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| Inmate sues to read Southern history book |
| By bendbulletin.com - Campbell Robertson |
| Published: 09/27/2011 |
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The past is never dead, although at the Kilby Correctional Facility outside of Montgomery, Ala., it seems it is not particularly welcome. Mark Melvin, who is serving a life sentence at Kilby, filed suit in federal court Friday against the prison’s officials and the state commissioner of corrections, claiming they have unjustly kept a book out of his hands. The book, which was sent to him by his lawyer, is a work of history. More specifically, it is a Pulitzer Prize-winning work of Southern history, an investigation of the systematically heinous treatment of black prisoners in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Melvin, 33, alleges in his suit that prison officials deemed it “a security threat.” The dispute began a year ago. Melvin was entering his 18th year in the state’s custody, having been charged at 14 with helping his older brother commit two murders. He was well-behaved enough to be granted parole in 2008, but after committing what his lawyer called “a technical violation” at a transition house, he was sent back. So he has been reading novels and biographies, studies of World War II and Irish history, his lawyer, Bryan Stevenson, said. After his return to prison, Melvin was assigned by the warden to work in the prison’s law library. Last September, Stevenson sent Melvin a couple of books, including “Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II,” by Douglas Blackmon, the senior national correspondent at The Wall Street Journal. It won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2009. The book chronicles the vast and brutal convict leasing system, which became nearly indistinguishable from antebellum slavery as it grew. In this system, people, in almost all cases black, were arrested by local law enforcement, often on the flimsiest of charges, and forced to labor on the cotton farms of wealthy planters or in the coal mines of corporations to pay off their criminal penalties. Although convict leasing occurred across the South, the book focuses on Alabama. Read More. |
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