How Prisons Silence

Research

How Prisons Silence

Abstract

Free speech is a core value of liberal democracies, but for 1.8 million incarcerated Americans, it is largely inaccessible. Incarcerated people have scarce access to phone calls and in-person visits, are prohibited from using social media, and face severe reprisals (such as transfer to solitary confinement) for engaging in protest. Are such authoritarian controls on speech—which it would be unthinkable to impose on the general public—justified behind the prison gate? I argue that they are not. First, I discuss how this silencing regime undermines the dignity of incarcerated people, by endangering their self-respect. Second, I explain how it increases moral ignorance among the public—about injustices related to our prison system, and beyond.

Keywords:

  • Keyword: speech
  • Keyword: self-respect
  • Keyword: moral ignorance
  • Keyword: non-reformist reform
  • Keyword: prison
  • Keyword: protest

How to Cite:

Thau, T., (2025) “How Prisons Silence”, Political Philosophy 2(2). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/pp.25033

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Funding

Name
UK Research and Innovation
FundRef ID
https://doi.org/10.13039/100014013
Funding ID
MR/V025600/1

How Prisons Silence

Tena Thau

Political Science, University College London, UK

If you ask for help they isolate you. If you cry they might take you away for two weeks. So, people stay silent.

– a woman in ICE detention in Florida1

If incarcerated people have a fundamental right to freedom of speech, the American carceral system does not respect it. Those who dare to engage in political protest from behind bars are routinely punished severely, and all incarcerated people are subject to a sweeping array of speech controls—from the denial of personal cell phones, to complete exclusion from social media. These restrictions are backed up by harsh penalties for noncompliance.

It would of course be unthinkable to impose such repressive measures on the general public. But we broadly tolerate these measures when they are imposed on incarcerated people. Indeed, many of those who claim free speech to be a core political value of theirs are actively working to expand the carceral state.2 My aim, in this paper, is to argue against these restrictive speech policies. Even in cases where restricting a person’s freedom of movement may be justifiable, depriving an incarcerated person of freedom of speech is not.

Though not the most prominent criticism of our prison system, the worry that incarceration wrongfully impinges on free speech is not a new one. The Supreme Court has considered the issue on several occasions, with Thurgood Marshall arguing powerfully for greater speech protections.3,4 Some activists are also pushing back against the silencing regime—by, for example, calling on media outlets to platform incarcerated writers, and campaigning to make prison phone calls free.5

Those who support speech-promoting efforts such as these typically appeal to the following values: wellbeing (by emphasizing the welfarist value that communication has for incarcerated people and their loved ones), public safety (by citing evidence that freer communication reduces recidivism), and an informed citizenry—because how else is the general public to learn about the conditions inside prisons, if not through the speech of those experiencing these conditions first-hand?6

I take these three appeals to be compelling ones. But I also feel that these standard arguments, on their own, fail to capture the full moral harm of restrictive controls on incarcerated people’s speech. So, in this paper, I will try to buttress the moral case for protecting incarcerated people’s speech, by exploring some serious—but less obvious—ways in which this silencing regime causes harm.

My philosophical contributions will be threefold. First, I add structure to the debate around free speech in prisons, by considering what I take to be the most compelling candidate justification for restrictive speech policies, and pointing out its vulnerabilities.

Second, drawing on a suggestion made by Thurgood Marshall in his concurring opinion in Procunier v. Martinez (1974), I argue that restrictive controls on speech violate the dignity of incarcerated people.7 In making this argument, I illuminate the connection between speech and self-respect—something that traditional “dignitarian” accounts of free speech have overlooked.8

Third, on the issue of an informed citizenry, I show that the epistemic harm of speech restrictions is larger than previously appreciated. While others have rightly noted that these restrictions prevent the public from learning about prison conditions, I argue that they deprive the public of much more. Specifically, I argue that the silencing of incarcerated voices increases the risk of widespread moral ignorance among the general public—including moral ignorance about matters unrelated to our prison system. (In making this argument, I depart from a tendency in the philosophical literature to regard incarcerated people as only the objects of “moral education”—rather than as moral educators themselves.9)

Before moving forward, a few points of clarification. First, my primary focus, in this paper, will be on the US prison system. This is for a few reasons. Considerations of scale10 and political tractability11 give the impartially-concerned reformer reason to focus their efforts on the US, and the harsh conditions of US prisons raise particularly pressing speech concerns. However, my arguments will be applicable, mutatis mutandis, to prison systems around the world.

Second, the focus of my discussion will be on prisons, where the majority of incarcerated Americans are confined. But others are incarcerated elsewhere, including in jails, and in the (rapidly expanding) network of immigrant detention camps.12 These sites have a similar regime of speech restrictions as prisons. In the case of jails and immigrant detention facilities, though, restrictive speech measures are more difficult to justify. Given that many people in jail have not been convicted of any crime at all, or have been convicted of only minor offenses, and given that those in immigrant detention have often only committed the “crime” of wanting a better life, the claim that people incarcerated in these facilities have forfeited their right to freedom of speech has less plausibility than the claim that prisoners have forfeited this right. Therefore, if I can show that restrictive speech policies in prisons are unjustified, then I will have shown a fortiori that the same policies are unjustified in jails and immigrant detention centers.

Finally, I will note that this is a paper in moral and political philosophy, not a paper about interpreting constitutional law. My contention is that the speech regulations in place in American prisons (which I will overview in Section I) are morally objectionable (for the reasons I will put forward in Section II), not that they are violations of the First Amendment.

In the next section, I will outline the main ways in which prisons silence. Some of the speech interferences I will discuss might initially strike you as morally justifiable. If so, then I hope that the moral considerations I discuss in Section II will change your mind—or at least cast serious doubt on such policies’ justifiability. Other speech interferences I describe, however, will strike many readers as obviously unjustified. (Solitary confinement, and the physical assault of protesting prisoners by guards would fall into this category.) These practices are noted in the paper not because I think there is any interesting debate to be had about whether they are defensible, but rather, for the following reasons. First, for the sake of comprehensiveness; In a paper about how prisons silence, it would be odd not to mention the fact that tens of thousands of people in solitary confinement are physically prevented from speaking with almost anyone, or to neglect to mention that incarcerated people are sometimes physically assaulted for protesting against their abuse. Second, I think that exposing unrecognized moral costs of clearly unjust practices can be worthwhile, insofar as this adds moral urgency to our efforts to end them. Third, I think that it is an attentional injustice13 that mainstream discourse around free speech has largely ignored the grave assaults on speech that occur routinely in prisons. This paper is a contribution towards rectifying that.

I. SILENCING MECHANISMS

The suggestion that prisons silence people may bring to mind cases in which a person is incarcerated for a speech-related offense. The prosecution, under the Espionage Act, of Julian Assange—who published leaks exposing US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan—is one such example. Such cases clearly implicate freedom of speech.14 It is less obvious, though, that incarceration for non-speech-related offenses is relevant to the topic of speech. This is the subject this paper will explore. Through a range of mechanisms, prisons systematically silence the people locked inside them.

The most severe speech controls are imposed on those in solitary confinement.15 Typically, a person in solitary is locked alone in a small, windowless cell for 23–24 hours a day, and then locked alone in an outdoor cage during the remaining 0–1 hour. Under these conditions, it is physically impossible to speak with almost anyone at all.

Those caged in non-solitary conditions face significant barriers to speech as well.16 First, incarcerated people have limited access to phones. It is prohibited to possess a cell phone in prison, and so most prisoners rely on communal landline phones to make calls. Typically, prison phones are only accessible during designated times, and prisoners must queue to use them. Those at the end of the queue may not get a chance to make a call at all on a given day. Physical altercations over access to phones is common.17 Lack of privacy is also an issue: Many prisoners feel uncomfortable expressing vulnerability during calls, since they are made within earshot of their peers.18 A further obstacle to having meaningful conversations is the fact that calling time is limited to several minutes, at which point the call abruptly cuts off. On top of all this, prison phone calls are also extortionately priced.19

In-person visits are limited in duration and frequency, and the out-of-the-way, rural location of many prisons can make visiting difficult.20 And for those who are incarcerated for many years—as their social ties with people on the outside fray, the few opportunities that they do have to communicate with others can become increasingly scarce. In Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” one formerly incarcerated woman describes how she was visited less and less over the course of her 18-year sentence: “First I would get one [visit] like every four months…And then I wouldn’t get none for like maybe a year. You know, because it was too far away. And I started to have losses. I lost my mom, my brothers…So it was hard, you know, for me to get visits.”21

A further obstacle to visits is the fact that prisoners are routinely strip-searched after them—a practice that many consider to be tantamount to sexual assault. Some prisoners decline to meet with visitors for this reason.22

Online spaces are no recourse, either. Posting on social media is prohibited in prisons—and punished mercilessly. In South Carolina, incarcerated people found guilty of “social networking” sentenced to an average of 517 days in solitary confinement.23

And while it is possible to publish essays and books from behind bars, prison administrators often make this very difficult, including by destroying written manuscripts in cell raids.24

Often, incarcerated people cannot even communicate with each other freely. Many states have bans on “inmate-to-inmate correspondence,” which prohibit incarcerated people from, for example, communicating with each other by letter. Such restrictions not only stand in the way of the maintenance of “wholesome friendships”25 and romantic relationships,26 but also impede political organizing. (To organize a national prison strike in 2018, the organization Jailhouse Lawyers Speak creatively circumvented restrictions on inter-prisoner communication by printing information about the strike in prison newsletters—in small font, so that they wouldn’t be noticed by censors—and also used intermediaries outside prison to help get out the word.27)

Prison officials also try to stifle criticism—and deter prisoners from speaking out in the first place—with a range of draconian reprisals, including: solitary confinement, punitive transfer to a different prison, denial of the “privilege” of being visited by loved ones, deportation (for those with insecure immigration status), and physical assault.28 For example, a number of women in a California prison were recently deported after reporting sexual abuse by prison staff.29 And when people incarcerated in a Brooklyn jail protested against inhumane conditions (during a winter power outage that left them in freezing cells), guards assaulted some of the protestors with pepper spray, transferred them to solitary confinement, and shut off the toilets so that prisoners had to sleep next to their own faeces.30 (Rarely ever do guards receive disciplinary sanctions for committing assault—even when the evidence against them is overwhelming.31)

And even when prisoners—in the face of all these obstacles and risks—successfully pull off a major protest, they often struggle to get the media attention needed to translate their efforts into policy change. (For example, the organizers of a nation-wide prison strike in 2016 criticized the mainstream media for failing to cover it.)32 Part of the problem is that major news outlets, because of their ad-revenue dependence, cater largely to the tastes of middle and upper class readers33—and such readers have little interest in reading about the places in which “undesirables are deposited.”34 And even when journalists want to report on prisons, restrictions on media access often get in the way. For example, in Michigan state prisons, a journalist is only permitted to visit an incarcerated person if they are on their “visitor list”—which is limited to 20 people, and which can only be changed every six months—and only permitted to be on the visitor list of one non-relative. Journalists in Michigan are also prohibited from taking photos or recordings during visits.35,36

I will note one final, sinister way in which prisons silence. Incarceration, and solitary confinement especially, can psychologically break people: making it difficult for them—while they are so confined—to summon the clarity of thought, or the will, to engage in speech at all.37 Of those incarcerated in maximum-security prisons, about half experience chronic depression, and 36% report feeling emotionally flat. For those in solitary confinement, these percentages rise to 73% and 78%, and many “begin to lose the ability to initiate behavior of any kind—to organize their own lives around activity and purpose.”38 About a third of individuals in solitary experience illusions and hallucinations.39 So besides closing off many communication paths, and deterring people from speaking openly through the threat of reprisals, the prison system also keeps people quiet through this more insidious, psychological route.

II. THE NORMATIVE STATUS OF RESTRICTIVE CONTROLS ON SPEECH IN PRISONS

Is the silencing regime I have described above morally defensible?

As noted before, I take the most egregious forms of silencing (like solitary confinement, and the illegal physical assault of protesting prisoners by guards) to be obviously immoral. But one can agree that these most outrageous practices are unjust, while being open to the possibility that most of the speech interferences discussed above are justifiable. So, while my descriptive discussion in Section I may unsettle, I assume that it is not enough, on its own, to convince most readers that restrictive controls on prisoners’ speech, broadly speaking, are normatively wrong.40

In the remainder of this paper, I will make that normative case. I will begin by constructing what I take to be the most compelling argument in favor of extensive restrictions on prisoners’ communication. I will then push back on the argument’s core premises.

A. A Defense of Speech Restrictions, and Its Vulnerabilities

There are a variety of possible justifications one could give for the far-reaching restrictions on speech in place in American prisons. The cold-hearted may support these policies simply on the grounds that they make prisoners’ lives more miserable. Alternatively, some have asserted that speech restrictions help “rehabilitate” prisoners. But they have yet to explain how, or provide any evidence of this supposed rehabilitative effect, as the Supreme Court has pointed out.41

A more common rationale is safety: It is often argued that strict controls on speech help protect prison staff, and prisoners themselves, from physical violence. Prison, after all, is an incredibly tense environment, in which there is an “ever-present potential for violent confrontation and conflagration.”42 It is sometimes suggested, further, that speech restrictions improve the safety of the general public, by making it more difficult for an incarcerated person to orchestrate crime in the outside world, or for a dangerous criminal to escape.43

It is also frequently claimed that speech restrictions are necessary for “order”—though, in claiming that a policy promotes “order” in prisons, people may mean different things. Often, what I suspect they actually mean is that the policy promotes the safety of people inside prisons.44 In other cases, the term “order” may be used to mean something that is distinct from safety. For example, one District Court judge suggests that an aim of prison regulations, besides protecting prisoners and guards from violence, is to “maintain some kind of internal routine, similar to municipal traffic and health ordinances, and similar to the rules of a monastery with respect to meals and hygiene and noise.”45 But it is far from clear that “order” in that sense has very much, if any, moral importance (apart from any instrumental value it may have in improving the safety of people inside these institutions).

However, any plausible ethical perspective should consider safety to be of significant moral importance. For this reason, and because there are prima facie plausible reasons for thinking that restrictions on speech in prisons promote safety (which are noted in the next paragraph), I consider safety to be the most compelling candidate reason for restricting speech in prisons.

Safety is also the rationale for restricting prisoners’ speech that courts appear most sympathetic to. For example, in Turner v. Safely (1987), the Supreme Court upheld restrictions on prisoner-to-prisoner mail on the grounds that mail correspondence could be used “to arrange violent acts, and to foster prison gang activity.” In Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners’ Labor Union (1977), the Court upheld restrictions on union organizing in prisons, because of prison officials’ fear that union activity might exacerbate tensions between incarcerated people and guards, which could potentially result in violence. And in Pell v. Procunier (1974), the Court appealed to “the internal security of penal institutions” in upholding restrictions on media access to prisons.46 (Press interviews had led to a few incarcerated people at one facility “gaining disproportionate notoriety and influence among their fellow inmates”— which prison authorities linked to a rise in disciplinary problems, including a violent escape attempt.)

But while (even highly speculative) appeals to safety can suffice to justify prison speech restrictions legally,47 they are not necessarily enough to justify these restrictions morally—at least not if we accept the widely-held view that free speech is a moral right. As Dworkin argues, while non-rights-infringing limitations on our liberty can be justified by pointing to a “speculative and marginal” safety benefit, restrictions that are rights-infringing, including restrictions on our right to freedom of speech, demand a stronger justification.48

To morally justify restrictive speech policies—while maintaining that free speech is a moral right—it would not be enough to show that these policies made people somewhat safer. One would also need to argue that the benefit to safety was sufficiently large that it morally trumped the right to free speech,49,50 or else make the case that incarcerated people have forfeited their right to free speech.

According to the rights forfeiture theory of punishment, people can forfeit some of their rights by engaging in criminal wrongdoing. One version of this view is that forfeiture is both necessary and sufficient to justify depriving a person of a freedom. A more popular (and, in my view, more plausible) version of the view is that forfeiture is necessary but not sufficient: Encroaching on a freedom would also need to produce some positive moral benefit (safety being the most plausible candidate benefit, in our case), and that benefit would need to be proportionate to any harm that is caused.51,52

Formally, here is how a defense of restrictive speech policies, grounded in appeals to safety and rights forfeiture, might be constructed:

Premise 1 (Safety): Restrictions on incarcerated people’s speech improve safety.

Premise 2 (Forfeiture): Restrictions on incarcerated people’s speech do not violate their rights, because incarcerated people have forfeited their right to freedom of speech.

Premise 3 (Proportionality): Restrictions on incarcerated people’s speech do not have a harmful consequence that outweighs the benefit to safety.

Premise 4: If restrictions on incarcerated people’s speech do not violate their rights, improve safety, and do not have a harmful consequence that outweighs the benefit to safety, then these restrictions are morally justified.

Conclusion: Restrictions on incarcerated people’s speech are morally justified.

My arguments in the rest of Part 2 will challenge Premises 1–3. First, in Section II B, I push back against the Safety premise. The assumption that strict controls on prisoners’ speech improve people’s safety is at best dubious—and we have very good reasons for thinking that the reverse is true. Given the strong reasons we have to doubt the Safety premise, the argument for speech restrictions doesn’t even get off the ground.

Second, even if it could be shown that speech restrictions improved safety, I think that the argument’s second (Forfeiture) premise should be rejected, because incarcerated people’s freedom of speech is an unforfeitable right, as I contend in Section II C. My approach in this section will be to accept by stipulation that dignity is an unforfeitable right (as it is commonly taken to be), and then offer reasons for why robust free speech protections are necessary to protect incarcerated people’s dignity.

Finally, even if it could be shown that restrictive speech measures improved safety, and even if incarcerated people’s right to freedom of speech was forfeitable, the harms to dignity (Section II C) and moral education (Section II D) that I will discuss (along with the more obvious harms of speech restrictions noted in the introduction) put considerable pressure on the proportionality premise.

Though my focus, in this paper, will be on refuting the forfeiture-based argument for restricting incarcerated people’s speech, I should note that my arguments also bear on a consequentialist analysis of the issue. It is of course very difficult (if not impossible) to conclusively prove that any policy is wrong on consequentialist grounds; Doing so would require comprehensively weighing every benefit and cost, including those in the far future.53 But given that prison speech restrictions seem at least as likely to worsen safety as to improve it, and given the serious harms these restrictions have on the self-respect of incarcerated people and on the moral education of the broader public, I think that my arguments provide a strong basis for consequentialists to oppose these policies.

Finally, while my primary aim is to convince a skeptic that the extensive controls on speech in place in American prisons are unjustified, I should note that my arguments are also of practical relevance to those already convinced of this, because they bear on questions concerning “cause prioritization.”54 For example, how should activists prioritize campaigning for speech-promoting reforms compared to campaigning for other reforms to the prison system? The harms to dignity and moral education that I identify are reasons to consider pro-speech interventions to be a higher priority than we would have otherwise considered them.55

B. Do Restrictions on Prisoners’ Speech Actually Promote Safety?

The argument for restrictive speech policies that I constructed above depends crucially on the premise that these policies make people safer. Do they?

While a full empirical assessment of this question is outside the scope of this paper, I will offer a few reasons for seriously doubting that speech restrictions improve safety. Indeed, prison speech regulations very plausibly worsen the safety of incarcerated and non-incarcerated people alike.

First, incarcerated people are more likely to keep up their spirits in prison, and less likely to engage in crime after their release, if they are able to stay in close contact with their support network of family members and friends.56 Studies have confirmed this common-sense point; Frequent visitation, as well as the provision of in-cell phones, have been shown to reduce recidivism substantially.57 Since restrictions on visitation and phone usage increase recidivism, it is likely that they harm public safety on net (even if they do make it more difficult to orchestrate crime in the outside world from behind bars). Second, by increasing the stress of and social isolation of prison life, communication restrictions exacerbate some of the major underlying causes of violence in prison.58 Third, the safety of incarcerated people depends on their ability to inform the public—quickly, and without fear of retaliation—about unsafe conditions and abuses, so that the public can pressure prison administrators and legislators to implement necessary changes. Restrictions on their speech get in the way of this. Fourth, given that fights often break out over limited access to shared prison phones, improving access to communication devices could greatly reduce inter-prisoner violence (as Corey Devon Arthur has persuasively argued).59,60 In addition, a common enforcement mechanism of speech regulations, solitary confinement, is harmful to the safety of those subjected to it (if we define “safety” broadly so as to include protection from psychological torture as well as from physical violence).61,62

For all of these reasons, we should seriously doubt that restrictions on prisoners’ speech have a net safety benefit.

C. Dignity

“We demand, as human beings, the dignity and justice that is due to us by our right of birth…” declare the prisoners of Attica, in the manifesto of their 1971 rebellion.63 Many will agree with the moral principle the prisoners asserted: that all human beings have certain fundamental rights, including a right to basic dignity, regardless of whether or not they have committed a crime.64 (Even rights forfeiture theorists can accept this principle, as Wellman points out.65)

Self-respect is commonly taken to be a core constituent feature of dignity,66 and it is the element of dignity that, I will argue, is undermined by restrictions on speech in prison. To have self-respect means that you see yourself as a person of inherent moral worth—that is, as a person “entitled to a certain threshold of treatment by others.”67

People who are treated respectfully by others in their daily life are likely to have a strong conception of self-worth. But, when a person is routinely mistreated—as is common in prison—then their self-respect is threatened.68 There is the risk that they will internalize the message that they are a person of little worth. Many incarcerated people enter prison with an already-fragile sense of self-respect, owing to backgrounds of childhood abuse and domestic violence.69

To safeguard, or build back up, one’s self-respect in the prison environment, freedom of speech is crucial. First, by speaking with family members and friends, incarcerated people can have their self-worth encouraged and affirmed. For example, in a powerful essay on strip-searches, Corey Devon Arthur discusses how he did not initially feel indignation over the strip-searches he was subjected to—as awful and humiliating as he felt them to be. It was a friend, during an in-person visit, who helped him understand that he was being treated wrongfully: “You’re a human being! No one deserves to be treated like that for any reason” he recalls her saying.70 But because of heavy restrictions around phone calls and visits, and the high costs of making them, incarcerated people have few opportunities to have their worth affirmed in this way.

Second, incarcerated people can have their dignity affirmed by speaking with each other. For example, through conversations facilitated by a mutual support group, some women serving life sentences in Ohio came to realize that they were survivors of domestic abuse. (Several subsequently petitioned, successfully, for gubernatorial clemency.)71 Restrictions on inter-prisoner communication, however, mean that many prisoners do not receive this kind of support.

Third, incarcerated people can affirm their own worth, when they engage in protest. One philosophical view holds that it is a psychological impossibility for a self-respecting person to refrain from speaking out when they are severely mistreated.72 If that view is right, then the reprisals discussed in Section I effectively punish incarcerated people for having dignity. A weaker view holds that, while it is possible for a self-respecting person to opt for pragmatic silence over protest, there is a significant risk that, in doing so repeatedly, they will eventually lose their self-respect.73 If that view is right, then we should expect speech restrictions and reprisals—insofar as they are effective at chilling protest—to erode prisoners’ dignity over time.

Tragically, even when incarcerated people do engage in protest, their sense of self-worth is still not secure. This is because of the nature of a reprisal they are likely to be met with: solitary confinement. As discussed in Section I, solitary confinement has devastating psychological effects, often leading to a loss of one’s sense of purpose and worth. So if a prisoner does not relinquish their dignity voluntarily (by silently submitting to mistreatment), the prison system will try to torture their dignity out of them.

In all of these ways, prison speech restrictions (and the enforcement mechanism of solitary confinement) undermine incarcerated people’s self-respect, a core aspect of dignity. If dignity is an unforfeitable right—as the prisoners of Attica asserted—then incarcerated people’s freedom of speech is, derivatively, an unforfeitable right as well.

D. Moral Ignorance

Just as many people in the past failed to see slavery as a moral evil, perhaps there are present-day injustices that you or I do not recognize as such.74 To guard against this unsettling possibility, MacAskill has stressed the importance of free speech: Since some of our prevailing moral attitudes might be mistaken, they should be tested by robust debate.75

Increasing free speech protections in prisons, I would like to suggest, is a particularly important safeguard against widespread moral ignorance—concerning injustices related to our prison system, and beyond.76

i. Moral Ignorance about Prison-Related Injustices

We often think of incarcerated people as the morally ignorant ones, the members of our society that need to be “morally educated.” Indeed, “moral education” is a leading philosophical justification of criminal punishment.77 But if mass incarceration is indeed one of the great moral atrocities of our time,78 then the people most in need of moral education may be on the other side of the prison gate: As a society, we must come to recognize the cruelty of the system of mass caging that we have collectively brought about.79

Through their speech, prisoners can serve as moral educators, helping the rest of us understand the wrongfulness of our carceral practices. Of course, the task of morally educating the public about the injustices of our prison system should not fall solely on the shoulders of incarcerated people—allied individuals and groups can (and are) doing this work, too—but incarcerated people are certainly among the most knowledgeable and motivated people to take on the role. Speech restrictions, however, make prisoners’ moral appeals less effective than they would otherwise be. For example, because of restrictions on communication with the media, prisoners who stage a protest often struggle to garner media attention (as noted in Section I). And when journalists do report on a protest, it may be through the filter of the prison administrators they speak to—who frequently misconstrue protests as apolitical “riots.”80 As a consequence, many members of the public will never hear and consider the protestors’ moral message.

Of course, a reader with tough-on-crime inclinations may push back on my suggestion that non-incarcerated people need to be “morally educated” about the serious injustices of the prison system. “No such injustices exist!”—he might insist—“other than, perhaps, that the prison system is too lenient!” Yet such a person rationally ought to at least acknowledge the possibility that he is gravely mistaken—that perhaps there are serious injustices associated with the prison system that he simply does not see.81 And he should also acknowledge that—because the 1.8 million people that are directly experiencing these possible-injustices are largely shut out of public discourse, unable to challenge his viewpoint and present counterevidence—such an error on his part is more likely than it would otherwise be.

Indeed, when the voices of incarcerated people are actually heard, the impact on the listener can be morally transformative. Once, at a national meeting for corrections officers, several incarcerated women jumped on stage and re-enacted a strip search, showing their audience what it was like to be subjected to this degrading treatment. Some of the prison guards in attendance—who routinely preformed these searches in prison—were moved to tears. Through the prisoners’ dramatization, the guards were able to finally see the strip search as a form of sexual violence.82

ii. Moral Ignorance about Other Injustices

Prison speech restrictions not only foster public ignorance about injustices related to our prison system, they also make moral ignorance about other societal injustices more likely. This is because morally foresighted activists—people who can help awaken the public to present-day moral atrocities—are disproportionately likely to end up behind bars. First, such activists might be incarcerated for engaging in various forms of civil resistance.83 Second, activists may be targeted by lawfare, if the politically powerful perceive their activism as a threat.84 The most influential activists are particularly likely to be targeted; Martin Luther King Jr. and W.E.B. Dubois, for example, were both politically prosecuted.85

The speech protections in place in American prisons may determine whether the most important moral activists of our time—should they end up incarcerated—have the capacity to continue their work from behind bars, or whether their activism ends forever with their criminal conviction.86

The contrasting cases of the leakers Julian Assange and Edward Snowden vividly illustrate what is at stake. Assange was barely heard from during the five years he was detained in a maximum-security UK prison, and his isolation took such a tool on his physical and mental health that the once-charismatic public speaker (who was recently released from prison) now falters over his words.87 By contrast, Snowden, who lives in exile in Russia, communicates often with his nearly 6 million Twitter followers, and even attends conferences in the US via “telepresence robot.”88 If American prisons put in place robust speech protections and affordances, incarcerated people could have the same opportunities to participate in American public discourse that Snowden enjoys.

III. CONCLUSION: REFORM OR REVOLUTION?

I will conclude by addressing a worry that some on the left might raise. It is often argued that small-scale reforms can undermine efforts to achieve the more radical changes required by justice, by entrenching harmful institutions.89 For example, the construction of new prisons—sometimes touted as a reform to alleviate overcrowding—is staunchly opposed by many leftists, on the grounds that the construction of new prisons seems to invariably result in more people being incarcerated.90

A version of this worry might be raised against speech-promoting reforms to prison conditions. The worry could be that, if prison conditions are modestly improved, then perhaps our prison system will appear more palatable to the public, sapping political energy from the movement to end mass incarceration. (By “ending mass incarceration” I mean bringing down the US’s incarceration rate to where it was before the prison boom of the 1970s.) Or the objection could be cast in terms of opportunity cost: perhaps the resources that activists would spend campaigning for speech reforms would be better spent campaigning for decarceration.

What this objection fails to recognize, however, is the value that speech-promoting reforms would have in helping bring about decarceration. A large part of the reason that there has been “no great outcry”91 over mass incarceration, and for the gross inadequacy of reform efforts to date,92 is that the people who care most deeply about the issue—the 1.8 million Americans in cages—are shut out of public discourse, unable to awaken the public to their plight. There has been a great outcry—most people outside prison just do not hear it.93

Leftists should therefore regard expanding speech protections in prisons as a “nonreformist reform”94—the kind of reform that would help dismantle mass incarceration.95

Some readers might question whether protecting the speech of incarcerated people is really the best pathway to decarceration. Might the problem of overincarceration be amenable, instead, to a technocratic solution: figuring out, and implementing, the policies and social programs that most effectively reduce crime?96 Research on the causes of mass incarceration, however, suggests that the answer is “no.” The United States’ staggering incarceration rate is the product of politics, not crime rates.97 Lowering crime (while a worthwhile goal in itself) is therefore unlikely to reduce prison populations substantially. To end this great injustice of our time, mass incarceration, the speech and activism of incarcerated people may indeed be essential.

The ancient historian Tacitus once described the brutality of the Roman imperial army, and the euphemistic language they used to shroud their destruction, writing that “they make a wasteland and call it peace.”98 Today, the United States has created its own vast “wasteland”99 in the prisons, jails, and detention centers that keep 1.8 million Americans behind bars. We call this wasteland “criminal justice”—deluding ourselves to believe that there’s something noble in the mass caging of human beings. But there is a way to pierce this fantasy: by giving prisoners a voice.

Notes

  1. Human Rights Watch 2025. [^]
  2. For example, it is common for people on the political right to vocally embrace the value of free speech, while supporting policies that would significantly increase the size of the incarcerated population, like the construction of new, high-capacity immigrant detention camps. [^]
  3. On the First Amendment constitutionality of the surveillance and censorship of prisoners’ mail, see Procunier v. Martinez (1974). On bans on media interviews, see Pell v. Procunier (1974). On restrictions on prisoner-to-prisoner correspondence, see Turner v. Safely (1987), on limits on visitation, see Overton v. Bazzetta (2003). On restrictions on union organizing, see Jones v. North Caroline Prisoners’ Labor Union (1977). [^]
  4. See Marshall dissenting in Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners’ Labor Union, Inc. (1977) and concurring in Procunier v. Martinez (1974). [^]
  5. Casella 2023; Latson 2025. [^]
  6. On wellbeing see e.g.: Moser 2023; Worth Rises 2024. On public safety, see Wang 2021. On informing the public about prison conditions see: Frank 2018; Foucault 1971. [^]
  7. Marshall wrote: “When the prison gates slam behind an inmate, he does not lose his human quality; his mind does not become closed to ideas; his intellect does not cease to feed on a free and open interchange of opinions; his yearning for self-respect does not end; nor is his quest for self-realization concluded. If anything, the needs for identity and self-respect are more compelling in the dehumanizing prison environment.” [^]
  8. The traditional dignitarian argument for free speech consists of two core claims: first, that all people have dignity, and second, that respecting people’s dignity requires respecting their liberty, including their freedom of speech. For example, Rao (2011, pp. 196, 203–204) summarizes the dignitarian account of free speech thusly: “[D]ignity arises from one’s humanity.” “[A] person’s dignity is best respected or enabled when he can pursue his ends his own way…This freedom [to pursue one’s own ends] encompasses…freedom of speech.” Likewise, Dworkin (2013, p. 239) explains that proponents of the dignitarian account “[suppose] that there are ways of treating a man that are inconsistent with recognizing him as a full member of the human community” and regard restrictions on freedom of expression (except those that are necessary to prevent grave harm to others; see note 49) to be one such form of treatment that is incompatible with respecting individuals’ humanity. [^]
  9. For the best philosophical defences of the “moral education” theory of punishment see: Hampton 1984; Duff 2001; and Howard 2017. [^]
  10. The US incarcerates more people than any other country (Statista 2025). [^]
  11. There is some appetite for criminal justice reform on both sides of the American political spectrum (Hulse 2015). [^]
  12. See McCann, Berzon and Aleaziz 2025. [^]
  13. Smith and Archer 2020. [^]
  14. Poitras 2020. [^]
  15. The several dozen prisoners subject to “Special Administrative Measures” face even more restrictions than those in solitary confinement (Stahl 2017). [^]
  16. The precise restrictions around prisoners’ speech vary by state and facility. [^]
  17. Arthur 2021b. [^]
  18. Ellison et. al 2018. [^]
  19. Blackwell and Hacheney 2021. [^]
  20. Coates 2015. [^]
  21. Ibid. [^]
  22. Arthur 2021a. [^]
  23. Maass 2015. [^]
  24. Hager 2016. [^]
  25. Safley v. Turner 1984, p. 592. [^]
  26. Armstrong 2019. [^]
  27. Losier 2018. [^]
  28. On the harm of being transferred to a different prison, Dawn Amos, a woman incarcerated at the Colorado Women’s Correctional Facility, explains: “the women in here over time find security and stability, with friends, lovers, or their jobs and the fear of being uprooted and moved to another city really scares them” (Law 2012). [^]
  29. Law 2023. [^]
  30. Whitford and Pinto 2019. [^]
  31. Santo, Neff and Meagher 2023. [^]
  32. Kim 2016. [^]
  33. Herman and Chomsky 1988. [^]
  34. Davis 2003, p. 16. [^]
  35. Law 2012, p. 122. [^]
  36. And for the several dozen American prisoners subject to “Special Administrative Measures,” media access is non-existent (Stahl, 2017). [^]
  37. Bryant et al. 2014; Brownlee 2012. [^]
  38. Goode 2015; Gawande 2009. [^]
  39. Grassian 2006. [^]
  40. One reason to expect that many readers will be open to view that status quo speech restrictions are broadly justified (if not positively supportive of these restrictions) is that judges generally uphold these restrictions, when they are challenged in court (Columbia Human Rights Law Review 2020, ch. 19). If it were intuitively obvious to any intelligent person that these restrictions were unjustified, then one would expect to see more judges opposing them. (I note this the pre-empt the reaction some readers may have that I am arguing for an obvious conclusion.) [^]
  41. Procunier v Martinez 1974, pp. 412, 416; see also pp. 425–6 of Marshall’s concurring opinion. [^]
  42. Jones v. NCPLU 1977, p. 132. [^]
  43. The possibility of orchestrating crime outside prison via the mail is mentioned in Procunier v. Martinez (1974, p. 413); Escapes are discussed in Procunier v. Martinez (1974) and Turner v. Safely (1987). [^]
  44. For example, the Supreme Court uses “order” in this sense throughout its opinion in Procunier v. Martinez (1974). [^]
  45. Morales v. Schmidt 1972, p. 553. [^]
  46. On the importance of the safety of prisons, the Court states in Pell v. Procunier (1974): “central to all other corrections goals is the institutional consideration of internal security within the corrections facilities themselves.” [^]
  47. Under Turner v. Safley (1987), a restriction on prisoner-to-prisoner communication can be justified if the court finds that there is a “rational connection” between the restriction and safety (or another “legitimate governmental interest”), even if it is speculative. (A somewhat more demanding standard applies to assessing the constitutionality of prisoner-to-public communication; see Procunier v. Martinez, 1974.) [^]
  48. Dworkin (2013, p. 231, 245). (Dworkin offers the example of a traffic law as a non-rights-infringing limitation on liberty.) [^]
  49. For example, Dworkin (2013) believes that restricting speech can be justified to “prevent a catastrophe” (p. 231) or when speech would pose “a clear and substantial risk…[to] the person or property of others” (p. 245). [^]
  50. I will discuss, in Section II B, reasons to doubt that prison speech regulations improve people’s safety at all, let alone to the substantial degree that would be necessary to morally justify encroaching on people’s rights. [^]
  51. Most rights forfeiture theorists take forfeiture to be a necessary but not sufficient reason to punish. Wellman (2012, p. 375) notes as much—although Wellman himself argues for the view that forfeiture is also a sufficient reason to punish. [^]
  52. I use the term proportionate here in an “instrumentalist” sense: depriving someone of a freedom is proportionate if the (expected) benefit of doing so is sufficient to morally outweigh the harm. This instrumentalist conception is in contrast to what Tadros 2011 refers to as the “aesthetic” conception of proportionality, which focuses on whether a punishment or deprivation “fits” the crime. [^]
  53. See Greaves (2016) and Thorstad and Mogensen (2020) for further discussion of this point. [^]
  54. MacAskill 2018. [^]
  55. But I don’t think that philosophers’ contributions need to have practical relevance, necessarily, to be worthwhile. One kind of philosophical contribution is just to illuminate a previously unrecognized wrongful aspect of a practice that may be morally wrong for reasons that are overdetermined. (For example, Sussman (2004) explores one harmful aspect of torture, a practice that is obviously objectionable for many reasons besides the one that Sussman describes.) [^]
  56. Besides providing emotional support, this network can crucially provide formerly incarcerated people with help securing housing and employment, easing their re-entry. [^]
  57. On the recidivism-reducing effect of in-person visits, see: Bales and Mears 2008; and Duwe and Clark 2013. On in-cell phones, see Ellison et. al. (2018). And for a first-hand account of the positive influence of communication with family, see Metcalf (2019). [^]
  58. For a theoretical discussion of the underlying causes of prison violence, see Blevins, Listwan, Cullen and Jonson (2010). There is also empirical evidence that more frequent phone calls and visits is associated with less violence in prison; see Day, Newton & Tamara’s 2021 review of the literature. [^]
  59. According to a report commissioned by the UK government, tensions over phone access was not only a cause of violence in prisons but “the most frequent flash-point issue [emphasis added] for confrontations, intimidation and violence” (Ellison et. al. 2018, p. 34). [^]
  60. Arthur 2021b. [^]
  61. On this broad conception of safety, see Luban and Shue (2011). [^]
  62. And the harmful psychological consequences of solitary confinement, it should be noted, not only befall those who intentionally defy speech restrictions, but also those who non-wilfully do so as well. For example, a common form of abuse in prisons involves “weaker” prisoners being coerced into carrying a contraband phone for “stronger” prisoners to use (Ellison et. al. 2018). Then, if the phone is discovered by guards, it is these weaker prisoners who are punished for it. [^]
  63. Prisoners of Attica 1971. [^]
  64. Many philosophers use the term “dignity” to refer to an impossible-to-violate quality inherent in all human beings, and the basis of all human rights claims. However, my usage of the term—to refer to a right which certain wrongful actions can violate—is not uncommon. See e.g. Waldron (2007, pp. 203–204) on these two usages of “dignity.” [^]
  65. Wellman 2012, pp. 384–385. [^]
  66. Debes 2023; Margalit 1998; Statman 2000. [^]
  67. Silvermint 2013, p. 418. [^]
  68. Examples of severe mistreatment include institutionalized practices like strip searches (which many incarcerated people regard as sexual assault; Arthur 2021a, Lewis 2012) and prolonged solitary confinement (which the United Nations regards as a form of torture; UN 2020). Arguably, incarceration itself is a form of mistreatment, for all but a “dangerous few” (McLeod 2015). [^]
  69. Wolff and Shi 2012; Prison Reform Trust 2017. [^]
  70. Arthur 2021a. [^]
  71. Law 2012, p. 25. [^]
  72. Silvermint 2013, p. 418. Srinivasan has defended a view close to this, although she does not cast it in terms of self-respect. Her view is that (for some people) verbally denouncing injustice is a constitutive part of what it means to feel anger over injustice: “For figures like Baldwin and Malcolm X, but also Catharine MacKinnon and Angela Davis, getting angry just does seem to involve an enviably articulate verbal expression, a swift and often automatic conversion of sentiment into word” (Srinivasan 2017, p. 17). [^]
  73. Boxhill 1976; Dubois 1903. [^]
  74. Appiah 2010. [^]
  75. MacAskill 2022a. (Here MacAskill echoes Mill’s “marketplace of ideas” argument for free speech.) [^]
  76. While MacAskill himself does not discuss the issue of speech in prisons, he has pointed to mass incarceration as an example of a contemporary injustice that many are morally ignorant of (MacAskill 2022b). [^]
  77. Duff 2001; Hampton 1984; Howard 2017. Moral education theorists, however, need not support incarceration as their preferred mode of punishment or defend the modern-day prison system in its current form. Duff (2001) is explicit about this point, writing that his theory “is [not] intended to provide…a justification of punishment as it actually operates in our existing penal systems… but an account of what punishment should ideally be: an account against which we can measure, and no doubt find seriously wanting, our existing penal practices.”) [^]
  78. Wellman 2017, ch. 8; Appiah 2010. [^]
  79. On the importance of reckoning with our own complicity in unjust policies, see Srinivasan (2022a). [^]
  80. Medina 2023, p. 174. [^]
  81. Williams 2015. [^]
  82. Davis 2003, p. 35. [^]
  83. Chenoweth 2021. [^]
  84. For example, the Nixon administration launched the “war on drugs” in part because it wanted to weaken the anti-Vietnam war movement (Lopez 2016). [^]
  85. Erb 2018; Lanham 2017. King was very luckily acquitted by an all-white jury; Du Bois was acquitted by a federal judge after Albert Einstein offered to serve as a character witness (Gewertz 2007). [^]
  86. The silencing of just one or a few activists, can plausibly alter the course of history. Drawing on the work of historian Christoper Leslie Brown, MacAskill (2022a, ch. 3) suggests that the abolition of slavery may have been contingent on the activism of a small group of Quakers, and especially Benjamin Lay. [^]
  87. Gross and Specia 2024. [^]
  88. Guardian Staff 2016. [^]
  89. Srinivasan 2022b, ch. 6. [^]
  90. Davis et al. 2022, ch. 1. [^]
  91. Davis 2003, p. 17. [^]
  92. The First Step Act, passed under Trump, only reduced prison sentences for a small sliver of the prison population, while harmfully “widening the carceral net” through the expansion of electronic monitoring (Schenwar and Law 2021). And the Brennan Center for Justice (2018) estimates that, if decarceration continues at the current rate, it will take decades before the US prison population declines to 1971 levels. [^]
  93. Casella 2022. [^]
  94. Gilmore 2007, p. 242. [^]
  95. In a similar vein, Brettschneider (2016) has argued that enfranchising incarcerated people would lead to more just carceral policies, because incarcerated people would likely vote for candidates who make this issue a priority. [^]
  96. Though prisoners’ voices would be helpful in the design of these policies, too. Reflecting on their own experience, incarcerated people can identify the different factors in their life that contributed to their incarceration—and the policy interventions that could have helped keep them from going down that path (Lewis, Shen and Park 2020). [^]
  97. Alexander 2010; Murakawa 2014; Cockburn 2024; Coates 2015. [^]
  98. Tacitus c. 98 AD. [^]
  99. Coates 2015. [^]

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For encouragement on the paper and helpful comments on multiple drafts, I am grateful to Liam Kofi Bright and Jeff Howard. For valuable feedback, I thank audiences at LSE, Oxford, Queens University Belfast, and the Concerned Philosophers for Peace conference. I also thank the anonymous reviewers of this paper and the editor of this journal, Robert Goodin, for their helpful suggestions. This work was partly funded by UKRI [UKRI grant MR/V025600/1].

COMPETING INTERESTS

The author declares that she has no competing interests.

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