The rapid overturn of the across-the-board ban on the Militant at the Federal Correctional Institution in Three Rivers, Texas, strengthens the paper’s fight to overturn bans at state prisons in Florida. The suppression of the Militant is a serious attack on the constitutional right of freedom of the press and free speech both of the paper and of our prisoner subscribers.
Help defend these rights — codified in the Bill of Rights — by talking to union locals and officials; community, church, immigrant rights, Black rights and other organizations; prominent individuals; and groups of your co-workers and convincing them to send letters requesting prison authorities overturn the bans.
Florida Department of Corrections officials have banned six issues of the Militant since January for printing articles about immigrant rights, a call to action to oppose Washington’s economic war on Cuba, and then for articles reporting on the fight against the bans! Prison officials claim that the articles are “dangerously inflammatory,” encourage “riot or insurrection,” and other supposed threats to order at the prisons.
The victory in overturning the ban at FCI Three Rivers is more proof that these and similar accusations are false to the core. “Literature is not what causes disruption,” a prisoner at Santa Rosa, Florida, wrote to the Militant during a similar flurry of impoundments of the socialist newsweekly in 2016. “Nowhere do I recall literature causing physical violence.”
Prisoners have the right to read literature of their choosing, to form their own opinions on the big questions facing the world today. The Militant has the right to reach its subscribers behind prison walls with a working-class road to oppose attacks on immigrants, or Washington’s war in the Middle East, or to put an end to racism, Jew-hatred and more.
Over decades we have succeeded in overturning the overwhelming majority of attempts by prison authorities to suppress the Militant.
Whenever the U.S. capitalist rulers go to war they look for ways to stamp out dissent and to keep working people from speaking out. It’s no surprise amid today’s war drive and deepening capitalist economic crisis that prison authorities, like other government officials, are once again testing the waters to see how far they can go in shutting down political views they disagree with.
Join the fight! Getting letters to the Florida Department of Corrections soon is crucial to winning the appeals the Militant is filing to overturn the bans.