Persistence pays off: Marshall Law banned, and then UNbanned by the DOC
Last week, internal documents obtained from the Maryland Correctional Training Center in Hagerstown provided evidence that the Maryland State Division of Corrections had placed a ban on Marshall Law: The Life and Times of a Baltimore Black Panther, a new memoir written by Marshall “Eddie” Conway and Dominque Stevenson, and published in March 2011 by AK Press.
A memo dated July 7, and signed by Acting Warden Wayne Webb stated that: “Effective immediately, the book entitled “Marshall Law – The Life & Times of a Baltimore Black Panther” by Marshall Conway and Dominque Stevenson is not permitted into the institution for security reasons.”
The memo was distributed to prison staff, as well as posted on inmate bulletin boards, and sent to the prison’s mail and package rooms, as well as the prison library.
Prisoners say that multiple copies of the book ordered through the mail have been confiscated and destroyed without explanation.
This is not the first time that reading material of a political nature has been banned without explanation from the Maryland Correctional Training Center. Men currently incarcerated at Hagerstown say that such unexplained bannings occur with some regularity, though several pointed out that in the case of Marshall Law, the prison officials failed to follow the correct proceedure which, under MD code 250-1, specifies that the offending pages of a manuscript should be removed, rather than placing a blanket ban on the entire work.
Information on why the book was banned is spotty; one prisoner was told that the book had been banned because it mentioned the Maryland Correctional Training Center. Another speculated that the ban stemmed from the fact that the book contains a chapter that describes a (failed) attempt at a prison break. Prisoners say they were denied the right to a hearing regarding the confiscation of the book, and that the Administrative Remedy Proccedure was denied when one prisoner requested it.
Conway and Stevenson’s book takes a critical look at the system of prisons and policing in the state of Maryland, telling the story of Conway’s arrest and conviction for the murder of a Baltimore City police officer in 1970, and his decades of activist and educational work carried out within the Maryland prison system during his incarceration. Conway, who is still imprisoned at the Jessup Correctional Institution in Jessup, Maryland, is a former leader of the Black Panther Party in Baltimore, and maintains that his arrest and conviction are a fraud―the result of a COINTELPRO operation designed to disrupt the activities of the Party in the region. Co-author Stevenson is the director of the Maryland Peace with Justice Program of the Middle Atlantic Region of the American Friends Service Committee in Baltimore, and the coordinator of prisoner-run mentoring programs within the Maryland prison system.
It is unknown whether the Correctional Insitution at Jessup, where Conway is currently incarcerated, has similar plans to ban his memoir within the prison.
David Rocah, attorney for the Maryland ACLU has called the book’s banning unconstitutional, saying, “First, the policy giving victims of crime the power to veto interviews or pictures of inmates is totally unconstitutional. Inmates retain a 1st Amendment right to communicate with the press, subject to reasonable rules applicable to all. Second, even if it was constitutional, the failure to adhere to it is not a constitutional basis to ban the book. Such publications can only be censored for penological reasons, such as because they pose a threat to prison security. Here the book is being censored for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with prison security, but because of an alleged failure to comply with a policy that is itself blatantly unconstitutional.”
Apparently the widespread outrage over this unconstitutional act worked: the Baltimore Sun reported on July 20 that the Maryland DOC had decided to life the ban on the book! The book can now be shipped to inmates at Maryland prisons again. Read the full story in the Sun here: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/editorial/bs-ed-prison-books-20110720,0,2715842.story
A copy of the ban notice may be viewed online here: http://www.voxunion.com/pics/BANTHEBOOK.jpg