STAFFORD, Va. -- The Rutherford Institute, in conjunction with the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Virginia, the Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy, Prison Fellowship, the Friends Committee on National Legislation and the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, has demanded that officials at the Rappahannock Regional Jail immediately end their illegal practice of censoring religious material sent to detainees.
In a letter sent today to the jail's superintendent, Joseph Riggs, Jr., The Rutherford Institute asks that jail officials guarantee in writing that the jail will no longer censor biblical passages from letters written to detainees and to revise the jail's written inmate mail policy to state that letters will not be censored simply because they contain religious material.
A copy of the letter is available here.
"Sadly, prison officials across the nation routinely deny religious materials to prisoners," said John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute. "This is a gross violation of the First Amendment and should be resisted at every turn. If anything, spiritual nourishment is what many prisoners need and want, and it should be protected."
The letter was prompted by a complaint brought by Anna Williams, a devout Christian whose son was detained at Rappahannock beginning in June of 2008 until his transfer earlier this year. Williams wanted to send her son religious material, including passages from the Bible, to support him spiritually during his confinement. But rather than deliver Williams' letters to her son in full, jail officials removed any and all religious material, destroying the religious messages Williams sought to convey to her son.
For example, after jail officials excised biblical passages, a three-page letter sent by Williams to her son was reduced to nothing more than the salutation, the first paragraph of the letter and the closing, "Love, Mom." Jail officials banned additional material from other letters Williams attempted to send her son, including passages from the Book of Proverbs, the Book of James, the Book of Matthew and an article that contained Christian perspectives on confronting isolation while in jail. Jail officials have variously cited prohibitions on "Internet pages" and "religious material sent from home" as reasons for the censorship.
The letter also asks jail officials to revise the jail's inmate mail policy to state that letters will not be censored merely because they contain material printed from the Internet or copied from the Internet and inserted into a letter using a word processor's "cut and paste" feature.
