New Draconian Policy Affects Books & Mail in PA Prisons

In a convoluted attempt to eliminate drug use in prisons, Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (DOC) has concocted a $15,000,000 plan that will censor books, alienate prisoners, increase recidivism, and not eliminate drug use in prisons.

All of this began because of an incident involving 57 members of staff made ill by exposure to K2, a synthetic cannabinoid. And while no one would disagree that keeping people safe is crucial, toxicologists have told local Pennsylvania papers, they don’t believe that most exposed were experiencing anything more than mass hysteria.

“In a word, it’s implausible,” said Dr. Lewis Nelson, chair of emergency medicine at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School and a past president of the American College of Medical Toxicology. “One thing we know about [synthetic cannabinoids] is that they don’t cause the effects these folks are having, and certainly not by the route that they’re being exposed. … The symptoms are much more consistent with anxiety.”

Some staff members were administered naloxone, also known by its brand name Narcan, in the field after exposure, a medication which reverses opiate overdoses. There is absolutely no rationale given for why it was administered, and only one person administered the drug was unresponsive, which is a major symptom of overdose. Naloxone also has no benefit to those under the influence of artificial cannabinoids.

So the DOC crafted a plan to eliminate books and magazines being sent to inmates from donation groups, like Books Through Bars, and booksellers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble to avoid drugs being smuggled in the books. Instead the prisons will shift to ebooks and digital magazines. The ebooks range in price from $2.99 to $24.99 and can be read on tablets that cost $149. Prisoners can make as little as $0.19 an hour.

The library of ebooks available contains 8,500 titles and consists largely of material that exists in the public domain and could be read freely through Project Guttenberg, “but that cost anywhere from $2.99 (Moby-Dick) to $11.99 (The Federalist Papers), all the way up to $14.99 (Joseph Conrad’s The Rescue). Many more recent titles also are priced far higher than the same Kindle e-books. For instance, Stephen King’s prison tome, The Green Mile, costs 66 percent more on prison tablets than out in the free world.”

Those who have reviewed the full list of titles are not impressed by the selection, saying that the company doesn’t offer access to the most frequently requested books. A cursory glance reveals that there are either no comics and graphic novels (which are frequently requested by inmates) or next to none.

“The Autobiography of Malcolm X didn’t make the cut, though The Autobiography of Tony Bennett did. Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl isn’t available, but interested parties can download Diary of a South Beach Party Girl. Also missing are modern-day carceral memoirs: Erwin James’ A Life Inside, Jeffrey Archer’s A Prison Diary, and Piper Kerman’s Orange is the New Black”. There are no titles by John Grisham, Robert Ludlum, or Donald Goines — all cited as popular authors in prison libraries. There are, however, four volumes from the oeuvre of Tori Spelling.”

Unsurprisingly, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow which details the inherit problems with mass incarceration, and has faced bans in prisons before, is not available either. Neither are there any legal or regular dictionaries available on the tablets, both of which are the most frequently requested books according to Books Through Bars. Prison libraries do have copies of dictionaries available, but with books like these, prisoners benefit most from being able to access them whenever they need to, so having them in their cell is far more beneficial.

“Another frequent request is the Quran, said Rebecca Makas, a member of Philadelphia Books Through Bars who has a doctorate in religion concentrating in Islamic studies. She was alarmed to see the translation GTL offers is a ‘nonstandard’ version not commonly used in academic or religious settings and containing departures that would be “extremely offensive to most observant Muslims.”

Access to books not only greatly reduces recidivism, but the programs like Books Through Bars allow inmates a chance to write letters and receive mail back that put them in contact with caring individuals. Taking away that contact only increases isolation.

Under this new plan from the DOC, inmates would also loose access to the actual mail sent to them. They would never again get to hold a birthday card, or a family photo sent to them. Instead the prison will pay $4 million a year to a sorting facility in Florida which will open the mail and scan it in to a computer, afterwards destroying the original (the period of time they keep the original is still under debate). A person doesn’t need to have been in prison to get how harmful this can be to the inmates, but merely think of a time they were away at sleepover camp or traveling for an extended period that they received a handwritten letter and knew they were loved.

So not only will these new policies hurt inmates emotionally, reduce attempts at self education, and connection with the outside world, they will also do very little to fix the drug problem that exists in prisons today, because it is very unlikely that books sent by approved corporations and charities were the main source of the problem. As Felix Rosado, a current inmate in a Pennsylvania prison wrote in his op-ed for the Philadelphia Inquirer

By now the injustice and harm of mass incarceration is well-documented. Being tough on black, brown, and poor people has not solved our social ills, but has created deeper ones. And so will these new policies. They are a three-decade step backward. We can no more punish our way to drug-free prisons than we can imprison our way to a drugless nation.

If you want to help, sign and share an online petition, volunteer your time, money, or old comic books with a book donation nonprofit, or just share stories online that raise awareness of the censorship that is happening every day behind bars.

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