Vol. 79/No. 1 January 19, 2015
This advance for workers’ rights is the latest of several successful fights the paper has waged against attempts by prison officials in Florida to ban delivery of the Militant to readers behind bars over the past year and a half.
On Dec. 16 the Militant received a notice that authorities at Taylor had impounded issue #41, dated Nov. 17, 2014, from a reader who has been receiving the paper for nearly two years.
The notice claimed the paper “presents a threat to the security, good order, or discipline of the correctional system or the safety of any person.” It cited an ad for Capitalism’s World Disorder by Jack Barnes, saying it promoted “a book disrespecting authority” and a full-page article reporting on the fight to win freedom for the Cuban Five, five Cuban revolutionaries imprisoned in the U.S. for 16 years. Taylor authorities said the article showed “Contempt for US Government.”
The book ad included a quote from Barnes saying, “The purpose of the cops is to punish, not patrol. The purpose of the cops is to keep workers in line, to make an example of you if you come from the wrong class — and more so if you also happen to be the wrong color or the wrong nationality.”
The article on the Cuban Five was titled ‘Unbroken Tide of Solidarity Will Carry Us Home’: Sister of Antonio Guerrero Talks About Brother’s New Prison Paintings at Colloquium for Cuban 5 in Havana.”
On Dec. 19, Benjamin Stevenson, the Florida American Civil Liberties Union attorney representing the Militant, requested the Florida Department of Corrections’ Literature Review Committee “grant more time to file an appeal because of the holidays,” Stevenson said in a Dec. 30 phone interview. “But they said there would not need to be an appeal because two days earlier they had decided to override Taylor Correctional Institution’s censorship.”
The Literature Review Committee “approved this issue for inmate use. It should be in the hands of your subscriber soon,” Marty Morrison, Library Services Administrator of the Florida Department of Corrections, wrote to Stevenson that day.
The censorship move by prison authorities at Taylor Correctional Institution targeting promotion of literature concerning the nature of the police under capitalism and the fight to free the Cuban Five occurred amidst a groundswell of protest against police killings of Eric Garner in New York and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Ironically, Florida’s prison Literature Review Committee overturned the ban on the Militant’s coverage of the Cuban Five the same day that the three remaining incarcerated Cuban revolutionaries were freed from U.S. prisons and returned to Cuba.
Previous successes in pushing back censorship moves in Florida state prisons include winning a reversal in October 2013 on impounding an issue reporting on initiation of a hunger strike in California prisons. Several months later subscribers incarcerated at the Blackwater River Correctional Facility in Milton, Florida, had several issues impounded, which authorities upon being challenged reversed as a “clerical error.”
The paper has also won similar battles in Washington state and at the high security U.S. Penitentiary in Florence, Colorado.
Publications such as the San Francisco Bay View and Prison Legal News that, like the Militant, champion the rights of workers behind bars and report on their fights for respect and dignity also find themselves forced to fight to defend their right to reach subscribers and the right of prisoners to read the news they want.
Related articles:
Greetings to workers behind bars!
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