In November 2008, a  mail-order book addressed to Lou Johnson arrived at the Hilltop  Unit, a state prison for women located in Gatesville, central  Texas. Written by investigative journalist Silja Talvi, the book  was titledWomen Behind Bars:The Crisis  of Women in the U.S. Prison System, and chronicled the past  decades sweeping upsurge in female incarceration as told through  the stories of prisoners across the country. Talvis interviews  cast light on the common threads of trauma and abuse these women  shared, the increase in nonviolent drug charges that put them  behind bars, and the troubling conditions they found inside.
  Johnson, one of the women interviewed for the project, described  the harsh and humiliating circumstances she endured at the Texas  Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) facility. Denied adequate  medical care, refused meals for minor infractions such as talking  in line, and forced to clean pipe chases covered with fecal  material without gloves, Johnson summed up her experience as  cruel and unusual punishment.
  But Johnson was barred from reading her own account in print, as  well as from accessing the testimonies of the one hundred other  female prisoners interviewed forWomen Behind Bars. By  the time her copy arrived at the Hilltop Unit mailroom, the book  had already been censored at another TDCJ facility. Johnson  received a form explaining that an offending passage on page 38  depicted sex with a minor, therefore the publication as a whole  was detrimental to offenders rehabilitation because it would  encourage deviant criminal behavior. She attempted to appeal  the decision to no avail; having never received the book to  review the contents of page 38, she was in no position to present  a compelling rebuttal.
  Prison walls do not form a barrier separating prison inmates  from the protections of the Constitution, the U.S. Supreme Court  found in its 1987Turner v. Safleydecision. While  inmates are not entitled to full First Amendment rights, any  encroachment on their freedom of speech must be reasonably  related to legitimate penological objectives.
    While both publishers and prisoners have standing to challenge    prison censorship policies that restrict opportunities to send    and receive literature, in practice publishers are far better    equippedthey are free from the legal restrictions that bind    the incarcerated, and can actually access the material in    question. But commercial magazines and booksellers rarely act    upon notice that the material theyve mailed has been seized or    withheld; prison inmates dont represent a sufficiently    marketable demographic.  
    Women Behind Bars, however, was distributed by Prison    Legal News (PLN), which, as the only national publication whose    majority of contributors and subscribers are state and federal    prisoners, is deeply invested in combating prison censorship.    Thats our core constituency, says editor Paul Wright. Wright    founded the magazine in 1990 while serving out a sentence for    first-degree murder in Washington State. As a    twenty-one-year-old military policeman, Wright was broke and a    week away from completing his service when he tried to rob a    cocaine dealer who turned out to have a gun. Wright panicked    and shot first, and was sentenced to twenty-five years.  
    In prison, he worked as a book fetcher at the facilitys law    library, and grew interested in prison conditions litigation.    With fellow inmate Ed Mead, he began PLN as a ten-page    hand-typed newsletter with a readership of just seventy-five    aimed at raising political consciousness and informing    prisoners of their rights. The censorship was immediate. In    1991, Wright reported on pervasive racism at Washingtons    Clallam Bay Corrections Center, and a specific incident in    which a group of white guards brutalized a black inmate. Prison    authorities redacted the incriminating sections for circulation    inside Clallam Bay, and when they found out that PLN had been    distributed to subscribers outside of the facility, subjected    Wright to three weeks of solitary confinement.  
    Wright, who was released in 2003 after serving seventeen years    of his twenty-five year sentence, says that over the past few    decades, censorship practices in prisons and jails have grown    startlingly worse. PLNwhich now has 7,000 print subscribers in    all fifty states, with reader surveys indicating that each    issue is passed around to ten different inmateshas faced    blanket censorship in over ten state prisons systems, and    countless bans in local jails across the country. The magazine    was impelled to establish the Human Rights Defense Center, a    legal nonprofit dedicated to protecting subscribers right to    read. It also launched a book publishing operation to    distribute titles that, despite limited commercial appeal, are    vital to incarcerated populations, such asPrisoners    Self Help Litigation Manual,Hepatitis and Liver    Disease: What You Need to Know, andBeyond Bars:    Rejoining Society After Prison. Which brings us back to    Texas.  
    Page 38 ofWomen Behind Bars, it turned out,    described the childhood ordeals faced by Tina Thomas, a    neurologist and professor in a teaching college who battled    drug addiction late in her career:  
    What is even more remarkable about Thomas is that she had    overcome the kind    of childhood trauma that might have completely derailed her    adult life. It might    have been precisely that background that first propelled her to    become an    overachiever and attain a high level of professional success,    but then came back    to haunt her just as she had gotten to where she wanted to go.    The dark secret of    her life was that she had been forced to perform fellatio on    her uncle when she    was just four years old. Thomas explains that this unresolved    trauma became the    template for a lifetime of distrust, fear, uncertainty, and a    spirit of self-negation.  
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Battling censorship behind bars