Alabama Inmate Sues For Right to Read Book About Convict Leasing System
Photo courtesy of Random House.
An Alabama inmate is suing prison officials and the state’s Department of Corrections for not allowing him to receive a copy of a book his lawyer sent him about an ugly chapter in the state’s racial history.
Mark Melvin, a 33-year-old inmate serving a life sentence for violating parole in two murders he helped his brother commit when he was 14, told the New York Times that prison officials said the book was “too incendiary” and “too provocative” to be allowed behind prison walls.
Melvin says he appealed, but prison officials upheld the decision, citing a regulation banning any mail that incites “violence based on race, religion, sex, creed, or nationality, or disobedience toward law enforcement officials or correctional staff.”
The book, “Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II,” chronicles the history of the vast and brutal convict leasing system that sprang up in Alabama and throughout the South following the end of Civil War. It won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2009.
Under the convict leasing system, people, mostly black, were arrested on the flimsiest of charges and forced to labor on the cotton farms of wealthy planters or in the coal mines of corporations to pay off their criminal penalties.
Melvin’s lawyer, Bryan Stevenson, director of the Equal Justice Initiative, says he considers the lawsuit to be less about the rights of people in prison and more about the country’s refusal to own up to its racial history.
The book’s author, Douglas A. Blackmon, a former senior national correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, said he had never heard of another instance of the book being banned.
“The idea that a book like mine is somehow incendiary or a call to violence is so absurd,” he said.
A spokesman for the state corrections department said officials had not seen the suit and could not comment.
