After Writing About Prison Censorship, I Got Blocked From Messaging My Sources

A few months ago, I logged into my online Securus account to send an electronic message to a friend in a Washington State prison. To my shock, I found the word “blocked” on my account and I was not able to send any messages. The block came just a few weeks after I had published an article with Truthout on censorship inside of prisons and had sent the finished article to some of my sources over the e-messaging system. It’s hard to know for sure, but the block is either the result of my journalism, or it is a result of facilitating a book club that connects people inside with those on the outside. Since my Truthout article was about how difficult prisons make it to access information, especially for LGBTQ+ people, the block seems ironic, to say the least.

People in prison do not have direct access to the internet or to any standard email services, nor can they generally receive phone calls. Instead, any communication other than paper mail (which is increasingly rare) takes place over services managed by for-profit companies like Aventiv, ViaPath and IC Solutions. If one of these services chooses to implement a block on an account, as in my case, an outside user cannot send e-messages, put money on a loved one’s books or pay for phone calls — for anyone who lives in a prison, anywhere in the United States, that uses the service that has implemented the block.

The only remedy for this is apparently to appeal to the state Department of Corrections (DOC), but unsurprisingly, there is no obvious method for such an appeal available to an outside family member or friend. Figuring out how to appeal required several calls and emails, and in the end, did not yield any change to my situation. This block is inhibiting my ability to do my work, and more than that, it’s isolating my friends in prison from contact with the outside world.

Privatized Prison Communications Companies Exert Outsized Control

Censorship in prisons has expanded with the monopolization of prison communications in the hands of only a few private companies. For instance, the services I use the most — JPay and Securus — are under the parent company of the behemoth Aventiv. I have not yet found any information on how blocks like this are processed and how frequent they are, but it seems the Washington State Department of Corrections did not actually mean to block me from communicating with people in other states. That is just a side effect of monopolization.

When Aventiv implements a block, it is companywide, meaning that I’m unable to message anyone who uses JPay or Securus, or where the phone service is provided by either Aventiv company, even though Washington State does not even use JPay. Half of all states that have e-messages in their prisons (22) use JPay as their e-message provider. Meanwhile, 42 percent of phone calls are managed by Securus, meaning that my block is a significant barrier to communicating with a large segment of the total prison population. According to the Securus helpline, blocks like this are not uncommon.

My ban was upheld on appeal (an email) because I was sharing messages that included more than one person in the prison. Not only is barring people in prison from communicating with one another enforced in more draconian ways than in the past, but prisons are increasingly banning people on the outside from being in contact with more than one person in prison. Given the reality that almost 2 million people are imprisoned in the U.S. each year and the disproportionate impact of the criminal legal system on particular communities, it is arbitrary for prisons and communication companies to act as though no one will have two family members or two close friends in prison at the same time. It is also unfair and punitive to further limit the outside support available to those inside.

Running an “Illegal Book Club”

My rule-breaking activities were related to the Abolitionist Book Club, a reading group that brings together people inside and outside prisons. I co-founded the group in 2023 with a close friend of mine, Vincent “Tank” Sherrill, who lives in a Washington State prison, and another outside organizer, Matthew Charlebois. Our original goal was to create a space for political education about abolition for our comrades outside and inside prison through reading Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie’s book No More Police together. We have since finished the book and become a tight-knit community who meets together virtually once a month to grow our abolitionist imaginations through our relationships with each other.

I have been censored by the prison for writing about censorship in the prison.

Organizing a group like this is not easy. Our meetings are held over Zoom, with each person in prison joining the video call via a buddy system with the outside members. We were pleasantly surprised that everyone in the prison received the copies of the book despite its title, but as soon as we held our first online meeting, book club members at the Washington Corrections Center for Women received a warning from the facility’s investigator telling them that they were not allowed to participate in this “illegal book club.” One member came to a second meeting — mainly to talk about how to proceed — and was punished with a major infraction (reduced to a minor infraction upon her appeal). This member submitted a formal proposal to the prison to make the group official, since our work fits the prison’s definition of “pro-social behavior” that it supposedly encourages, but she never received a response to the proposal and was not able to join any more of our discussions.

After this intimidation, members from the women’s prison were too afraid to join our meetings, but punishment of some members of the book club did not stop us. The Abolitionist Book Club continues, building solidarity and shared analysis between comrades inside and outside prison. This experience has affirmed the value of doing collective work, rather than individual or even centralized work.

Prisons Can Isolate Us — But They Can’t Stop Our Work Completely

I was the main outside instigator of the Abolitionist Book Club, and most of the first contacts were mine. I’m proud, though, that as we have grown, everyone in the group has taken ownership and I’m no longer any more central than anyone else. This meant that when I was cut off, other people in the group were ready to step in. Being formally cut off from my friends and comrades inside has been yet another lesson about creating dense webs of relationships rather than jealously guarding our relationships or contacts; it’s much harder for the DOC to destroy that whole web than to sever one particular line of communication.

I would love to say that if we organize in this way, the DOC can’t touch us, but unfortunately that’s not true. Since the block, it has been much harder to be in touch with some of my close friends in prison, and I have dearly missed talking regularly with these folks. Nonetheless, I’m thankful for not being totally cut off since I am still able to communicate with the help of others in the book club.

The block has a direct impact on my journalism as well as my personal relationships. It would be bad enough if I had only been blocked from communication inside Washington State, where I’m working with people on various projects, but I also can’t send messages to people I know in Michigan or in Missouri. Even worse, I can’t reach out to speak to people in any state or facility that uses an Aventiv service to report on their experiences, unless I reach out to them via another friend of theirs. That, however, would be third party contact, which is the same rule I’m accused of violating. I am stuck either continuing to violate that rule or ceasing to do journalism about the experiences of people in prison.

Like so many people before me, most especially those in prison themselves, I have been censored by the prison for writing about censorship in the prison. I am outraged that this has happened; that the prison has extended its reach to censor those of us outside prison in this way is dangerous and disturbing. But the real travesty here is the regular, ongoing censorship that people in prison are subjected to daily, like the women in our book club who were cut off from one of the few sources of outside support and communication available to them.

Worse yet, people in prison don’t necessarily have a way of knowing why I’m not responding to them — and Aventiv takes their money to send messages that are not delivered. I keep receiving emails from JPay telling me that someone has sent me a message, but I’m unable to read these messages. One person has been released from prison altogether after sending me a message I couldn’t read, and we’ve completely lost touch.

The monopolization of communication technologies combined with the system’s bans on “double contact” significantly expands the existing regime that destroys relationships between people in prison and their communities on the outside. Ultimately, the result of blocking communication is to keep people in prison away from those who want to offer support, and away from people like me who might be able to tell their story to the broader world.