Whaddaya know? MIM censored in the MDOC

I recently wrote you about the Michigan Department of Corrections. I'd like to say thank you for your response, but regrettably I never got to read it. The MDOC said the letter was a Security Threat. How? I do not know. I believe it is because you people care about all the corruption that's going on behind bars.

I am not sure it is legal to hold the mail you send me, but as I and you have said, they do whatever they want to do. We are not here for justice, we are here for security and profit. We are hostages.

We are begging you to help us in any way you can. The things going on in here are way worse than anything a lot of us have done to be here.

I do want to read your letters, but what can we do to get them delivered to me?

-- a Michigan prisoner, 30 June, 2005

MIM responds: Censorship of MIM Notes and correspondence often boils down to disapproval of the political opinions we express. This is illegal in any state, by decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. That said, Michigan is a pretty bad state for censoring MIM (check any edition of the MDOC's Restricted Publications List) and often correspondence as well. But there are steps you can take to fight censorship no matter what state you are in, and some of the most effective things you can do involve preparing for the event before it happens:

1. Read the mail policy for the state or federal system you're in. If the prison you are in has it's own policy, read that too. This will tell you what types of mail you are permitted to receive. This will also tell you how to register a complaint if your newspapers or correspondence are rejected.

2. Find out if others have had problems receiving MIM Notes, or publications or correspondence generally. What types of things were rejected? Did the prisoners challenge rejections? With what results?

3. Summarize your experience. Whether you have experienced censorship in the past, or fought it successfully, your acquired knowledge will be useful to others.

4. Write about censorship for Under Lock & Key. Prisoners and people on the outside need to know who censorship is directed at, whether policies are uniformly enforced, and what types of materials are most vulnerable.

Remember: MIM is every bit as entitled to publish as Abraham Lincoln was when he said that any people anywhere, disapproving of their government, have the right to replace it either by constitutional or revolutionary means. And prisoners have as much right to read our work as they do to wall-to-wall coverage of U.$. war-mongering in Iraq.