Eastern NY Correctional Facility - Federal

Last month I received my first issue of Under Lock & Key (No. 42), and I’m honestly surprised that the correspondence unit even let this newsletter into the facility. In the 13 years that I’ve been imprisoned, I’ve witnessed and experienced having all kinds of books, magazines, and other publications be either censored in part or disapproved altogether.

The conventional reasons behind this censorship are either that the works contain content that is considered a threat to the safety and security of the institution, or that the literature contains “gang” signs or other unauthorized organizational content. Of course these reasons are totally arbitrary and capricious. For example, the prison media review committee regularly blots out the peace gesture in The Five Percenter Newspaper and claims that the hand gesture is a “gang” sign. However, I’ve seen pictures of President Obama making this very same gesture, but these pictures are never censored.

Similarly, I’m enrolled in a college program and last semester the administration here disapproved two pieces of Black literature: Richard Wright’s Big Black Good Man and James Baldwin’s Going to Meet the Man. They claimed that the stories were offensive in content. The real insult to me was that during the very same semester they approved literature in other Eurocentric classes that regularly referenced Black people as niggers. I guess offensive content is okay as long as it doesn’t offend those in control.

MIM(Prisons) adds: This new ULK subscriber is reporting a problem we see in prisons across the country: systematic censorship of literature that presents even mild cultural news targetting a New Afrikan audience. White supremacist books and magazines get past the censors with no problem, but books by famous authors like Richard Wright and James Baldwin are denied. And ULK is even more likely to be censored because it speaks to the situation prisoners face today and builds unity and peace to create real change as part of a broader anti-imperialist struggle.

Everyone who successfully gets a copy of ULK should do their part and share it with others. You never know when it’s going to slip past the censors, so each issue should be passed around so that we can maximize its use. And if you get a copy from someone else, be sure to write to us for your own subscription.