58 Iowa Prisoners Sue For Access To Porn, Money Damages

DES MOINES, IOWA—Sexually explicit material—"pornography"—is legal everywhere in the United States unless that material has been adjudged to be "obscene." But there's plenty of porn out there, and most adults can find it in stores and online—unless, that is, they're inmates in prisons in Iowa, where a recently passed law has barred the prisons from offering "pornography reading rooms," which had existed for at least three decades in several of the prisons, and also bans inmates from having nude photos—even those as mildly nude as in Playboy magazine—in their cells. As might be expected, the inmates weren't too happy about that, and have sued state officials in federal court for depriving them of their First Amendment right to see and own the material—and they're asking the courts to award each of them $25,000 for this violation of their constitutional rights. "The plaintiffs—who are all inmates at the Fort Dodge Correctional Facility—are led by Allen C. Miles, 70, who is serving a life sentence for the stabbing death of Cheryl Kleinschrodt on March 3, 1982, in Des Moines," reported William Petroski of the Des Moines Register. "The suit claims the law was enacted under the guise of 'morality,' and blames 'religious tyrants' who have no regard for the U.S. Constitution or Declaration of Independence." The basis for the new ban is apparently two-fold: Female corrections officers objected to having to see the material in the cells and reading rooms, plus getting rid of the reading rooms "ends a staff-intensive process," which involved helping the prisoners check out the materials and escorting them to the reading rooms, then returning the material to the stacks after making sure the inmate hadn't removed any of the pages. (In the lawsuit, Miles and his fellow plaintiffs suggested that if the female guards can't handle the material, "they should find employment elsewhere.") The prison porn ban was hidden away in a justice system budget bill passed and signed into law at the end of the legislature's 2018 session, and in supporting the bill, Michael Savala, the Iowa prison system's general counsel, argued that the legislation "mirrors a policy currently used by the Federal Bureau of Prisons." "The department really feels that inmates having access to that kind of material does not lend itself to pro-social thinking and behavior and as far as our responsibilities to change the mindset of the offender as they transition back into the community," Savala said. However, state Sen. Rich Taylor argued that the ban "ignore[s] the fact that male inmates have a sexual drive." "That is just a fact and you have to have some way to relieve that," Taylor said. "This gives the inmates no release point except another offender, and don’t think that it doesn’t happen. This will make it worse. They will have no other alternatives for their relief. I think that this is a bad idea." Of course, most of the inmates were not convicted of any sort of sex crime, even though prison officials claimed that "the population of sex offenders has grown significantly in Iowa's prisons since the 1980s and 1990s," and in their pre-prison and post-prison lives, will have access to pretty much as much porn as they want. The suit was filed in October; no court date has yet been set.