Tag: unconstitutional practices

I am a cadre of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party Prison Chapter, currently incarcerated at Red Onion Prison in the southwest corner of Virginia. I’ve been a subscriber to SF Bayview for 14 months. I recently received the August 2016 issue, which came as a pleasant surprise. Prior to that, my copies of Bayview were arbitrarily disapproved with the pseudo-justification that “content could be detrimental to offenders’ rehabilitation efforts.”

In order to successfully advance in each step of CDCR’s newly enacted Step Down Program (SDP), prisoners are expected to fill out and complete a series of thought policing or brainwashing workbooks. One such workbook is entitled “The Con Game” and purports to elucidate for the prisoner via “self-directed journaling” the ways in which he either consciously or unconsciously is a con artist and criminal.

Stories in the Bay View about figures historically associated with prisoner issues, such as George Jackson, comprise a large percentage of the stories that the CDCR deems to pose threats to prison security and, in the hands of African-American prisoners, as indicia of gang affiliation. In other cases, the CDCR seizes the Bay View without referencing any particular article, the inference being that the newspaper itself is a threat to security, the mere possession of which is an indicator of gang association.