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Advocacy/Direct
John Medina/ACLU-NJ Paralegal
The ACLU-NJ successfully represented the ACLU National Prison Project (NPP) in opposing the confiscation of an issue of the NPP Journal by officials of the Mountainview Youth Correctional Facility (MYCF). MYCF objected to an article that described a lawsuit in Texas in which an inmate alleged abuse by prison guards. MYCF confiscated the NPP Journal because the article "portrayed officers in a very bad light." We wrote to the Commissioner of the Department of Corrections and demanded that he overturn the MYCY determination and that the article be returned to the inmate from whom it was confiscated. MYCY's actions violated the federal Constitution's First Amendment right to free speech, the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of due process, and the New Jersey Administrative Code that governs state prisons. On October 1, 2003, we received a response from Commissioner Devon Brown granting our demands.
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