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THE LONG STRUGGLE TO READ IN ALABAMA’S PRISONS  
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Beth Shelburne
March 3, 2024
Facing South
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_ Jennings and other prisoners say reading is therapy for them, but a
hostile bureaucracy often makes access to books and other reading
materials difficult. _

Hasani Jennings, 48, has spent his entire adult life in Alabama's
troubled prison system for a fatal shooting he committed during a
robbery when he was a teenager., Illustration by Hasani Jennings

 

Cayce Moore was just 19 years old when he found himself in solitary
confinement, alone in a dark and filthy cell in Alabama's infamous
Kilby prison. His four months in solitary, or "segregation" as it's
called by the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC), marked the
beginning of his life sentence, now in its 35th year.

The year he arrived was 1987, a time when prisoners in any type of
segregation were not allowed to receive magazines, newspapers, or
books. When this reality dawned on Cayce, compounded by the squalid
surroundings and shouts from other prisoners, he experienced
overwhelming alarm. "Confined to a cell 23 hours each day, what was
there to do?" he remembered. "How could one occupy the mind or still
the fear, despair, and loneliness that filled me?"

Cayce had always been an avid reader, beginning as a small child,
"devouring everything from dinosaur books and science fiction to
astronomy and encyclopedias," he wrote in one of many letters he's
sent me over the years. Today Cayce is 53, incarcerated at St. Clair
prison in Springville. We met in 2014 through my reporting on
Alabama's prison crisis, but I now consider Cayce a dear friend.

I have sent him many books over the years that we've discussed, and we
share a necessity for the written word. Reading is like breathing, an
essential part of life itself, but a vast difference in access and
opportunity exists between my reading life as a free person and the
impoverished reality he faces as an incarcerated person in Alabama.

Cayce was a gifted student from the small town of Ragland, Alabama,
but during adolescence he developed crippling depression that went
undiagnosed. At age 17, he was considering suicide but instead robbed
a local convenience store with two of his friends, also teenagers, and
shot the clerk during the robbery. He was tried as an adult and spared
the death penalty, but his sentence of life without parole felt akin
to death. It meant he would spend the rest of his natural life in
prison with no hope of release.

The confines of that solitary cell at Kilby, the beginning of Cayce's
lifetime incarceration, still burn in his memory. A single bulb
recessed in the back wall of the cell cast the only dim light. It was
late September, unseasonably warm, and during the day the cell was
stifling. By November, it was freezing at night, so cold that he ate
his breakfast, delivered at 4 a.m., swaddled in a single, thin
blanket.

Cayce Moore

His lifeline during the dawn of his imprisonment was a college
professor named Ada Long. She ran the honor's program at University of
Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), where Cayce had been her student before
he was tried and convicted of murder. Ada began writing to him in
prison and sending him material to read. Segregation rules wouldn't
allow her to send him an actual book, so she photocopied material by
Samuel Johnson, Stephen King, and one of her favorite novels,
"Housekeeping" by Marilynne Robinson. She mailed it 40 to 50 pages at
a time, like a serialized Dickens novel in the 19th century.
"Receiving the book in installments made it last longer and I savored
every page," Cayce wrote.

Another book Ada sent was "The Queen's Gambit" by Walter Tevis, now a
popular Netflix series. Before he was sent to prison, Cayce often
played chess with other UAB students inside the Honors House on
campus. Ada had earlier advised Cayce that he should think of his life
in prison as a game of chess. "By applying my mind in a clear-headed,
systematic way, I could learn to survive and perhaps thrive," he
remembered.

Back in 1987, ADOC mailrooms were looser on page restrictions, but now
the agency imposes a four-page limit for photocopied material sent
through the mail, and anything longer is rejected. But those early
books Ada sent gave Cayce something constructive to do with his mind
when the only other option was to ruminate on his devastating
circumstances. "I can't imagine what that experience would have been
like for me without Ada's support and the regular stream of reading
material she sent my way," he wrote. "I think she saved my life."

Another fellow reader and writer I have gotten to know over the years
is Hasani Jennings. Like Cayce, Hasani has spent his entire adult life
in prison for a fatal shooting he committed during a robbery when he
was a teenager. Hasani grew up poor, in and out of the custody of his
mother who suffered from mental illness. Although he was a gifted
student, his grades began to suffer, and as an adolescent he began
drinking heavily before he committed his crime.

In 1994, he was cast into Alabama's prison system with no hope of
release. Today he is 48. Books have provided therapy to Hasani, a
pathway to understanding himself and the larger world that he can no
longer access. "I started surrounding myself with books shortly after
I woke up in prison," he explained, "and set out on a mission to find
the self I lost. I can't imagine doing time without books."

'Books is contraband'

In 2018, Hasani was suddenly transferred without explanation from
Donaldson Prison, where he'd lived for a decade, to Limestone Prison
in North Alabama. When a prisoner who worked for the officers told him
to pack up, Hasani didn't ask where he was going. "I asked him how
many books I could take," he wrote. "He said four. It reminded me of
when I was 9 years old, and our apartment burned up. That same
deflating feeling of loss, but at least this time I could choose
something to take with me."

Self-portrait by Hasani Jennings

Hasani chose two books for his studies of the French language:
"Complete French Grammar" and a French-English dictionary. He also
brought a collection of essays by Ta-Nehisi Coates titled "We Were
Eight Years in Power," and his Hebrew/Greek Bible. When he arrived at
Limestone, officers confiscated the Bible because it was worn and had
a replacement cover, something they claimed created a security hazard.
It was another loss to remind Hasani that he was powerless to stop the
prison's infantilizing control over his entire life and property.

Cayce and Hasani are just two men among thousands of people struggling
to survive the record violence and chaos of a prison system in crisis.
In December 2020, the United States Department of Justice sued ADOC
after the two sides failed to agree on remedies for unconstitutional
excessive force and bloodshed. In addition to horrific overcrowding
and skyrocketing deaths, ADOC's long history of restricting the
constitutional right to read reflects a mindset intent on inflicting
the harshest punishment possible.

From banning books to barring lending libraries to enforcing draconian
practices like allowing only the Bible as reading material for people
in disciplinary segregation, ADOC has long eyed educational
opportunities with suspicion and sought to suppress access to reading
material. These practices are part of the larger story about how
Alabama prisons descended into the current morass and why Gov. Kay
Ivey's "Alabama solution" of constructing new mega-prisons will not
address the pervasive punitive and dehumanizing ethos behind the
crisis.

Perhaps no other case embodies this outrageous oppression
like _Johnson v. Mitchem_, a 1997 lawsuit filed after the warden of
Donaldson prison created a list of acceptable reading material that
limited books, magazines, and newspapers in the prison to a paltry 16
publications. Steve Dees, a career correctional employee, decided
periodicals such as Scientific American, Inside Chess, Writer's
Digest, and hundreds of others would no longer be allowed inside the
maximum-security prison. "Books is contraband," Warden Dees said in a
deposition, revealing a truth about ADOC rarely stated so explicitly:
that reading while incarcerated was seen as dangerous by the prison
administrators who went as far as authorizing book burnings in a field
near Donaldson prison.

The deposition occurred after attorney Rhonda Brownstein with the
Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in Montgomery, Alabama, filed the
lawsuit in response to the warden's arbitrary attempt to ban reading
material, arguing the policy violated the First Amendment and served
no logical security purpose. The judge agreed, forcing prison leaders
to withdraw the ridiculous policy, but only after ADOC attempted to
defend the warden's position, wasting precious taxpayer dollars on
needless litigation.

'My mind could be free'

Instead of allocating resources to better staffing and training, or
more extensive therapeutic and educational services, ADOC continues
this pattern of wasteful legal spending, defending unwinnable causes
and fighting reforms at every turn.

The class-action lawsuit, _Braggs v. Dunn_, now in its eigth year of
litigation, already determined that mental health care in ADOC is
"horrendously inadequate." Despite the fact that the state's prison
system has the highest suicide rate in the nation, Alabama leaders
have approved over $28 million in taxpayer-funded legal spending to
defend ADOC since the case was filed in 2014. In December, a federal
judge issued an order
[[link removed]] in
the case requiring ADOC to remedy the situation, saying that its
"horrendously inadequate" care of mentally ill inmates violates the
U.S. Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

In early 1988, after Cayce was released from his four-month stay in
segregation, he entered the prison's general population and soon
realized the scarcity of books was not just a segregation problem but
a problem throughout the entire prison. Other than a few old
paperbacks floating around the cell blocks, there was no centralized
prison library or set of books available to everyone.

Cayce was soon hired to work in the prison chapel, performing clerical
and custodial duties, but he also convinced the chaplain to allow him
to set up a religious library. He wanted to offer a broad selection of
religious material covering several Christian denominations, and some
material for the small Muslim community in the prison. The chaplain
allowed Cayce to solicit donations for educational and reference
books, like dictionaries and encyclopedias, along with biographies,
classical literature, and even popular fiction that he didn't consider
"trashy."

Once again, Ada Long was an invaluable ally, securing donations from
UAB. Cayce remembers reading some great books during this period —
"The Color Purple" by Alice Walker, "The Bluest Eye" by Toni Morrison,
"Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe, "The Man Who Mistook his Wife
for a Hat" by Oliver Sacks. "Even when my body was in prison, my mind
could be free through books," he said. "We ended up with a decent
library — about 300 books." Dozens of men began visiting the library
and checking books out. Things went well for about a year, until one
day in 1989 when guards locked down the entire prison to search for
contraband.

An officer named Sgt. Brown searched the chapel, "a hateful man who
viewed any kind of educational or rehabilitative program for prisoners
as 'coddling criminals,'" Cayce wrote. Brown confiscated all the
nonreligious books and sent them out the back gate of the prison where
officers threw them into a dumpster. Cayce watched through a window in
his dorm as officers carried garbage bags and cardboard boxes to the
dumpster, a sinking feeling of dread in his gut.

That same day, Cayce was called to the chapel. He was met by Brown, a
bulldog of a man, an angry look on his wide face. "I'm going to write
your ass up," Brown said. "For what?" Cayce asked. "For running an
unauthorized library," Brown snarled.

The warden vouched for Cayce and the disciplinary citation was never
written, but the books were gone forever. "Reading was hard to come by
after that," Cayce told me. "I felt frustration and anger at the
irrationality of the system. They seemed hellbent on making it so
difficult for people to get books."

'Like tending a garden'

Instead of wallowing in despair, Cayce focused his attention on an
area of the prison known as "the school," where Lawson State Community
College taught adult basic education. The area contained a large room
meant to be a library, but it was in shambles, an embarrassment to the
prison administration because dignitaries touring the prison often
caught a glimpse of the disarray. "Picture a huge room with several
thousand books randomly dumped into piles on teetering stacks of
cardboard boxes," he described.

Cayce pitched the idea of cleaning up and organizing the library, then
opening it to the general population. The warden approved the project
on one condition: Cayce and the other prisoners who would set it up
had to make it look good and organize it like a real library.

To catalog all 5,000 books, Cayce borrowed a set of Dewey
classification manuals from UAB. He recruited four other prisoners to
work with him on the project, which took about two months. When they
finished, the library became a showcase for the prison. Cayce
explained that creating and maintaining a library or educational space
inside a maximum security prison is often a political process that
must be carefully managed. It needs to benefit both the prisoners and
the administration in some way, and it must be defended from negative
elements in both groups.

"It's like tending a garden," Cayce wrote. "You have to nourish the
good, useful plants and continuously fight the weeds. Libraries can be
exceptional spaces in a prison, but you've got to have some staff on
board to intercede against people like Sgt. Brown. Some staff will
just see it as a good way to control prisoners, but others see the
human benefit. The key is to have some staff that are true believers
to set it up and make it work. You have to keep them convinced that
it's a good thing."

In 1991, ADOC secured a grant to set up libraries in multiple
facilities. Donaldson would be the first Grant Library Service (GLS)
location in the prison system, and Cayce and his friends were
thrilled. This meant they could greatly expand the limited selection
of books they had. ADOC hired a trained librarian who set them up with
about 1,200 books, including encyclopedias and other reference books,
plenty of novels in popular genres, and a decent selection of literary
titles, along with several hundred nonfiction works like biographies,
history books, and vocational manuals.

A major point of contention was how to handle service for prisoners in
segregation. Cayce believed those in solitary confinement needed
access to books, but the warden was skeptical. Ultimately, the warden
decided the library would run a book delivery service to everyone in
solitary confinement, including death row, except for people serving
time in segregation as punishment for disciplinary infractions. The
book cart would never enter that unit.

Cayce served as the primary person to fulfill book orders for those in
protective custody and on death row. He didn't have direct contact
with the men, but he got to know them through the books they requested
on slips of paper listing their primary and alternate requests. He
never got farther than the door of the death row unit, but sometimes
when he dropped off orders, he would glance through the large glass
windows and spot one of the men sitting outside his cell.
Occasionally, one would wave or give Cayce a thumbs up. After a while,
some of the men on death row began adding short notes to their
requests. "Thanks, man!" or "Great book!" or "Love this author, got
anything else by her?"

When Cayce couldn't find any of the books a man requested, he tried
hard to substitute something similar, or at least pick something he
knew was good. "I knew the clock was ticking for those guys," he
wrote. "They had a limited time left to read. It was on me to try to
find something that this guy would enjoy. It mattered to me."

It turned out some of the men on death row, like Cayce, were big fans
of the "Wheel of Time" fantasy series by Robert Jordan, so Cayce
loaned part of his personal collection to them, making sure all of
them got a chance to read it. One sent a note back that he'll never
forget. "Thanks for sharing your books with us," the man wrote. "This
has been a great series! Hope I get to finish it before my time
comes."

Cayce thinks GLS lasted about four years, until the grant ran out and
subsequently the libraries declined. The end of GLS meant the
individual prisons no longer had to report to a central library
authority and they stopped receiving regular book shipments. Without
that oversight, the leadership inside ADOC failed to maintain the
momentum. "Most of the people in charge of ADOC's prisons don't
appreciate or even understand the value of quality libraries for
prisoners," Cayce wrote, "and probably not even the value of books
themselves."

A four-book limit

ADOC rules contain a list of 13 approved items that prisoners may have
in their cells, along with the number allowed — 40 stamps, three
black or blue ink pens, four notepads, one calendar. Under books, the
rules state, "Four total to include Bible or equivalent religious
study book, educational/dictionary, law book, and/or novel." The books
are to be kept within a locker box under the bunk. The list governs
"all inmate personal and state-issued property," and anyone who
violates it is subject to disciplinary action.

Despite these rules, Hasani has maintained an elaborate book storage
system in his cell at Limestone, which he described to me in a recent
letter.

"Books stretch across the top rail," he wrote. "I glued rectangular
wooden blocks on the wall to make a shelf. There's another bookshelf
made from a net laundry bag. It has three levels — big pockets
sectioned off with strings from an old state-issued boot. Stray books
are in my locker box. Under the bed, there's a bag filled all the way
to the top with books. There's another bag just like it under there,
half filled with books and half with legal work. There are two stacks
of books and papers under there, another stack growing in the front
corner by the wall. Plus, I've got a dozen out on loan."

Hasani knows he's taking a chance keeping so many books in his cell,
but to him it is worth the risk. "Officers generally don't care about
that offense, but I know all it takes is one to come to work with a
bad attitude," he wrote. "Knowing I can lose them all at any time
makes me put more effort into internalizing what I read and study, and
into applying it to produce as much good as I can in the world."

Hasani began reading in prison to stimulate his mind. He started with
self help books that his cellmate shared with him — "The Seven
Habits of Highly Effective People" and "Don't Sweat the Small Stuff."
He was excited to read about ideas that he could apply to his life to
make himself better, a little more capable of enduring his
incarceration that buried him alive. "My reading was slow and
labored," he remembered. "I needed grammar and vocabulary work. But
the more I read, the more alive I became."

He moved on to books about Christianity and spirituality, to novels
and essays and anything he could get his hands on. Today Hasani
prefers practical books like "The Personal MBA" by Josh Kaufman, but
he also has a long list of favorite literary novels like "Their Eyes
Were Watching God" by Zora Neale Hurston. After he picked up reading,
he went on to serve as a literacy tutor for many years, teaching other
incarcerated men to read.

By the time Hasani left Donaldson in 2018, the prison's central
library was long gone. He connects ADOC's indifference toward
libraries as a symptom of larger dysfunction within the agency. "The
Alabama DOC doesn't see libraries or books as a priority," he told me.
"It's not a coincidence that guys misbehave or do drugs because
there's nothing available in here. If they (ADOC) were to promote
education, personal transformation, or rehabilitation, then that's how
people would spend their time."

When incarcerated people "misbehave," they are often subjected to time
in segregation, but it's not just used for disciplinary purposes.
"Administrative segregation" is a catchall term ADOC uses for
nonpunitive stays in solitary, like Cayce's four-month stint at the
beginning of his incarceration. In 1995, the issue of periodicals in
administrative segregation became the subject of a lawsuit. A man
named John Spellman, who was confined in administrative segregation at
Donaldson, decided to sue over the ADOC policy, which began in 1987,
banning magazine and newspaper subscriptions in administrative
segregation. Spellman alleged that prison staff confiscated and
destroyed his magazines and books when he was placed in segregation,
and he believed this, along with the prohibition of receiving
subscriptions, violated his First Amendment rights.

All segregation cells are the same — single occupancy, a concrete
room the size of a standard parking space, with only a bunk and a
metal combination toilet and sink. Incarcerated people can be confined
to administrative segregation for long or indefinite periods of time.
When he filed the lawsuit, Spellman had been sent to administrative
segregation on five different occasions "for his protection," and he
was hardly alone. In April of 1997, 600 to 700 men and women were in
administrative segregation throughout ADOC, and a total of 1,500 to
2,000 were in all categories of segregation.

Spellman testified that he spent over 23 hours a day in his cell,
released only to shower or exercise in the prison yard, which the
judge described as "walking around in a circle with their hands
handcuffed behind their backs in the yard, which is usually a small
concrete fenced-in area." Spellman told the judge, other than writing
letters, working on legal matters, or cleaning his cell, "there's just
not much to do, really."

U.S. District Judge Ira DeMent, who died in 2011, wrote in
his _Spellman v. Hopper_ order that "inmates have a First Amendment
right to receive newspapers and magazines through the mail." While
ADOC attorneys argued that limiting reading material in administrative
segregation was vital to safety, security, and discipline, Judge
DeMent didn't buy it, finding the restrictions to be "an exaggerated
response" to concerns in the prison. He called the reading choices in
administrative segregation "profoundly limited" and wrote that the
restriction "offends the Constitution even under the most deferential
standard."

ADOC was forced to apply the same standard to administrative
segregation that existed in other parts of the prison: to limit the
quantity of newspapers and magazines without absolutely banning them.
The decision was a victory for Spellman and people incarcerated
throughout Alabama, but the litigation took five years to resolve.

Burning books

While _Spellman_ was winding its way through court, another issue
involving publications bubbled up inside the prisons.

In 1997, Steve Dees became the head warden at Donaldson after 20 years
of working for ADOC. Dees was close to retirement, but he still wanted
to strictly curtail the number of periodicals coming into the prison.
He issued a new policy on March 19, 1997, that banned all magazines
not included on his pre-approved list, which originally contained only
five magazines but that he later expanded to 16. The new rule also
permitted prisoners to subscribe to newspapers only from their
hometown. Cayce recalled that Dees also made the statement that all
books except those checked out from the prison's library were
contraband, the Bible being the sole exception.

The people incarcerated at Donaldson, especially avid readers like
Cayce, felt blindsided by the new rules. At the time, Cayce subscribed
to The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review,
Harper's, The Atlantic, Chess Life, Inside Chess, Paper Mayhem,
Science News, and Scientific American, none of them on the approved
list. "So, the mailroom promptly stopped allowing me to receive my
magazines," Cayce wrote. "All of this gave us the opportunity to file
a lawsuit with the objective of restoring access to periodicals and
leveraging the absurdity of the rule to establish a realistic
procedure for inmates to order their own books."

Once again, Rhonda Brownstein at SPLC agreed to file the lawsuit, and
Cayce did some of the footwork inside the prison. In a deposition of
Dees by SPLC's Ellen Bowden on June 26, 1997, Dees admitted the policy
was really enacted to address staffing issues in the prison mailroom.
"The volume was too big for one person to handle," he said.

In this same deposition, Warden Dees revealed that he did not know how
many men at Donaldson subscribed to magazines, or which magazines were
available in the prison's general library. He also had no idea how
many prisoners didn't know how to read, how many were enrolled in
literacy classes, or how the prison obtained books for the general
library. He said he came up with the policy to cut back on "an excess
amount of paper in the prison" and to address staffing shortages. When
Bowden pressed him about the need for the policy, he said his list of
acceptable magazines meant "less stuff we'd have to put up with" in
the cells.

Q: How did you decide which magazines inmates would be permitted to
receive?

A: I used my own judgment on it.

Q: How did you decide which magazines would be on the final March 19th
list?

A: Past experience.

Q: Why can't inmates receive magazines that are not on this March 19th
list?

A: Because we feel that's all the magazines they need.

Q: Why do you feel these particular magazines are the only ones
inmates need?

A: That's the ones we've always had. That's the ones we had when I
first started, the ones we had I was trained to bring in, and that's
the way we still do it.

Dees also told Bowden that every night, officers shook down 10
different people to look for rule violators and contraband.

Q: And that includes books in particular?

A: Yes ma'am. Not in particular. Books is contraband.

Q: What do guards do with those books?

A: Some of them are destroyed and if the inmate says, 'put it in the
general library,' we put it in the general library.

Q: What do you mean when you say 'destroyed?'

A: Destroyed.

Q: It's burned?

A: Burned. Fill an incident report out and burn it.

Q: Where are those books burned?

A: In the field over there (indicating).

Censorship by bureaucracy

After several months of depositions in _Johnson v. Mitchem_, it
became clear to Warden Dees and ADOC that they would not prevail. Dees
withdrew the policy and the two sides agreed to settle the matter
without a trial. "After the settlement, things got better for a
while," Cayce remembered. "People started getting their magazines and
newspapers again, and since the settlement allowed us to receive book
catalogs (this was before Amazon), we were allowed to order books more
easily."

The plaintiffs made one concession. They agreed to allow ADOC to keep
its rule that incarcerated people had to pay for books out of their
"Prisoners' Money on Deposit" or PMOD accounts. This meant no one
outside the prison could directly order books for prisoners. The PMOD
accounts contain the only official money an incarcerated person is
allowed to maintain or spend while in prison. Family or friends can
deposit funds into the account using a credit card or money order and
the transaction is managed by ADOC's business office.

Rhonda Brownstein realized this rule was a big problem when she wanted
to send Cayce the newest book in Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time"
series, but couldn't order it for him because the PMOD rule required
that Cayce pay for it with the funds in his account. Rhonda offered to
send him the money, but that wouldn't work either because ADOC also
required that prisoners order books directly from the publisher,
vastly limiting their choices. Cayce had not been able to find a book
catalog that listed the "Wheel of Time" series.

"It's difficult to describe the feeling of wanting a particular book,
knowing that it exists and having the means to purchase it, but being
utterly unable to get a copy and read it because of impossible
bureaucratic procedures," Cayce wrote. "The truth masked by all those
rules was that prison officials knew that we were legally entitled to
obtain and read books, but they didn't want to deal with the minimal
hassle of processing books in the prison mailroom."

Rhonda searched for ordering information for Cayce, but she turned up
empty handed. "The other shoe dropped when the mail clerks at
Donaldson realized they could apply the PMOD rule to periodicals as
well as books, and everyone in the prison was given one month to prove
they had ordered their magazines or newspapers using funds in their
PMOD accounts," Cayce wrote. "Almost no one had and then once again,
all the periodicals were rejected."

Cayce and Rhonda discussed filing a lawsuit, but they knew it could be
a hard fight because ADOC could argue that prisoners _could_ pay for
books and periodicals with their PMOD funds. ADOC wasn't outright
banning publications — they just made getting them as difficult as
possible. "I decided the best approach would be to amplify the effect
of edge cases, specifically free publications that literally couldn't
be purchased," Cayce wrote.

To work this angle, Cayce wrote an article for Prison Legal News
[[link removed]], which entitled him to a free issue
and allowed him to bring Prison Legal News on board as a plaintiff. He
also identified prisoners who were receiving free religious or
self-help books, and he asked people to send off for free government
publications, vocational materials, Dianetics booklets, anything he
could think of that wouldn't cost a penny. "Before filing anything in
court, I built a weapons-grade case against ADOC, guaranteed to make
them look like book-burning fools," Cayce wrote.

ADOC wardens defended the PMOD policy, citing security, but no real
specifics. In a deposition, Gwendolyn Mosley, the warden of Easterling
prison, claimed the policy was designed to prevent a scheme of
incarcerated people using magazine subscriptions to pay off drug
debts, but then admitted she didn't know of a single case in which
that had happened. "I just think it's a good security practice to
limit them and confine them," Mosley said.

At the first meeting between both sides, Cayce recalled that the
magistrate told ADOC their case was absurd and they needed to settle.
The settlement finally ended the PMOD rule; since then, receiving
books ordered by friends and family from places like Amazon has been a
relatively smooth process. However, ADOC employees can still reject
hardback books or any publication they think violates the standards of
prison regulations, although the agency does not make those standards
publicly available.

A failed agency's rotting heart

In September 2010, those mysterious standards led to a lawsuit and an
avalanche of unfavorable media coverage for ADOC.

Staff at Kilby Prison would not allow a man named Mark Melvin to
receive the Pulitzer Prize winning book "Slavery by Another Name" by
Douglas Blackmon, a widely acclaimed work examining the forced labor
of prisoners in Southern states through the convict leasing system
from after the Civil War until World War II. An officer cited the ADOC
regulation preventing mail that poses a security threat, calling the
book "too incendiary" and "too provocative." Melvin filed a grievance,
but the prison swiftly denied his plea. Melvin then filed a lawsuit,
arguing ADOC's actions violated his constitutional freedom of speech,
due process, and equal protection.

"Defendants' decision to ban the book was based on their desire to
restrict access to information about historical racism in the Southern
United States and is not reasonably related to a legitimate
penological purpose," attorneys with the Montgomery, Alabama-based
Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) argued on behalf of Melvin. ADOC,
represented by Alabama's attorney general, admitted that prison
officials banned the book based on its subject matter and defended the
action. "The book, its title, its contents and/or its
pictures could be used (or misused) by the plaintiff or other
inmates to incite violence or disobedience within the institution,"
the attorney general wrote.

As a result, more than 50 media outlets publicized ADOC's decision to
ban the book and deny the incarcerated population critical information
about America's racial history. Headlines included "Book is too
embarrassing for Alabama prison," and "Black history and the art of
denial." Public outrage grew as the case continued to wind its way
through court, but finally in 2013 ADOC agreed to lift the ban on the
book and EJI dropped the lawsuit.

The need for more informed thinking about all aspects of incarceration
underpins Alabama's continued indifference to the crisis in state
prisons. The governor and ADOC have focused energy exclusively on new
buildings, while prison libraries have languished or closed and
participation in prison educational and rehabilitative programs has
plummeted. In the last decade, graduates of ADOC's re-entry program
have dropped by more than 50%, prisoners earning a GED have fallen by
more than 60%, and people completing ADOC's drug treatment program
fell more than 70%.

For Cayce, the decades-long struggle to read is just one piece of an
epically difficult life behind the walls of prison, run by an
organization that relies on institutional violence and oppression,
with the goal to always keep the prison population disenfranchised and
in its place. The consistent disregard of prisoners' humanity can lead
people in charge not only to ban books but also look the other way
when prisoners are using substances, taking their own lives, and dying
in record numbers.

"The critical component is the decline in ability and integrity of
supervisors managing the prisons," Cayce wrote. "The same problem that
lies at the rotting heart of the entire failed agency."

_BETH SHELBURNE is an independent journalist and writer based in
Birmingham, Alabama. She is currently an investigative reporter with
the Campaign for Smart Justice and spent 20 years working as a
television reporter and anchor._

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