POSTCARD-only policy in jails unconstitutional!

YAY for Prison Legal News - which is well worth the subscription, by the way.

 Hopefully this means the beginning of the end of the crummy postcard-only policy in the Maricopa County jail system. It really is unduly oppressive and drastically restricts freedom of speech both ways. It being thrown out in one jail doesn't mean that Joe Arpaio will change his policy without a fight, though. It means the prisoners in his jails need to file grievances about the mail policy violating your 1st Amendment rights - appealing them all the way to the top so you are in a position to sue when the last denial comes down - that's called "exhausting administrative remedies" - it shows you're trying to work things out in-house, by policy, before asking the court to settle your prisoner issues. 

I know the MCSO is worried about massive quantities of drugs being hidden in children's homemade birthday cards and the like, but I think they should start strip-searcing the guards (who are the biggest source of contraband in most jails/prisons) instead of strip-searching all the prisoner's  mail...they'd find a whole hell of a lot more contraband that way.

Besides, nothing beats a real letter...

Here's the link to the actual decision

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PLN prevails in challenge to postcard-only policy at Columbia County, OR jail

Prison Legal News, Jan. 1, 2013. Press release - PLN prevails in challenge to postcard-only policy at Columbia County, OR jail 2013

PRESS RELEASE

Human Rights Defense Center
For Immediate Release

April 25, 2013


Federal Court Strikes Down Postcard-only Policy at Columbia County Jail

Portland, OR – On April 24, the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon, Portland Division, held that a postcard-only policy at the Columbia County Jail, which restricted mail sent to and from detainees at the facility to postcards, is unconstitutional. The court therefore has prohibited enforcement of the policy permanently – the first time in the United States that a jail’s postcard-only policy has been struck down following a trial on the merits.

The ruling, by federal judge Michael H. Simon, was entered in a lawsuit against Columbia County and Sheriff Jeff Dickerson filed by Prison Legal News (PLN), a non-profit monthly publication that covers criminal justice-related issues. PLN, a project of the Human Rights Defense Center, sued in January 2012 after Columbia County jail employees rejected PLN’s monthly news publication and letters mailed to detainees. Further, the jail had failed to provide PLN with notice or an opportunity to appeal the jail’s censorship of PLN’s materials.

The rejection of PLN’s publications and letters was attributed to the jail’s postcard-only policy and a policy and practice that prohibited detainees from receiving magazines. PLN contended that such policies violated its rights under the First Amendment, and that the lack of notice and opportunity to appeal was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.

During the litigation, the defendants admitted “that inmates have a First Amendment right to receive magazines and inmates and their correspondents have a Fourteenth Amendment right to procedural due process.” However, the jail defended its postcard-only policy and claimed there was no official policy banning magazines at the jail.

On May 29, 2012, Judge Simon entered a preliminary injunction prohibiting the defendants from enforcing their postcard-only policy. He ruled that the policy "drastically restricts an inmate’s ability to communicate with the outside world," and "prevents an inmate’s family from sending items such as photographs, children’s report cards and drawings, and copies of bills, doctor reports, and spiritual and religious tracts." The court also observed that the jail’s postcard-only policy "inhibits rehabilitation," citing a U.S. Supreme Court decision that found "inmate freedom to correspond with outsiders advances rather than retards the goal of rehabilitation." Undeterred, the defendants continued to defend their policy at trial, held from February 5 to 8, 2013.

Following the trial, the district court found in its April 24 ruling that the defendants’ rationales for adopting the postcard-only policy at the jail – preventing the introduction of contraband and saving time during mail inspection – were not supported by the evidence.

The court also determined that jail employees “did not in fact allow magazines to enter the Jail,” and that a ban on magazines was specifically declared in the jail’s inmate handbook, in a jail memorandum and on the jail’s website. Further, "Sheriff Dickerson credibly testified that he did not know that the First Amendment required the Jail to allow inmates to receive magazines when he took office in 2009." The district court therefore concluded that the defendants had a policy and custom of prohibiting magazines, in violation of the First Amendment.

Accordingly, Judge Simon entered a permanent injunction that enjoins the defendants from restricting incoming and outgoing mail to postcards only. "[T]he postcard-only policy creates a hurdle to thoughtful, personal, and constructive written communications between an inmate and his or her unincarcerated family and friends," he wrote. He also declared "that inmates have a First Amendment right to receive magazines and that it would be unconstitutional for Defendants to refuse to deliver magazines to inmates solely because they are magazines," and that detainees and their correspondents have a right to procedural due process when mail is rejected, including notice of the rejection and the ability to appeal same.

"This lawsuit could have been avoided had Sheriff Dickerson not enacted an unconstitutional, harmful policy that limited correspondence to and from detainees to postcards, and had he ensured that jail employees were properly trained as to the First Amendment and due process rights of both detainees and those who correspond with them," stated PLN editor Paul Wright. "Unfortunately he failed in both of these respects, and the court’s ruling is the result."

"The court’s well-reasoned and thoughtful opinion is notice to other jails that a postcard-only policy does not serve a legitimate purpose, and indeed harms the public interest. Jails would do well to steer clear of adopting ineffective policies that violate the Constitutional right of free speech," added attorney Jesse Wing, who represented PLN at trial.

PLN was represented by Marc D. Blackman with the Portland law firm of Ransom Blackman, LLP; Jesse Wing and Katie Chamberlain with the Seattle law firm of MacDonald Hoague and Bayless; and Human Rights Defense Center general counsel Lance Weber and staff attorney Alissa Hull. The case is Prison Legal News v. Columbia County, U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon, Case No. 3:12-cv-00071-SI.

________________________


The Human Rights Defense Center, founded in 1990 and based in Brattleboro, Vermont, is a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting human rights in U.S. detention facilities. HRDC publishes Prison Legal News (PLN), a monthly magazine that includes reports, reviews and analysis of court rulings and news related to prisoners’ rights and criminal justice issues. PLN has around 7,000 subscribers nationwide and operates a website (www.prisonlegalnews.org) that includes a comprehensive database of prison and jail-related articles, news reports, court rulings, verdicts, settlements and related documents.


For further information, please contact:

Paul Wright, Editor
Prison Legal News
(802) 257-1342 (office)
(802) 275-8594 (cell)
pwright@prisonlegalnews.org

Jesse Wing, Attorney
MacDonald Hoague & Bayless
705 Second Avenue, Suite 1500
Seattle, WA 98104
(206) 622-1604 (office)
jessew@mhb.com

Ethnic studies books banned from AZ state prisons?

As I said in my previous correspondence, Mr. Ryan: you are the reason  your prisoners have rioted, not me. I don't think I even have contacts on Santa Rita. You appear to have plenty of discretion as to what you will and won't allow inside your institutions...I wish your SSU officers were as vigilant about keeping the heroin out as they are about stopping the flow of my free speech.

In any case, to the rest of you: here is the newsletter in question, in case you missed it. I mailed a list of the ethnic studies books banned from Arizona's public schools to a bunch of prisoners this summer, encouraging them to request and read them in solidarity with students - and in defiance of racism, which is necessary to uphold the current power structure inside. 

I really didn't think those books would be off limits to adult prisoners too, but that sure is what it sounds like - this is the AZ DOC's General Counsel they sent to intimidate me, by the way. She really is scarier than Chuck - she used to be a capital crimes prosecutor at the AG's office. This newsletter isn't what I was so concerned about being confiscated, though - they still haven't responded to me on that count.

Here is the beginning of DO 914.08, by the way:

"UNAUTHORIZED PUBLICATIONS AND MATERIAL - Prohibited publications include those that by their nature or content threaten or are detrimental to the security, safety and orderly operation, or discipline of the facility, or inmate rehabilitation, or, are found to facilitate, encourage, incite, promote or instruct in criminal activity or unauthorized prison activity."


Shame on me for urging anyone - especially criminals - to resist racism and violence...
 

Carlo Krakoff, age 29, 

died in an AZ state prison of a heroin overdose.

Substance abuse treatment programs are nearly impossible to get into in the AZ Department of Corrections, even for those who want it desperately - only 4% of all state prisoners were able to participate in one last year, including those we sent to private prisons specifically for DUI offenses. That's despite AZ DOC records stating that oapproximately 75% of prisoners are there for substance abuse-related crimes. Too many prisoners going in are actually clean but come out addicted to herion, as the drug is so plentiful and alternative activities for the mind, body and soul  are so few. 

Arizona Prisonwatch <arizonaprisonwatch@gmail.com>

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Prisonwatch Newsletter 2 messages

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NORTHUP, DAWN <xxxxxx@azcorrections.gov>	Fri, Nov 9, 2012 at 4:24 PM
To: Arizona Prisonwatch <arizonaprisonwatch@gmail.com> Cc: "RYAN, CHARLES" <xxxxxx@azcorrections.gov>, "PATTON, ROBERT" <xxxxxx@azcorrections.gov>
Ms. Plews: On behalf of Director Ryan, I am responding to your October 30, 2012 email, inquiring about the reason your Prisonwatch Newsletter has not been disseminated to inmates at ADC complexes.  In your Summer, 2012 Newsletter, titled: “Prisoners’ Justice Day 2012: Justice For Dana” you advocated that prisoners “push back” and show resistance from injustice by requesting a subversive book or by “support[ing] another prisoner’s resistance.”  Although your intent may have been to provoke non-violence, inmates may construe your suggestion that they “fight the injustice from within” as an invitation for unrest and non-compliance.  Contrary to many of your assertions, the safety and security of the inmates and staff is of paramount concern to ADC.  In accordance with DO 914.02, staff at each complex is authorized to withhold publications that may have a detrimental impact on the safe and orderly operation of the institution.  Encouraging inmates to request books that you know are prohibited or to conduct themselves in a manner to show “resistance” violates that policy. In accordance with DO 914.02 and 914.08, your Newsletter, as with all other incoming publications, is subject to screening and review.  Your Newsletter will be disseminated to intended recipients after review provided it complies with Department Policy.  Dawn Northup General Counsel Arizona Department of Corrections 602-542-2323 dnorthup@azcorrections.gov

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Arizona Prisonwatch <arizonaprisonwatch@gmail.com> Fri, Nov 9, 2012 at 5:40 PM To: "NORTHUP, DAWN" <xxxxxxx@azcorrections.gov> Cc: Daniel Pochoda <xxxxxxxx@acluaz.org> Thank you for getting back to me on the July Newsletter. My greater concern, though, is that my more recent correspondence - not all of it containing calls to "resist" in a way that could seriously threaten institutional order - has apparently been disrupted to nearly all the prisoners I previously corresponded with. This includes prisoners trying to access both health care and safety because they are in harms way; I hate to answer people in such desperate straits with silence. Since I haven't gotten any feedback from you folks about what may be getting confiscated or contrabanded until now, I have no idea if your office has legitimate things you want me to tone down, or if Chuck Ryan just doesn't want me arming his prisoners with information about appropriately asserting their civil rights. Those are two very different things. In any case, I'd like to know what procedures I need to follow to protect my own rights - the "free speech" ones. How do I grieve an ADC action that adversely affects me as a civilian? That correspondence represents a tremendous investment of time, money, and other resources. Much of my correspondence with prisoners is time-sensitive, as I'm sure you are aware, so I'd really prefer confrontation over avoidance on such matters. Please let me know what's happening with the rest of my mail - both to and from prisoners. Regards, Peggy Plews [Quoted text hidden] -- Margaret J. Plews, Editor Arizona Prison Watch P.O. Box 20494 Phoenix, AZ 85036 480-580-6807 "Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness, and our ability to tell our own stories..."  - Arundhati Roy Prison Abolitionist http://prisonabolitionist.blogspot.com Arizona Prison Watch http://arizonaprisonwatch.blogspot.com Survivors of Prison Violence - AZ http://azprisonsurvivors.blogspot.com

Ortega: The prisons, their drugs, and our dead.

 

 Carlo Steven Krakoff

Here's the moving slideshow of prisoners put together by the AZ Republic for this series...check it out at the source.

-------from the Arizona Republic--------

 Arizona Prisons Struggle With Drugs


Bob Ortega
Arizona Republic
June 3, 2012

Orion Wilkins was a drug addict, hooked on painkillers he'd begun taking to fight the pain of an old high-school football injury.

In 2008, he used a wrapped block of Velveeta cheese, claiming it was a bomb, to rob several Valley pharmacies of pain pills to feed his addiction. He was convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to 101/2 years in prison.

Three years later, on Dec. 7, 2011, Wilkins, 35, died of a drug overdose inside the Arizona state prison in Florence.

The presence of illegal drugs inside what are supposed to be the most secure buildings in the state has led to the deaths of at least seven inmates from overdoses, all involving heroin, over the past two years. The state Department of Corrections classified the deaths as accidental.

The Arizona Republic investigated these deaths as part of a broader look at the high rates of suicide, homicide and accidental deaths in Arizona's state prisons. The ability of inmates to get drugs and hypodermic needles while behind bars suggests that the Department of Corrections has its own drug problem: a porous security system that allows a steady flow of drugs to be smuggled into the state prison system by inmates, visitors and prison staff.

Department inspections in the year after three inmates escaped from the Arizona State Prison-Kingman in 2010 repeatedly revealed that officers at most prisons failed to properly search and screen staff and visitors. The department says it has improved security procedures.

Late last month, a multi-agency investigation, including Corrections, initiated by the Chandler Police Department, made 44 arrests and seized 32 pounds of heroin and 5 pounds of cocaine and uncovered a drug ring connected to a state prison.

A spokesman for the Arizona attorney general said one woman arrested had planned to take 10 ounces of heroin to the state prison's Lewis Complex in Buckeye. A family with three brothers inside state prisons operated the ring and had smuggled heroin in several times before, she said.

The Attorney General's Office did not release details of how the drugs were smuggled in.

Corrections officials say that drugs, cellphones and other contraband can enter prisons via visitors, incoming mail, off-site inmate work crews and staff. Corrections director Charles Ryan noted an incident two years ago at the Lewis unit in which a corrections officer was caught bringing in burritos stuffed with two cellphones and a package of marijuana. But he says that inmate visitors are the biggest source of drugs.

"We have visitors who may secrete contraband in a body cavity, and then pass it to an inmate who will secrete it in his body cavity," Ryan said. To combat that, he says, the department uses drug-detection and cellphone-detection dogs. "We also search visitors through a screening device where a fan blows across the visitor, the dog sits on other side of a wire-mesh fence, and the dog will alert if there is contraband," Ryan said.

Whether smuggled in by visitors, as Ryan says, or staff, as inmates and some corrections officers allege, drugs continue to get through. Internal incident reports for 28 days in May obtained by The Republic show that every day, correctional officers find heroin, methamphetamine, marijuana and spice, along with syringes and contraband cellphones that inmates can use to communicate with drug suppliers on the outside. During cell searches, officers frequently catch inmates hurriedly flushing objects down their toilets.

Examples from the incident reports:

On May 6, an officer at the state prison's Manzanita Unit in Tucson spotted a balloon, apparently filled with drugs, that fell out of the pants of an inmate who was being visited by his brother and sister. On the same day an inmate in solitary at the Eyman Complex in Florence was taken to Anthem Hospital with an apparent drug overdose.

On May 9, an assistant deputy warden at the state prison's Cheyenne Unit in Yuma was caught bringing a cellphone into the prison in her lunch bag. Corrections officials have not responded to queries about this incident, which was not publicly disclosed.

On May 23, a Tucson city employee spotted someone tossing a package over a fence to an inmate work crew. Inside the package were four bubble-wrapped cellphones.

On May 26, in separate incidents at four prisons, corrections officers found two packets of drugs, two syringes, a cellphone and, at the Florence prison's central unit, four gallons of alcohol in an inmate's cell.
Three-quarters of arriving inmates have significant substance-abuse histories, according to Corrections records, yet only one in 13 received substance-abuse treatment last fiscal year. A spokesman for the department said inmates usually don't receive treatment until they approach the end of their sentence.

The heroin-overdose death of Anthony Braun at the Lewis Complex on Nov. 14 has raised other questions about the problems of drugs in state prisons.

Tony Braun

An anonymous May 1 e-mail to prisoner advocate Peg Plews alleged that two correctional officers assigned to Braun's housing unit failed to do their security checks for at least four hours before inmates notified them Braun was having problems. The e-mail alleged one officer was asleep in the control room, and questioned whether Braun might have been saved if officers had done their jobs properly.

Corrections spokesman Bill Lamoreaux confirmed that one officer was dismissed, another resigned and a sergeant was demoted as a result of the incident, though he could not confirm whether it was for failing to conduct security checks. He said the case was referred to the Maricopa County attorney for possible charges against other inmates.

The mothers of two dead inmates blame the availability of drugs behind bars for the deaths of their sons.

Roberta Wilkins, the mother of Orion Wilkins, said her son became addicted to pain pills he started taking for back injuries from playing football. In an interview, she wept over his death but didn't excuse his crime. "It doesn't matter; he threatened and terrified people. We discussed his crimes and how stupid and idiotic they were."

But she said he had seemed to be drug free and was gaining weight for several months before his death.

Cynthia Krakoff's son, Carlo Krakoff, died of a heroin overdose in prison in Tucson on July 31, 2011. A former child actor who played the young Spock in "Star Trek III: The Search for Spock," he became addicted to the pain medication Oxycontin after his jaw was damaged in a tonsillectomy, says his mother. As the addiction progressed, it changed him, she said.

"He was always so levelheaded and loving," Cynthia said, especially toward his son, now four. "Then at a detox facility in Phoenix, they treated him with Methadone. He met some low-life people there, and all of sudden he was stoned all the time."

Cynthia said she was shocked when Carlo was arrested in 2009 on suspicion of robbing several Phoenix-area pharmacies with a gun. But she was more shocked when he died 15 months into his 13-year sentence.

"Nobody ever told me he could die in prison of illegal drugs," she said. "If they can't clean up the prisons, they need to find a different way to treat the drug addicts."