The Militant (logo)  

Vol. 78/No. 2      January 20, 2014

 
‘Militant’ held up in Florida jail over
‘miscommunication’
 
BY JOHN STUDER  
The Militant was withheld from subscribers incarcerated at the Blackwater River Correctional Facility in Milton, Fla., for several weeks on the basis that “the entire publication is viewed as a threat to security.” After an inquiry by the American Civil Liberties Union, prison authorities chalked it up to a clerical error and said the paper would be promptly delivered.

The incident followed the Militant’s victory against prison authorities’ effort to censor the paper “in all major institutions, work camps, road prisons, and forestry camps” under the jurisdiction of the Florida Department of Corrections.

On Dec. 24 the Militant received multiple sets of impoundment notices from Blackwater, indicating that four subscribers to the paper had each been denied from three to five recent issues and that all issues would be banned in the future.

ACLU lawyer Benjamin Stevenson then contacted Mark Henry, the warden at Blackwater, who referred him to Scott Seagle, a lawyer for Geo Group, Inc., a private company that builds and runs prisons around the world. Henry said his prison was just following the Florida Department of Corrections’ earlier decision to impound the paper in September.

“I’ve contacted Blackwater and determined that the magazine was impounded in error,” Seagle wrote to Stevenson Jan. 7. “The error has been corrected; the magazine will be delivered today.”

Geo Group describes itself as “the world’s leading provider of correctional, detention, and community reentry services, with 95 facilities, approximately 73,000 beds, and 18,000 employees around the globe,” with facilities located in the U.S., United Kingdom, Australia and South Africa. In the U.S. the company runs federal and state prisons, county jails, immigration detention centers and other incarceration facilities.

When the Militant appealed the earlier September impoundment, the Florida Department of Corrections’ Literature Review Committee initially upheld the censorship. But after the Militant continued to press the case and started winning support from journalist organizations and other publications, the committee reversed it.

“There was apparently a miscommunication with the mail room staff on the status of the publication,” Seagle wrote, suggesting that the second decision by the Literature Review Committee did not make it to those in charge at Blackwater.

“We intend to follow up whenever we learn about delivery problems or efforts to censor the paper in prisons,” said Militant editor Doug Nelson. “It’s more than a question of free speech and freedom of the press. We think the Militant is needed by workers behind bars to help connect them and their everyday fights for dignity with the struggles of working people on the outside. That’s why we offer special rates to prisoners without means to pay and more and more have been signing up.”
 
 
Related articles:
Framed-up, jailed lawyer Lynne Stewart wins release
 
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home