Greetings. I am an inmate at the Snake River Correctional Institution (hereinafter SRCI). Due to the Department of Corrections (hereinafter DOC) refusal to follow their own agency rules, those on your mailing list at this institution neither received, nor were informed of any violation of your last issue. Please understand and know of the fact that your newsletter was NOT refused by any of the intended recipients. The DOC and SRCI have made it a practice, policy and custom to claim that notification of refused mail is only necessary when the mail item is opened. This brings into question that idea of inflammatory material can only be known after it has been opened.
The above isn't the first time that the DOC and its institutions have had an exaggerated response to prison concerns. Inmate mail is constantly "lost" or "misdirected." Mail is returned to senders (including family members) marked "refused by inmates" when the inmate was never even informed that the mail item ever existed. Many legal actions have been litigated concerning such acts by Oregon's DOC, including, but not limited to, Wayne D. McGee and Roy G. Cheney II V. Cook, Appellate no. A110036, Prison Legal News v. Cook, (cite unknown), and many more.
My point is, if you require any type of assistance, I have a professional degree from XYZ school as a paralegal, and am interested in any assistance I can give.
--an Oregon Prisoner, October 2004
RAIL responds: We did receive notice from SRCI for the recent censorship of MIM Notes indicating that it was "detrimental to security." So we were not given the "refused by inmate" excuse. In fact, SRCI has been consistent in censoring our stuff with political reasoning as well as petty regulations about the appearance of the envelopes we send to prisoners.
The fact that things are being censored as being inflammatory without being opened is further evidence that MIM is being targeted for censorship across the board, in this country where we are promised free speech.
We welcome the offer to help us in litigating this case with SRCI, as we are in constant need of people with knowledge of the law and time to work on the numerous censorship cases we have to deal with.