The Militant is fighting to reverse the banning of issues of the paper by the Lansing state prison in Kansas and of issue no. 28 by the Missouri Department of Corrections. What’s involved is a clear violation of prisoners’ constitutional rights and the right of the Militant to reach its subscribers behind bars.
Prison officials in Kansas say they have told prisons across the state that the Militant is now an approved publication. We’ll see if our subscribers there will begin getting the paper.
In Missouri, officials at South Central Correctional Center in Licking claimed the paper “promotes, incites, advocates, facilitates or otherwise presents a risk of lawlessness, violence, anarchy or rebellion against a government authority,” when they informed the Militant in a letter the paper received Sept. 23 that a subscriber was being denied the Aug. 11 issue. It “contains information which can be used to instill violence or hatred among the offender population,” they wrote.
Militant attorney David Goldstein requested authorities provide specific information about what exactly they were objecting to. He received a voicemail response claiming the paper was banned because it “discusses lynching and encourages strikes.”
On Oct. 17 Goldstein filed an appeal calling for the ban to be reversed. He pointed out the only mention of the word “lynch” in the issue is from the “25, 50, and 75 Years Ago” column, which had an excerpt from an Aug. 8, 1975, story about a “lynch-mob terror” attack in South Boston by enemies of court-ordered school desegregation there. This and numerous other stories about the Boston busing fight were covered by newspapers all across the country at the time.
A front-page article in issue no. 28 was headlined “Build solidarity with Teamsters in strike battle with Republic Services.” It covered the fight of union sanitation workers in the Boston area for improved pay, health care and decent working conditions. There were four other articles about strikes in the issue.
“Virtually every issue of the Militant for decades,” Goldstein wrote, “includes one or more articles on labor strikes.” For nearly three years MDOC inmates have been getting these articles, he noted. “Almost every issue includes the ‘On the Picket Line’ column, which reports on several labor strikes around the country from the point of view of the striking workers.”
“MDOC has never censored any of these almost 150 issues of the Militant,” he wrote.
Media of all political outlooks report on labor negotiations and strikes, Goldstein notes. “It certainly appears that the Militant has been singled out for censorship based on its political viewpoint.”
The Missouri Department of Corrections’ banning of the Militant is “discriminatory and arbitrary,” he wrote. It’s “in violation of the Militant’s rights to Due Process and Equal Protection under the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.” Authorities’ failure to notify the paper about their specific objections “violates the Militant’s 14th Amendment Due Process rights to notice and a hearing to contest the censorship.”
The Militant has over 330 subscribers in at least 163 state, federal and municipal prisons in 32 states.
“Every time the paper is denied to subscribers behind bars, we have challenged it and in most cases won,” said Militant editor John Studer. “They have the right to read material of their choosing, to think for themselves, to form their own opinions and to follow the class-struggle battles unfolding today.”
Stay tuned for updates.