Vol. 78/No. 20 May 26, 2014
The Militant calls on the United Kingdom Ministry of Justice to reverse its prohibition on sending parcels to prisoners, effectively banning all subscriptions to newspapers and magazines and sharply limiting the availability of books beyond whatever meager selections may exist in prison libraries. This arbitrary clampdown on basic liberties is nothing but another club in the hands of prison authorities to demoralize, dehumanize and crush the spirit of workers behind bars.
The Militant is joining the fight being waged against this attack by defenders of prisoners’ rights and democratic rights around the world — including English PEN, the Howard League for Penal Reform, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot, U.K. poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, fighter for Kurdish rights Busra Ersanli and many others. This battle is part of a global struggle against “justice” under capitalism, dispensed by cops, court officials and jailers — from Russia to the U.S., from Turkey to the U.K.
Many workers behind bars respond to dehumanizing prison conditions by dedicating themselves to self-improvement through reading and study. This includes books on working-class struggles — the kind of books that prison authorities often label “extremist material,” which you say you don’t want prisoners to have. Self-driven learning by workers behind bars is the direct opposite of your insistence that prisoners “behave well and engage in their own rehabilitation” to earn “privileges.” This is doublespeak for falling in line with the jailers’ organization of prison life, which is designed to corrode solidarity, dignity and a sense of self-worth.
The mass incarceration of working people in the U.S. has touched the lives of millions. It has spawned outrage against confessions extorted by torture and plea-bargain frame-ups. It has fueled sympathy with hunger strikes by prisoners against abuses and indignities from California prisons to immigration jails in Washington. And it has created fertile ground for growing support to free the Cuban Five and other U.S. political prisoners. Similar struggles are taking place in the United Kingdom against killings in police custody and on-the-spot executions by cops in working-class neighborhoods.
The Militant, along with the San Francisco Bay View, Prison Legal News and Prison Focus — papers with a proud base of subscribers in U.S. prisons — have been part of a series of battles against attempts to deny prisoners the right to read what they want. These and other publications have faced censorship for news coverage of events that wardens don’t like, including the hunger strike waged by some 30,000 prisoners in California in 2013 against solitary confinement and other abuses. In some cases, prison authorities have sought to outright ban newspapers they don’t agree with, including the Militant, a socialist newsweekly that connects inmates to struggles of fellow working people outside prison walls.
Last fall the Militant — with support from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union and others — forced prison authorities in Florida and Washington state to reverse censorship of the workers’ press and deliver impounded issues to subscribers behind bars. At the same time, supporters of democratic rights won a related victory that forced the Randolph County Board of Education in North Carolina to rescind its ban on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man from school libraries. The ban lasted just nine days, and libraries and bookstores in the area couldn’t keep up with the demand for the classic.
The thought police of the U.S. prison and school system misjudged the sentiments of ordinary working people and their capacity to resist attacks on their most fundamental rights. I’m confident the book-banners in the U.K. Justice Ministry will find they’ve made the same mistake.
Related articles:
UK authorities ban inmates from receiving books, parcels
Oklahoma execution spurs opposition to death penalty
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