In the last issue of FRFI we reported on attempts to prevent subscribers in Wakefield and Woodhill prisons from receiving the paper. We sent letters of complaint and made it clear we will take legal action if FRFI is censored. We have now received letters from both prisons and from the Directorate of High Security Prisons backing down. The Prisons Ombudsman has also upheld a complaint about the censorship in Wakefield.
Unfortunately, the fight on this front is never over and it has already been reported to us that even after Wakefield had written to us accepting that they could not impose a blanket ban, they still initially withheld the last issue of FRFI on the spurious grounds that it was ‘not suitable for distribution on the wing due to the sensitive content of certain articles’ and only issued it following further complaints.
We will always respond to attempts to censor FRFI and ask all our readers in prison to notify us any time the paper is stopped, and to provide us with copies of any correspondence (such as judgments from the Ombudsman) which will be useful on future occasions.
FRFI 212 December 2009 / January 2010
