Politics: Freedom of Thought

There are a lot of political considerations people make about prisoners serving jail time. It seems sometimes that many Americans believe that anyone who ever crossed them deserves the electric chair or whatever. I can't possibly assess the prison situation in America. We've got a lot of people in jail, we even kill some, but the only thing in my lifetime that has ever actually made an impact on the crime rate is the age of prosperity which happened to coincide with the presidency of a certain Arkansan we all know.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about. This AP item recounts the story of a prisoner serving time for protesting at the School of the Americas, at Fort Benning, in Columbus, Georgia. (Care to guess the worst place I've ever been stranded during air-travel, in my life? Worse than Rabat? Worse than Newark? Columbus, GA.) While serving his sentence, he received some news clippings from the Readers Digest, New York Times, and other publications. He was then removed to solitary confinement.

William Combs, who is a bit of a protest gadfly, is represented by a BIll Quigley:

Bill Quigley said the minimum-security prison camp transferred his client, William "Bud" Combs, to the Santa Rosa County Jail for eight days of solitary after friends sent him anti-war and social justice articles from The New York Times, Readers' Digest, Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, the BBC and the British newspaper The Guardian.

"Even in prison you're not supposed to be punished for reading the paper," Quigley said in a telephone interview from New Orleans, where he is a Loyola University law professor. "This gives us an idea about the arbitrary power, and what people consider political activity, in prison."

When people are put into solitary confinement for reading Readers' Digest, there's got to be something wrong.