "revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow" the government.(1)
[Such hypocrisy] is inherent to the injustice system as the Mumia Abu- Jamal case proves. The prosecutor against Mumia pointed to Mumia's quoting from Mao Zedong that "political power grows out of a barrel of a gun" as evidence against Mumia in his court case. Meanwhile, MIM has yet to hear of anyone being accused by prosecutors of distributing the New York Times despite its backing of numerous wars and coups and quoting from people like George Bush Sr. and Jr. who bombed Iraq. As a matter of compromise, MIM would agree not to send its present literature to a prison if a prison warden concerned with rehabilitation only allowed pacifist literature into prison. We would accept that as a principled compromise, but there is no prison warden proposing or implementing such a policy.
Notes: www.bartleby.com/124/pres31.html