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ACLU Objects To Jail's Censorship Of Biblical Verses In Correspondence

By Howard M. Friedman

An ACLU press release yesterday disclosed that the ACLU has written the Superintendent of Virginia's Rappahannock Regional Jail (full text of letter) demanding that it end its rather unusual policy on censorship of incoming letters to inmates. The jail takes out all Biblical passages from incoming mail, as well as any material inserted into a letter by cutting and pasting it from the Internet. The letter says in part: "The principle that religious correspondence must not be saddled with restrictions inapplicable to non-religious correspondence is so settled in law that prison and jail officials who impose such restrictions forfeit qualified immunity and become subject to suit in their personal capacities." Driving home its pint, the letter also observed: "Even the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky had ready access to scripture while incarcerated in a Siberian prison camp in tsarist Russia."

Full post as published by Religion Clause on July 10, 2009 (boomark / email).