Empire of Censorship

Contemporary discussion on the topic of censorship rarely goes beyond the framework of individual rights to address its broader effects on people's movements and collective forms of struggle. In the context of Amerikan prisons, this limited, and liberal, definition of censorship as primarily an assault on individual rights or freedoms obscures its real function as a tool of counterinsurgency, waged against entire populations or classes of people. 

In this piece, I attempt to broaden our definition of censorship by analyzing the widespread mail bans that prisoncrats across the empire began implementing, following the historic state- and nation-wide prison strikes that swept the country in 2016 and 2018. While the confiscation and censoring of prisoners' mail as a form of punishment and retaliation is nothing new, I argue that the enemy made a qualitative leap in their tactics following this period of insurgent prisoner-led resistance. 

Rather than banning or withholding mail outright, prisoncrats began using a tactic I call censorship by expansion, where the digitization of mail, alongside the introduction of electronic tablets into prison facilities, provided a legal and moral cover for the wholesale banning of physical mail and increasingly books into prisons. By framing the generous "gifting" of electronic tablets to prisoners as an expansion of access to information and knowledge, prisoncrats succeeded in withholding, censoring, and ultimately exercising vastly greater control over the actual information deemed most threatening to the prison system. This is a clear example of what the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual considers disrupting insurgency by, essentially, appropriating its cause. Rather than relying on blunt military force to subdue and defeat an insurgent population, counterinsurgency operates indirectly, through a process of co-optation that blurs the line between victory and defeat. 

Counterinsurgency is a core element of how the Amerikan prison system has functioned since at least the 1970s, according to Dr. Orisanmi Burton's insight, which is derived from survivors of the Attica prison rebellion. The type of prison censorship we see today should thus be understood as a form of intellectual, psychological, and class warfare, whose ultimate goal is social control and behavior modification, specifically of the prisoner class.

More than an attack on individual freedom of expression, prison censorship in the 21st century takes aim at Our collective ability to organize and collectively resist the violence of the prison system that dehumanizes Us on the basis of a distinct form of class and national oppression.

Prison Censorship As Class Warfare

During the so-called Cold War, the Amerikan empire promoted the idea of capitalist "democracy" as tied to freedom, as opposed to an "undemocratic" communism associated with unfreedom. Thus, many of Turtle Island's occupants were conditioned to believe that censorship, especially political censorship, was undemocratic and "unconstitutional." In other words, censorship is unAmerikan, something that the dreaded foreign "communists" practiced, but never could happen in the so-called land of the free. However, it is hardly a secret that the Amerikan government has long engaged in blatant acts of censorship against ideas that threaten its own hegemonic narratives, including the frequent targeting, imprisonment, and murder of people who espouse those ideas.   

To this day, We often object to censorship on the basis that it violates our individual freedoms, pointing to instances of book denials or mail tampering as evidence of this injustice; however, this framing of censorship risks falling into the tendency to individualize our collective struggles that the enemy's counterinsurgency strategies are designed to promote. Moreover, it risks reinforcing the narrative that censorship is merely a deviation from the "true" Amerikan values of freedom and democracy and that combating censorship is just about restoring those ideals. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. 

In an open letter he wrote to the New York Department of Corrections upon learning that his book Tip of the Spear had been banned in prisons across multiple states, Dr. Orisanmi Burton noted: "[George] Jackson and others did not see the prison-based rituals of censorship, violence, exploitation, and white supremacy as exceptions to the norms of liberal democracy. Rather, they saw them as a distillation, the very essence of society that was founded on genocide and slavery and that continues to be ruled by monopoly capital. Under such conditions, elite control over the flow of knowledge is imperative."

It is particularly important to highlight the class dimension of prison censorship, since prisoners and the activities and ideas that surround Us, are not often analyzed as a class in Our own right. However, the laws of capitalism always necessitate the development of a sub-economy or black market, and the prisoner class, being excluded from the formal economy, is a natural outgrowth of this arrangement. Prisons, in part, exist to wage war on this sub-economy and those who operate within it. And since Amerikan capitalism, and by extension, its judicial system, has always had a distinctly racial component to it, the majority of prisoners and those of the lumpen class generally are also nationally and racially oppressed. As Jackson wrote in Soledad Brother: "The [modus operandi] of the fascist arrangement is always to protect the capitalist class by destroying the consciousness, the trust, and the unity of the lower classes."

Prison censorship is a form of intellectual, psychological, and class warfare against the imprisoned lumpen class as a whole, designed to control Our narratives, identities, activities, and influence on the broader society. It is designed to stifle not so much our individual expression, but our collective expression as an objective class; and it is this class consciousness which poses the real threat to the prison system, which is why it must go to such extreme lengths to censor and suppress. 

Mail Bans and the Insidious Development of the Prison Censorship Regime

Beginning in 2011 and again in 2013, prisoners across the state of California organized a series of hunger strikes that garnered unprecedented media attention and outside solidarity. During this time, the lumpen class, nearly 30,000 strong, waged a militant campaign to expose the enemy's widespread use of psychological torture inside prisons, particularly that of long-term solitary confinement. This successful exposure of one of the enemy's primary weapons of counterinsurgency was met with a wave of global solidarity: The Pelican Bay hunger strikers garnered the support of Palestinian prisoners on the other side of the world, who have long endured similar types of torture at the hands of their israeli captors. 

Following on the heels of this widely publicized hunger strike, a national prison strike was organized in 2016 to protest the issue of mass incarceration, especially the industrialization of prisons. Though I personally believe this strike was organized in haste, two years later in 2018, another, better organized national prison strike coalesced, with sister souljah Amani Sawari serving as its public spokesperson. The 2018 national prison strike and its demands were widely publicized and discussed, in part, because it was timed to coincide with the Democratic Party primaries that set the stage for the 2020 elections. During the debates, presidential candidates were asked a series of questions about prisons and prison reform, directly derived from the demands of the 2018 national prison strike. This moment made clear that the lumpen class and their petit-bourgeois allies had indeed succeeded in forcing the issue of mass incarceration to the forefront of national consciousness.

In the same year, however, We began to witness the first waves of mail bans being implemented in prisons across the empire. While the Amerikan prison regime has a long history of withholding or tampering with prisoners' mail, the specific methods used to implement these policies after 2018 represented an escalation in the enemy's tactics: Rather than banning mail outright, prisoncrats began instituting new state-wide policies of mail digitization, which required all incoming physical mail to be scanned and uploaded into a digital database. Though they argued that these policies were necessary to prevent the smuggling of drugs and contraband into prison facilities, this claim is easily disproven by the stats. For example, between the years of 2022 and 2025, the Arkansas Department of Corrections reported only 25 incidents of drugs being smuggled into prisons through physical mail. Since thousands of pieces of mail entered Arkansas prisons over this three-year-long period, the claim that drugs smuggled in via physical mail posed a legitimate security threat to the prison system is unsubstantiated. 

In reality, these new mail digitization policies were a coordinated effort to target, eliminate, and destroy the primary lines of communication that sustained the waves of state and nation-wide prison strikes during the first half of the 2010s. It is clear that Amerikan prisoncrats, who observed the widespread success of the prisoners' movement in the preceding years, responded to this insurgent offensive by initiating a counter-offensive, which entailed attacking and destroying the entire communications infrastructure that made possible the successes of the prisoners' movement during the preceding years. However, rather than attacking it outright, they employed the classic counterinsurgency move—tested and proven in the course of Amerika's many wars abroad—of co-opting the insurgency through a veneer of concession.

Many of Us who took part in the militant prisoner movements during the first half of the 2010s correctly predicted that this counterinsurgent attack on our mail, and, by extension, our ability to organize, was only the beginning of a larger strategy to come. In 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the George Floyd uprisings, and numerous strikes and uprisings occurring behind the walls, the state initiated a second wave of counterinsurgency when they began distributing electronic tablet devices to prisoners across the empire. In the state of Texas, the private company Securus Technologies paid the Texas Department of Criminal Justice tens of millions of dollars to open its doors to a non-competitive and captive market, while other states signed multi-million dollar contracts with similar corporations such as Global Tel Link (GTL) and CorrLinks. Electronic tablets were now rented freely to each prisoner, who would be charged to use select content and services on these devices, including email and phone services that were also to be paid for out of pocket.

By framing the introduction of tablets into prisons as an expansion of prisoners' access to information, knowledge, and channels of communication, prisoncrats succeeded in convincing the public that these tablets constituted a positive step toward "prison reform" and an improvement in prison conditions overall. In reality, however, these "reforms" merely provided cover for an unprecedented expansion in the prison system's own surveillance and censorship capacities, dealing a decisive blow to the victories of the nation-wide prison strikes in the preceding years.  

New Prison Tech Blurs the Line Between Victory and Defeat

In his book, Tip of the Spear, Dr. Orisanmi Burton wrote: "To see the prison as an institutionalized form of counterinsurgency is to apprehend how not only spectacular violence, but mundane 'progressive' and 'humanizing' reforms are constantly being weaponized against the capacity for radical thought." He noted how, in the wake of the 1971 Attica Rebellion, the New York Department of Corrections initiated a state-wide program allowing prisoners to have individual TV sets in their cells—a move that resulted in a marked decline in young people's desire to read. While many interpreted this new allowance of individual TV sets in prison cells as a "privilege," the intended effect of this counterinsurgency move is clearly illustrated in an anecdote shared by Attica survivor Jomo Omowale, who in the late 1970s reported seeing a copy of George Jackson's Soledad Brother in a prisoner's trash can. 

Prison censorship thus exemplifies the carrot and stick logic that characterizes prisons as sites of low-intensity warfare. For every "carrot," such as electronic tablets, introduced by the prison regime to reward (read: mold) prisoners' behavior in ways that favor the interests of the ruling class, there is a "stick" ready to beat and terrorize the captive who does not comply. Punishment can mean an array of things. For some, like comrades Kevin Rashid Johnson, Shaka Shakur, and Sundiata Acoli, it means domestic exile through policies such as the interstate compact, where captives are traded across state lines, deliberately kept out of reach of their families and communities. It can mean arbitrary searches and raids, the illegal confiscation of property, physical beatings, and false and trumped-up disciplinary cases and sanctions, which prevent a prisoner from any ability to contact their supporters.

In the conclusion of his book, Burton wrote: "Today's prison-based tablets are on the cutting edge of carceral war. Privately-owned digital communications firms such as Securus Technologies and Global Tel Link (GTL) are increasingly flooding carceral systems with app-filled devices specially designed for prison contexts. Although these tools are publicly marketed as "bringing fractured communities together," these companies employ predatory pricing strategies that extract scarce financial resources from already vulnerable communities and are rapidly replacing letter writing, which, as I have shown, is central to the terrain of anti-carceral Revolt.

Moreover, he noted how "increasingly ubiquitous tracking technologies," such as electronic ankle shackles, among numerous other carceral technologies that have proliferated alongside the introduction of tablets, are increasingly blurring the line between freedom and captivity altogether, foreshadowing a time already rapidly emerging when we will be less and less able to define the parameters of incarceration at all. Here again, the proliferation of technologies such as electronic ankle shackles allows the state to craft a narrative of "reform" and "progress"—by citing declining incarceration rates over the last decade—while in reality expanding and rewriting the very terms of incarceration, by once again blurring the distinction between victory and defeat.

In this sense, the fight against prison censorship cannot be about the restoration of individual rights or freedoms; ultimately, there are no rights, only power struggles. Until the oppressed nations and classes within Occupied Turtle Island gain true sovereignty over land, including the prisons that currently occupy them, we will continue to see a further heightening of these contradictions, causing classes in power to censor us more, not less.

As Mao wrote in "On Practice": "In class society, everyone lives as a member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of class." The question becomes: which class is determining your thoughts and action?