Arthur Longworth has been in the Washington state prison system since 1986, when he received a life sentence without parole for first-degree murder. He spent his first decade of imprisonment in and out of solitary confinement and developed an extensive disciplinary record. Then he had an “epiphany” while reading Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1973 “The Gulag Archipelago,” a non-fiction narrative about living within the Soviet Union’s forced labor camp system. Longworth decided to reform himself for the woman he murdered, and he began to write.

Longworth wrote his first book in 2004. The prison intercepted the novel when he tried to mail it to his wife, but he has since had two books and several essays and articles published. His work has been taught in college courses and he has won several writing awards. But despite his successful writing career, Longworth had to keep the manuscript of his 2016 novel, “Zek: An American Prison Story,” under wraps while he wrote it in his cell. A volunteer English teacher at the prison smuggled it out of the facility to get it published for Longworth. After it was published, Longworth was suspended from his job at the prison, removed from his college courses, and repeatedly threatened with solitary confinement. “Zek,” which is Russian slang for someone in a labor camp, was also banned from Washington state prisons. “To be honest,” Longworth said in a 2018 interview with The Marshall Project, “I don’t understand what bothers them about my writing or why they go to extremes to punish me for what I’ve written, as well as do all they can to prevent me from writing more. When I look at my writing, it seems to be merely an attempt to convey the experience of long-term incarceration.”

Over the past few decades, prisons have increasingly been allowed to strip incarcerated people like Longworth of their freedom of speech with little protection from the courts. Prisons gained this control after the Supreme Court set a low standard of review that called for great deference to prison administrators in constitutional challenges to prison policies.

The extremely deferential standard used in First Amendment cases involving incarcerated parties, however, is in stark contrast to the celebrated American tradition of fiercely protecting individuals’ freedom of speech. Prisons cite safety and security concerns as the reasoning behind these policies, yet they commonly restrict books about racial injustices and the inequitable treatment of Black men in the criminal justice system. This then raises the question: Are all of these regulations and restrictions really in place to maintain security in the prisons and promote rehabilitation, or are they about control and keeping incarcerated people uninformed and silenced? Through their respective decisions and laws implemented over the past several decades, the Supreme Court and the U.S. Congress seemingly do not believe this is a question that must be answered or even asked.

While courts and legislators may be quick to write off the First Amendment concerns of incarcerated people and simply allow prisons to handle internal issues, they are ignoring the fact that people who have been or are currently incarcerated make up an increasingly significant population in our country. The U.S. prison population has grown exponentially in recent decades, ballooning from about 330,000 incarcerated people in 1980 to nearly 1.5 million in 2016. As incarcerated people represent a large and ever-growing subset of the United States, their lack of access to free speech and other fundamental freedoms should be of particular concern to our government’s leadership. At their core, America’s values represent a resounding commitment to upholding fundamental democratic freedoms like the freedom of expression, which is broadly accepted as a fundamental human right. Therefore, in order to truly abide by the Constitution, restrictions on an incarcerated person’s speech must be more closely scrutinized by the courts. The pervasive issue of incarcerated people’s lack of access to their freedom of speech also can and should be addressed outside the courtroom, from legislative action down to decisions made by individual wardens.

To better understand the lack of freedom of speech in the prison system, this article will first detail how traditional freedom of speech cases are analyzed under the law and then review the key Supreme Court cases that have impacted incarcerated people’s First Amendment rights and how those cases set a strong deferential precedent toward prison administrations. It will then delve into a few of the areas in which incarcerated people’s freedom of speech has been impeded, followed by a discussion of the limited tools incarcerated people have to remedy such impediments. Finally, the article will consider opportunities for salvaging incarcerated people’s free speech rights.