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| Weekly Turns Down Prisoner's Subscription Request |
| By Editor and Publisher |
| Published: 06/27/2003 |
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You be the publisher. The warden at the maximum-security prison in your small town won't permit inmates to read your weekly, fearing these hard-core offenders will use details from the community news to intimidate officers and other workers. A prisoner challenges the ban, which is overturned by a judge. The officers' union, the village council and even the school board plead with you not to allow inmate subscriptions, while a prisoner threatens a lawsuit if you don't let him get the paper. What do you do? That's exactly the situation the 5,700-circulation Boscobel (Wis.) Dial faced. Publisher John Ingebritsen ultimately reached the conclusion that the weekly would not be available to inmates at the Wisconsin Secure Program Facility, formerly known as the 'Supermax' prison. 'We didn't do this because we felt pressure,' Ingebritsen said, 'but we did this because we listened to what the community and community leaders said. So we have a policy that says: 'For the safety of the communities which it serves, Morris Newspaper Corporation of Wisconsin ... will not be selling subscriptions to inmates at the maximum security prison that is in the newspapers' readership area.'' Ingebritsen said the weekly never solicited inmate subscriptions, but it does cover the Wisconsin Secure Program Facility, which is a major village employer. The prison's Web site says the complex holds 'the most violent and difficult-to-manage inmates under Department of Corrections supervision.' The Dial was apparently the only general-interest newspaper affected by a ban Warden Gerald Berge imposed shortly after the prison opened in 1999; prisoners were allowed to subscribe to any other newspaper. Because none of the prisoners are from Boscobel, Berge has said their only interest in getting the paper is gleaning personal information to use against officers and other residents. But last month, Dane County Judge Michael Nowakowski, ruling on a challenge by inmate Bryce Garrett, said the policy was unconstitutional. In a handwritten letter to the paper, Garrett, prisoner number 078526, said the Dial had 'no choice' but to accept his subscription, and that if it did not, he would 'rumble in the court' with a lawsuit charging 'discrimination, access-association to freedom of the press, denials of equal protections of the law, etc.' For all the furor in Boscobel, newspapers in other towns with prisons have encountered no similar controversies or problems from prisoner access to the hometown paper, said Wisconsin Newspaper Association Executive Director Sandra George: 'It doesn't seem to have tripped anybody else's trigger.' |
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