Just after writing my blog last week about the wonders of Changing Lives Through Literature (see “What You Need to Know About Changing Lives Through Literature“) I came across an article on the Christian Science Monitor (CSM) titled “Should prison inmates be allowed to read whatever they choose?”

We know prisons only let in paperback books. At least that is what Framingham Women’s Prison told me some years ago. But they also certainly don’t want books critical of their practices and wouldn’t house my book, Shakespeare Behind Bars in the prison library when it was first published. They said it was because it was a hardback but even in paper, I’ve heard it hasn’t made its way there.

Husna Haq, in his CSM article mentions that recently the 1st District Court of Appeal in San Francisco overturned a previous ruling barring a prisoner from receiving a book he requested deemed “problematic” by prison officials. The book in question was The Silver Crown by Mathilde Madden “which has widely become known as ‘werewolf erotica,’ and was considered too sexual by corrections officers.”

What? Corrections Officers are deciding that a book is too sexual for prisoners to read?

Get a load of this other recent news article posted in Business Insider. Called “America’s Prison Guards Are The ‘Ugly Stepchildren’ Of The Criminal Justice System” the article reveals how guards “allegedly snuck cellphones and other contraband to Black Guerrilla Family (BGF) prison gangsters.” They allowed them to do whatever they wanted apparently, and BGF leader Tavon White is accused of impregnating four guards, two of whom got tattoos with his name.

Thankfully, as Salon reported, the Court found that the prison had overstepped its bounds in the case, engaging in an “arbitrary and capricious application of the regulation.” The judge declared that ” The Silver Crown did not meet the famous ‘three-pronged’ standard by which American courts have determined obscenity since the Supreme Court of the United States’ decision on Miller v. California in 1973.”

A 2011 suit by the American Civil Liberties Union charged a South Carolina prison with denying its prisoners all reading material other than the Bible.Other cases include an Alabama prison that barred a prisoner from reading the Pulitzer Prize-winning Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II by Douglas Blackmon.

Why, because it was too controversial? That’s what I was told at Framingham when I wanted to teach a June Jordan essay and direct a version of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Way before Oprah produced a movie in this novel, I had planned to have many Janies and the focus on a re-creation of the trial scene. But the prison said that involving my theatre troupe in such an effort was “too racial.” And I quote.

The truth is that prisons want to control behavior. They want to “reform” which usually means to turn out people who are as conformist as possible. Read, write fine. As long as they don’t overstep “our boundaries.”

The idea that freedom of the press or the freedom to read literature of one’s choice doesn’t exist for prisoners is unconstitutional. The idea that is does is illusion.

Not that this surprises me. I worked at Framingham Women’s Prison in Massachusetts in the 1990’s when male guards rounded up women in the middle of the night for an “alleged” strip-search. They were sued. The women won. But the extent of the case at the jail in Chicopee where Sheriff Michael J. Ashe is reputed to be innovative, concerned and on the side of the women is frankly appalling.

This image of a woman strip searched by a female guard via ACLU. It’s humiliating enough, right?

The story broke on May 23rd on a local TV station in the western part of the state,WWLP, and was picked up the next day by the The Springfield Republican but the suit was originally filed in September 2011. At that time, Debra Baggett, a former prisoner at the Western Mass Regional Women’s Correctional Center sued on behalf of 178 women. It took a while — what’s new? — but U.S. District Judge Michael A. Ponsor has finally ruled that the class action suit can go forward. 178 women, strip-searched at different times, were allegedly videotaped by a male officer during those body-cavity searches. These were women segregated from the population for different reasons such as suicide watch; the jail claimed that strip searches were necessary for safety per attorney David Milton, interviewed on the Bill Newman radio show, also out of Western Mass.

WWLP reported that Boston Civil Rights attorney Howard Friedman, colleague of Milton, said these travesties occurred between 2008 and 2010, and that “men held the camera for 71% of the videotaped strip searches.” Attorney Friedman also asserted, says WWLP that after prison officials became aware of the lawsuit in 2012, the percentage of those videotaped dropped to 2% by 2012.

Where was Sheriff Ashe, the innovator during all this? One can only speculate.

These cases are so clearly an abuse of power that it is almost not worth mentioning the obvious. And yet a woman stripped naked in front of male officers should only occur in cases of emergency. Female officers should always be conducting searches. And it shouldn’t take a lawsuit to change an abusive policy. Supposedly the jail now only videotapes when they feel there is a direct threat, i.e. dangerousness, but I bet they aren’t letting men hold the camera now. Plus, why on earth we need videotaping of people who might commit suicide when they are being strip searched — for contraband supposedly –is beyond beyond.

In 2011, The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that cross-gender strip searches of prisoners were unconstitutional, reported in the ABA Journal of the American Bar Association. That was when a male sued because a female officer searched him.

A court is expected to rule on whether the policy that was allegedly in place at the women’s correctional center was or was not constitutional. That’s to happen sometime in early 2014. Let’s hope the next judge does the right thing.

Cartoons by artists behind bars give them a way to express themselves without words.  A chance to speak out their conditions, pains and losses as well as use humor to alleviate some of the deepest pains or anger. 

Lois Ahrens at the Real Cost of Prisons Project has comics by many artists behind bars and they tell amazing stories. One of the artists whose work is featured on the home page is Jacob Barrett.  He portrays the brutality of prison with a dark humor in this cartoon titled “Mass Incarceration.”

Here he uses color to give us the punch of the “D.O.C.” and help us see bodies hauled off in the same kind of vehicle that picks up trees or trash.  The DOC driver looks almost jubilant and the lilting tone contrasts with the awful reality of body after body after body being essentially warehouse.

On Ahrens‘ website, two complete books are available that tell researched and documented stories of incarceration — all in comics. “As of February 2010, 125,000 copies of the comic books have been printed and more than 115,000 have been sent to families of people who are incarcerated, people who are incarcerated and to organizers and activists throughout the country.”  Check out the website if you or your group is interested.

Another place I’ve found some wonderful comics is on the website Between the Bars.  If you’ve never visited this site, do.  Many pieces of art some touching writing — all by prisoners across the country. Steve J. Burkett created the piece below around Christmas this past year.

Channeling humor, loss and the feelings of isolation at holidays, Steve puts his shipwrecked, totally surprised-to-be-there-in-spite-of-the-drink Santa on an island. No man is an island?  Go to prison and see if you still feel that way. 

Please see my new article at  about the impending new policy coming to Massachusetts — dogs who will sniff visitors for drugs at state prisons.

Here’s how it begins:  “By now, everyone has heard about the amazing sense of smell of bomb-sniffing dogs, who we saw on the front lines of the Boston Marathon bombings. But a new policy coming to state prisons that involves dogs trained to sniff out drugs could rattle some cages, and it should cause us to ask: Is Massachusetts turning down the wrong criminal justice path, aiming to fix a problem without getting at its core cause?”

Be sure and watch the video.  Do these digs remind you of other dogs, anywhere else?  One thing that didn’t make it in my article is this:

In an interview, Marina Drummer, Director of the Community Future Collectives in California, said Louisiana has a particularly horrendous drug-sniffing policy: “Visitors line up and go inside a little shed, individually. Around the bottom two feet is chicken wire—each person goes in the box and the handlers take the dog and walk around the shed with the dogs sniffing.” She called it “a terrifying experience for children and humiliating for everybody else.

Check out my newest blog post about the new report issued by MassINC and Community Resources for Justice (CRJ) on– guess what — the sagging state of criminal justice health in Massachusetts.

“The report points out well-worn zingers such as “A decade ago, higher education surpassed spending on corrections by 25 percent. Today the higher education budget is 21 percent lower.”

The report, titled Crime, Cost, and Consequences: Is It Time to Get Smart on Crime?, asks a good question, and it provides some good suggestions for change. But it seems like, year after year, another report comes out that recommends significant change to the system. And it seems that, year after year, we look over our policies, brood over how much money we’re spending, shake our heads at how many people keep returning to prison, and then, just like that, wash our hands and choose not to follow the recommendations.”  More.