Under President Donald J. Trump, the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has a mandate to bolster Trump’s draconian law-and-order agenda—and carte blanche to cater to the private sector’s schemes to maximize profits.
To that point, BOP is enacting new policies on books and communications that will drive business to a limited set of vendors and effectively deprive its nearly 200,000 federal prisoners of reading material as well as access to friends and family, support organizations, and media.
The first of the new policies bans all books from being sent into federal facilities from outside sources including Amazon and Barnes & Noble. These retailers are usually the only means by which prisoners can receive books because most facilities reject reading material sent from individuals or small bookstores due to regulations aimed at eliminating contraband.
Now, prisoners instead will have to submit a request to purchase books — a limit of five per order — through an ordering system in which they must pay exorbitant prices and don’t have the option to buy cheaper used paperbacks. In addition, prisoners must pay a 30 percent tax plus shipping cost, according to prisoners and memos distributed in at least three BOP facilities. Under the new protocol, a book purchased from Amazon for as little as $11.76, with shipping included, could cost more than $26.
Warden David Shinn of the Victorville Federal Correctional Institution (FCI), one of two federal institutions in California where the book policy is already in place, claimed it is a response to “attempts to introduce narcotics … unauthorized positive urinalysis; inmate on inmate assaults; and inmate on staff assaults.”
A Florida federal penitentiary plans to implement the policy this month.
“Effective Monday, May 14, 2018, books from a publisher, book club, bookstore, or friends and family will no longer be accepted through the mail,” reads the memo from warden R.C. Cheatham which was first obtained by the Families Against Mandatory Minimums organization (FAMM). “Books will be rejected by mailroom staff and returned to sender.”
The book ban is, at a minimum, counter-productive.
[B]ooks are a critical part of the rehabilitation process, allowing prisoners to learn and develop new skills. A 2013 RAND study found that prisoners who received education in prison had 43 percent lower odds of recidivating than those who did not.
New York enacted and then quickly reversed a similar policy. Yet BOP is forging ahead.
BOP’s second problematic initiative limits who prisoners can communicate with.
BOP is placing new limits on prisoner communications that will greatly affect who they can talk to on the outside. Under this policy, no two prisoners are allowed to have the same person on their contact list in prison email system, known as CorrLinks, according to memos circulated in Coleman, Victorville, and California’s Dublin Federal Correctional Institution
“An inmate’s contact list may not possess another inmate’s immediate family member, friend, or contact located on the inmate’s approved list,” reads the March 22 Dublin memo, adding it will make exceptions for “attorneys, clerks of the court, and other contacts approved on a case-by-case basis.”
What’s the problem? Approving attorney contact on a case-by-case basis is a bureaucratic nightmare almost certain to result in constitutional violations. Preventing any two prisoners from contacting the same people vitiates prisoners’ rights advocates’ ability to support inmates and both advocates’ and journalists’ opportunities to gather information. And, of course, individuals may have more than one family member or friend incarcerated at the same facility.
The ACLU of Florida is preparing to fight the book restriction, and the Mississippi Center for Justice filed suit against the Department of Corrections on April 30 over a similar policy banning all but purchased or “religious” books.