The ACLU, South Carolina, and Information Control In Prisons

On February 22, the ACLU of South Carolina filed a federal lawsuit against one of the most restrictive "prison media access" policies in the United States

South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDC) headquarters (Photo from SCDC and in the public domain.)

In 2018, seven deaths occurred at Lee Correctional Institution, a state prison in South Carolina. It was the deadliest incident of violence in a United States prison in the past quarter century.

South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDC) Director Bryan Stirling blamed “gangs” and insisted that illegal cellphones had intensified the incident. The state renewed pressure on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to allow officials to jam cell signals of prisoners and effectively tighten secrecy.

But Heather Ann Thompson, a reporter known for covering prisons, received numerous emails, calls, and texts from within South Carolina prisons that showed officials were “misleading” the public. State prison officials “had decided to house rival gangs in the same dormitory, and it was the official’s increasingly punitive policies that exacerbated tensions on the inside.”

Videos and photos that Thompson received illustrated the dehumanizing policies that had helped spark the violence. In Thompson’s view, the use of cellphones allowed prisoners to “document their claim that corrections officials could have prevented the high death toll.”

Only through prisoners themselves was it possible for reporters to get closer to the truth of what happened, and yet, in South Carolina, firsthand accounts from prisoners are suppressed daily by prison administrators.

Read the full article at The Dissenter.