The Mississippi Department of Corrections faces a difficult task of both keeping order among prisoners while also maintaining their civil rights on thin budgets.
Most countries, and past civilizations, have not worried much about prisoners’ rights. Those who weren’t executed were left to rot with little food or concern for their wellbeing.
Some would return to those days, seeing it as both a cost savings and a crime deterrent, but there is a high moral and social cost to pay for such a tact: Inhumane prisons create monstrous inmates who become permanent wards of the state rather than reformed citizens.
That’s why prisons, at least in theory, are supposed to focus on rehabilitation, not just punishment. Often it doesn’t work that way, but the state should be emphasizing low-cost ways to reform prisoners.
That’s why a recent book ban is so odd. The Clarion Ledger reported this week that Big House Books, a nonprofit that sends reading material to inmates, sued MDOC in federal court for allegedly rejecting its books. The lawsuit says only books inmates paid for or religious books are allowed.
On its face, if what the lawsuit alleges is true, it’s clearly a violation of the First Amendment ban on government endorsement of religion to allow donated religious books but not secular ones.
And more basically, why does MDOC care if inmates are reading free books? Shouldn’t the state want them to learn more and be better prepared for life on the outside?
We at The Columbian-Progress learned about the effort to stifle reading in prisons over recent months when prisons began rejecting our newspapers sent to subscribers behind bars. Many prisoners like to keep up with what’s going on in their hometown; it’s a way of maintaining a connection with the world they formerly lived in and hope to return. Mind you, these weren’t prisoners who got into trouble and had their privileges revoked; these were blanket bans on all newspapers. We’ve not been able to get an explanation about which prisons banned newspapers and why.
MDOC, which has been trying to escape from the Chris Epps scandal where private prison companies and others paid bribes to get lucrative contracts, has made a lot of head-scratching decisions over the years. If anyone knew the whole truth about what happens in Mississippi’s prisons, I think it would be another huge blowup. They’ve always operated on their own rules without much legislative or press oversight; we’ve seen where that’s gotten us.
There now seems to be a shift toward more accountability. My boss, Wyatt Emmerich, has repeatedly reported on a federal trial involving the East Mississippi Correctional Facility that detailed abuses among mentally ill prisoners, and Jerry Mitchell of the Clarion Ledger has been poking away for the past couple of years at abuses within the prison system. When Mitchell, the state’s preeminent investigative journalist, works repeatedly on a story like that, it’s a good indication that there is a lot more behind the scenes that he’s working to expose.
With all its problems, why would MDOC poke the bear with this book ban?
Ask any prisoner and they’ll tell you the boredom is the worst part of serving time. That’s why there’s never a shortage of volunteers for outside jobs, even if it’s something unappetizing like riding on the back of a garbage truck. And reading is just about the cheapest, most productive way to shape an idle mind; better to read than to riot.
C-P Editor/Publisher Charlie Smith may be reached at csmith@columbianprogress.com.
