When Pulitzer Prize-winning author Heather Ann Thompson sent a copy of her 2016 book “Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising and Its Legacy” to three people locked up in Illinois prisons, two of the three copies were rejected because of security concerns.
So she sued.
Last year, the Illinois Department of Corrections settled the 2018 federal lawsuit by agreeing to approve “Blood in the Water”. Thompson’s publisher sent “Blood in the Water” to all prison libraries across Illinois this month.
The corrections department also agreed to pay Thompson, a professor of history and Afroamerican and African studies at the University of Michigan, $8,500. The civil rights law firm Uptown People’s Law Center represented Thompson in the suit.
“Blood in the Water,” which won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, details the deadly uprising at Attica, a men’s maximum security prison in upstate New York, on Sept. 9, 1971. More than 1,000 prisoners took over the facility, taking 39 correctional officers as hostages. Forty-three people died during the riot, 11 hostages and 32 prisoners. The rioting men were demanding better living conditions and political rights. New York started offering higher education in prison in the mid-1970s partly in response to the riot.
“I am thrilled that my book on the 1970s struggle of prisoners at Attica is now protected inside of Illinois prisons, and that there soon will be a copy in every prison library for folks to access,” Thompson wrote in an email to Open Campus. “Despite earlier civil rights victories to ensure people could read inside, prisons have become ground zero for book banning, just as have schools.”
In 2018, a corrections officer rejected one of the copies of “Blood in the Water” that Thompson sent to an individual at Pontiac Correctional Center, stating that it contained descriptions of activities that may lead to violence or disruption; encouraged criminal activity; and was “otherwise detrimental to security, good order, rehabilitation, or discipline.” The officer testified during a deposition that the man who received the book could use it “as a potential guideline and process by which to take a hostage, take over an institution.”
People at Attica State Prison in New York raise their hands in clenched fists to show solidarity of their demands during a negotiation session Friday with a New York prison leader. A recent lawsuit settlement means Illinois prisoners are now allowed to read an award-winning book about the Attica prison riot
AP
Thompson said she believes she succeeded in her suit because her claims in the Illinois case, and in a similar effort in New York, were based on her First Amendment right as an author. It is much more difficult to sue on behalf of prisoners because of restrictions placed on them by the Prison Litigation Reform Act, a 1995 law passed by Congress in response to a sharp rise in prisoner lawsuits in federal courts.
According to the Marshall Project’s database of banned books by state, other states that have banned Thompson’s book include Ohio, North Carolina, and Texas. The latter state banned the book for “sexually explicit images,” which Thompson said refer to photos of naked men being tortured during the Attica riot.
Earlier this year, Illinois became the first state to implement a ban on book bans, by withholding state funding from schools and libraries that attempt to prohibit certain books. After advocates raised questions about whether the new law applies to prisons, the secretary of state clarified that the ban on bans includes prison libraries because they receive state grants.
Charlotte West is a reporter covering the future of postsecondary education in prisons for Open Campus, a nonprofit newsroom focused on higher education. Sign up for her newsletter, College Inside.
