The below came from The Legal Pad, Volume 4, Issue 5 (May, 2020), published by Cyrus Gladden from the gulag in Moose Lake, Minnesota.
Editor’s Introduction: Only recently (taking a cue from the favorable SCOTUS decision in Packingham) have courts begun to take the free speech, free press, and free thought guarantees of the First Amendment seriously when it comes t~ sex offenders. Prior to that, complaints by sex offenders – especially those confined in SOCC facilities.:_ were regularly dismissed without serious examination. Worse, some adverse decisions actually further sequentially eroded those rights.
As a result, SOCC facilities came to believe that their confinees simply had no First Amendment rights. Mail was regularly delayed, even discarded on whim of facility staff. Outrageous rules not heard of even in prisons for the last half-century have often virtually choked off nearly all lines of communication by any confinee with the outside world. One example is one state’s restriction of mail to letters only from and to a very short list of correspondents for any given confinee, with each correspondent allowed to write only to that particular confinee in that facility .
This has been quite deliberate. Our captors, realizing that their future paychecks depend on our continued confinement, have signed onto incessant, massive propaganda campaigns to convince the public that we are monsters. Communication has been almost totally extinguished to eliminate our voices from getting through to those outside. The aim is to hold us incommunicado. Then we will be just voiceless imagined objects to vilify.
Now, however, the tide appears to be turning. Although this may be slow at first, the sweeping nature of First Amendment rights requires that everyone must have them, limited only to the least extent of only truly compelling government needs.
Thus, we can prevail on all of these rights, if we adamantly and wisely litigate all restrictions foist upon us. I do not refer to random, isolated lawsuits by legally uneducated pro se confinees about trivial issues of their own. I speak of major cases for which the volunteer services of dedicated civil liberties lawyers well versed in First Amendment case law are needed. The following articles should convince you that this is a powerful trend of minds opening to our morally and ethically compelling claims of this kind. The time is right, and the metal is hot. Use both to forge a line of decisions acknowledging and detailing our rights to full and effective communication with the outside world!
