Source: prisonlegalnews.org 8/15/24
On May 3, 2024, Arizona’s Department of Corrections (DOC) settled a federal censorship lawsuit brought by PLN’s publisher,the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC). Under the agreement, DOC paid $2,650,000 to cover HRDC’s attorneys’ fees and expenses in connection with the successful litigation, the largest such award in a prison censorship case in U.S. history.
Until 2014, DOC prisoners routinely received issues of PLN. That year, however, DOC began to censor numerous issues for “sexually explicit material” that violated its mail policy; the articles in question, however, merely reported legal cases filed by prisoners who had been sexually assaulted or harassed by prison staff. Worse, DOC did not provide HRDC with notice of the censorship decisions nor any opportunity to appeal them.
HRDC filed a civil rights lawsuit in federal court for the District of Arizona in 2015, alleging that DOC’s ban on “sexually explicit material” was a violation of the nonprofit’s First Amendment rights, both on its face and as applied to specific issues of the magazine that were banned simply for “describing sexual contact between jail or prison guards and prisoners to which the prisoners did not consent.” HRDC further alleged a violation of its Fourteenth Amendment due-process rights when DOC failed to provide notice of the decision and opportunity to appeal it.
