The Militant was informed Nov. 18 by David Brengle, from the Office of General Counsel at the Missouri Department of Corrections, that the ban on the Oct. 13 issue of the paper at the South Central Correctional Center in Licking, Missouri, has been overturned. This is the second time in the recent months that a ban on the Militant there has been reversed.
This is an important victory in the fight to defend the constitutional rights of both workers behind bars and the Militant.
In response to an appeal from the paper, Amnesty International, the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, ACLU affiliate in Missouri and PEN America had written the Missouri Department of Corrections urging it to end the censorship and deliver the Militant to its readers. A big shout-out to all those who joined in the effort!
John Cotman, associate professor emeritus in the Political Science Department at Howard University, had written to Department of Corrections officials urging them to drop the bans, pointing out they “violate the First and 14th Amendments in the Constitution.” He asked what the reason for the ban was, since the Militant had not been given an explanation.
DeAnna Duff, a Department of Corrections constituent services manager, wrote back saying the censorship was based on an article in the Oct. 13 issue about police in Montreal killing Nooran Rezayi, a 15-year-old boy, while he was playing with friends. Prison officials claimed the article “contains information which can be used to instill violence or hatred among the offender population.” The article, written by John Steele, also reported more than 1,000 people marched in a protest Sept. 27 calling for “Justice for Nooran.”
Hundreds of people, including neighbors and schoolmates, attended Nooran’s funeral Sept. 25. “Young people in the community told the media they face continual harassment by the police,” the article said.
In his letter for Amnesty International USA, Justin Mazzola, the organization’s deputy director of research, said that the “article merely provides a factual accounting of an incident of lethal force and a historical overview and accountability with respect to Canadian law enforcement — none of which can be reasonably inferred to be used to ‘instill violence or hatred among the offender population.’
“The act of informing subscribers about events of the outside world in and of itself and without more should not be a means to violate the right to freedom of expression of incarcerated individuals,” he wrote.
The Militant has 350 subscribers behind bars in 163 state, federal and municipal prisons in 33 states. It challenges every effort by prison authorities to bar subscribers from getting their paper, and has won the large majority of them.