When convicted criminals are sent off to prison as punishment, they give up certain rights, the biggest being freedom of movement and privacy.
They don’t, however, forfeit the right to express themselves, as guaranteed by a First Amendment that covers not just those in the free world but those behind bars, too.
Some in the Mississippi Department of Corrections appear to not understand that.
As reported last week in the Commonwealth, at least one Parchman inmate and possibly two have been punished with relocations in the past four months for writing letters to this newspaper that criticized MDOC and, in particular, Corrections Commissioner Marshall Fisher.
Three days after we published such a letter from Tim Turner, he was written up and moved from the “C” Building in Unit 29 to the “A” Building.
How significant a punishment this is, I don’t know. Dealing with MDOC is a lot like dealing with a brick wall. Their typical response, as it was when I asked about Turner and another letter-writing inmate who was apparently moved to an out-of-state facility in July, is that they don’t provide that kind of information for “security reasons.”
But it’s not just the press that gets the brush-off. Turner’s family members around Tupelo, who are worried about his medical condition, say that they have been getting the runaround from Parchman staff ever since he was moved.
If Turner did something else to get into trouble, an internal Parchman disciplinary report doesn’t indicate it. It says that Turner violated a rule by writing the Commonwealth because it was an “unauthorized communication” with the public.
That’s ridiculous and the type of attitude that prevailed at Parchman when it operated as an abominable prison farm — a time when inmates were guarded by other inmates, some of them armed; when black inmates got worse housing and harsher punishments for the same offense than white inmates; when living conditions were described by a federal judge as “generally deplorable and subhuman.”
That same judge, William Keady, in one of his earliest orders in the landmark Gates v. Collier case, said that Parchman had to stop censoring inmates’ mail. They could inspect what came in to be sure it didn’t include contraband or escape plans or messages designed to facilitate other illegal activity. They could read what went out for the same reasonable safety concerns. But they couldn’t stop inmates from communicating to the outside world as long as what they were communicating was not criminal in nature.
It was such prior censorship, contends semi-retired Jackson attorney Ron Welch, who represented state inmates for most of the 40-year life of the Gates case, that allowed the abuses, corruption and mistreatment at Parchman to go on along as they did. The inmates were blocked from telling anyone what was going on at that hellhole.
Technically, Mississippi’s corrections system is no longer governed by the Gates case, which was dismissed five years ago after it was determined that the state was basically in full compliance with the federal court’s orders. MDOC, however, is not free now to do whatever it wants. If it desires to restrict an inmate’s constitutional rights, it has to have a valid, demonstrable reason for doing so — or risk being hauled back into court.
The rule under which Turner was cited is being almost certainly misapplied. Welch surmises that the ban on unauthorized communication with the public is designed to prevent inmates, when outside of prison on a work detail or making a court appearance, from trying to use that opportunity to arrange an escape or obtain contraband.
Publicly criticizing Fisher, as these two inmates have, for allegedly being excessive with lockdowns and removing other inmate privileges poses no threat to anyone or anything except possibly the commissioner’s thin skin.
The Commonwealth periodically receives letters from inmates held not only at Parchman but also at the Leflore County Jail. We don’t publish many of them, particularly those in which the inmates claim they were railroaded. When an inmate, though, wants to voice an opinion on a topic of public interest — and corrections policy is such a topic — then I have no problem giving them a forum to do so. As Welch cautions, you need to read what they say with some large grains of salt, but they do have an insider’s perspective of life behind bars.
The bigger point, though, is if MDOC can get away with punishing inmates for what they write to the newspaper, then they could use the same rule to try to dissuade them from writing anyone — lawmakers, lawyers and judges, even their own family members.
You don’t have to have a bleeding heart to recognize how unconstitutional this is.
