Georgia Is Stopping a Bookstore from Sending Books to Prisons

The Progressive, April 23, 2024. https://progressive.org/latest/georgia-is-stopp...

But a Free Speech lawsuit challenging the policy could change that.

by Moira Marquis

In conducting research for the PEN America report “Reading Between the Bars,” I found that while about 30 percent of prisons and jails limited who could mail books to people inside in 2015, this rate rose to 80 percent of prisons by 2023. This steep rise has dramatically decreased access and exacerbated censorship.

Avid is now suing the Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office for violating the store’s civil rights to free expression, with the University of Georgia School of Law’s First Amendment Clinic and civil rights attorney Zack Greenamyre as counsel. If successful, this case would establish approved vendor policies like Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office as unconstitutional.

Prisons and jails claim approved vendor policies are necessary to avoid the introduction of contraband into the facilities, but there has been little evidence to support this accusation.

At the end of March, federal investigators charged 150 Georgia Department of Corrections employees and other outside individuals for their role in a smuggling ring—the largest in the state’s history—that brought in contraband weapons, cell phones, and drugs. Prisons and jails routinely deny staff culpability and devote extensive energy to censorship by claiming mail is the conduit. In fact, jails are some of the most egregious censors in the carceral system. While prisons are subject to state-level policies, county sheriffs determine the specific mail policies of their jails. This means there is little awareness or oversight of individual jails’ policies.

Prohibiting Avid from distributing literature denies the bookstore their First Amendment rights. As businesses, bookstores have legal personhood status, which means they are protected constitutionally. Approved vendor policies limit publishers and sellers, and impede independent bookstores from reaching incarcerated readers. These policies also deny incarcerated readers their right to access information and literature.

Approved vendor policies don't target content. It doesn’t matter if the person wants a dictionary or a bible, they can only get them from the small list of booksellers (the list can be as short as one vendor) a prison or jail has approved.

The Gwinnett County Jail has not published criteria for how vendors are approved, and neither have the other prisons and jails that follow a similar practice. These opaque policies greatly limit access to information and impede literacy. Limiting vendors restricts the variety of titles available and amounts to a ban on free books, which are sometimes the only ones incarcerated people can both access and afford.

Avid is the first independent bookstore to challenge approved vendor policies in court. It’s costly and time-consuming to sue. Because of this, not many publishers have challenged prison censorship; but the Human Rights Defense Center is one such publisher that has. They publish the free newspaper Prison Legal News and are often the target of state censorship. Many of the center’s cases have involved successful challenges to approved vendor policies.

If Avid’s suit is also successful, it would establish that the approved vendor policy is unconstitutional. This victory would pave the way for other challenges that could take down these policies on a national level.

A ruling in favor of Avid would send a warning to other jails that censorship of books is not reasonably related to maintaining security and makes it impossible for people who are detained—and not necessarily even convicted—to read while they await trial. Surely, that’s the most basic of freedoms.