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| Court nixes prison book label rule |
| By Oakland Tribune |
| Published: 11/24/2003 |
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A federal appeals court last Tuesday upheld an Oakland judge's ruling that California prisons can't block inmates from receiving books and magazines just because the packages don't bear an approved, prison-provided vendor label. "The requirement that books be sent from approved vendors, the policy of searching all incoming packages, and the lack of a vendor label requirement for items such as shoes, clothing and appliances support the conclusion that the book label policy is not rationally related to the need to prevent the introduction of contraband," 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge A. Wallace Tashima wrote for himself and judges Betty B. Fletcher and Louis H. Pollak. That decision is basically what U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken of Oakland ruled in September 2002, when she decided against the state Department of Corrections in a lawsuit brought by Todd Lewis Ashker, an inmate in the security housing unit at Pelican Bay State Prison. Ashker challenged a prison policy requiring packages containing books and magazines -- which must be ordered directly from a vendor, without any intervention by family, friends or associates -- to have a special label attached. Prison officials claimed this was an added security measure to ensure books and magazines aren't tampered with to contain secret gang-related messages. But more than a hundred books a friend had ordered for Ashker from Barnes & Noble were turned away by prison officials because the bookseller hadn't used the label. His cellmate, Frank Clement, had a similar problem and was told by a bookseller that it couldn't comply with the label requirement, and so would no longer ship to prisons. Not fair to prisoners Wilken ruled -- and the appeals court agreed Tuesday -- that this policy put too heavy a burden on inmates' First Amendment rights and isn't related to a legitimate prison objective. |
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