Newspaper madness: Kansas prisons spin fearmongering drug tales to restrict information

Kansas Department of Corrections officials say drug-soaked paper delivered via mail, which incarcerated individuals can smoke or ingest to get high, is the reason for changing its print newspaper subscription policy. (iStock/Getty Images Plus)

Here’s one guarantee from Kansas Reflector: We’re not soaked in drugs and sent through the mail.

That’s the curious claim made by the state Department of Corrections after it decided to cancel all print newspaper subscriptions purchased for inmates by outside parties. That’s right — state officials believe that your hometown gazette is at risk of being infused in a mind-altering substance and carried by the Postal Service. Publishers and the Kansas Press Association have protested mightily, but the department has refused to offer any specifics about the supposed threat.

As I said, a good reason to turn to the all-digital Kansas Reflector. The only mind-altering substance we’re infused with is great reporting and community commentary. If you really want to taint us with drugs in some way, I suppose you can print out some of our stories and do so in the privacy of your own home.

If it sounds like I’m not taking these stories from the state seriously, that’s because I’m not.

Kansas Reflector reporter Anna Kaminski wrote about the change Sept. 8: “Previously, families of incarcerated people could take out a newspaper subscription in a person’s name and have it delivered to a state facility. The agency says it made the change, forbidding newspaper subscriptions paid for by outside parties, for safety. … The new policy requires people serving time in state facilities to request a subscription on their own, undergo an approval process and pay for the subscription out of their commissary accounts.”

After that initial story was published, prison spokesman David Thompson wrote in an email to Kaminski: “The impetus for this policy is an increase in drug-soaked material, such as books and newspapers, being transmitted to residents through the USPS.”

The department provided no evidence that this had happened in Kansas.

Let’s consider for a moment what it would mean for newspapers to actually pose such a threat. What is the corrections department actually suggesting? It seems to me one of two astonishingly improbable scenarios.

First off, it suspects that a newspaper publisher somewhere in the Sunflower State actually has been coating his or her publication with drugs and sending it through the mail. It’s already tough enough making ends meet in this business. Why would owners and operators of local papers open themselves up to such threats?

Secondly, they think that the mail has somehow been intercepted along its path from publisher to prison. That would be a federal crime. And while I understand that legal ramifications don’t deter everyone, surely these canny drug smugglers would want to spread drugs on more durable paper than newsprint. Have you ever tried to even wrap a mug in newspaper? It’s not that durable!

The final and wildest part of all this is that the actual restriction doesn’t fit the supposed risk.

Kansas has forbidden friends and family from buying inmates newspaper subscriptions. But inmates themselves can still purchase the subscriptions. So if the infrastructure already exists to ship newspapers-as-drugs into prisons, the only thing that needs to change is the person actually buying the subscription (and perhaps the prison’s approval process, however that works).

Here’s the bottom line. Prisons and those who run them want control over their institutions and inmates. Contact with the outside world — be it mail, visits or internet — poses potential risks to inmate and staff safety. Officials want to lower those potential risks.

That makes sense. But it can lead to ridiculous situations like this one, where the action taken doesn’t lead to the stated goals and make no sense besides.

Believe me, we wanted to hear more from the state about this. Kaminski and others at Kansas Reflector and the Kansas Press Association have sought extra information and explanations. We would be happy to understand more about officials’ thinking and share it with our readers. Perhaps my absurd scenarios aren’t so absurd after all.

But they have refused to do so. We’re left with a ham-fisted restriction on the free access to information. That leaves all of us, not just prisoners, worse off.

Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.