We're delighted to say that the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections ("DOC") loathes us! From the top down, prison officials want us to be censored! The corrections boss, Secretary Jeffrey Beard, has personally attacked us and our publisher, Sandra Feigley. The website and individuals associated with us have been, and are being, subjected to diverse official abuses. DOC wants to silence us, to censor us and to shut us down. The prison system is such a corruptly mismanaged waste of tax money that it can't tolerate criticism. We expose the follies of the system and the inept staff. In turn, like any tyrannical government, the DOC and its 15,000 drones, assail us with everything from viruses and spam to lies and obstruction. Recently they tried a much bolder and desperately direct attack on our freedom of the press. And, make no mistake, we are as much a bona fide voice of the fourth estate as the Daily News or CNN, we're just a lot smaller. In particular, prison administrators want to silence our implacable co-founder, George Feigley. They don't really much care if they have to kill him so long as they shut him up. That's how much they hate the criticism on this website! For over 25 years Mr. Feigley has been a prisoner enduring under the heel of the DOC. Now, aging and in bad health, he's a frail target for official reprisal. Recently executives of the DOC (perhaps including the Secretary, himself) undertook a heavy-handed campaign to silence us by using Mr. Feigley's life and health to intimidate us. The strategy was typical of the oppressive thinking of prison officials. They would simply punish Mr. Feigley, endanger his life and attack his health, confine and abuse him. They expected that they'd be able to intimidate him, and us, into silence. The correction racket is built on retaliation, on "getting even," on hurting people. It's the very essence of the prison mentality. There is never an effort to improve anyone or anything. Prison professionals are destroyers, not builders. The irony about silencing Mr. Feigley is that it's so easy. As he's repeatedly said, "You don't have to kill me to shut me up, just parole me." But prison officials think in terms of what they can do to a victim, not what they can do for him. So, a "grind-up" was devised. A "grind-up" is what prisoners call the common weapon of the prison staff to punish, abuse and torment a man with excessive or unwarranted treatment, to do to him! The idea was that if they hurt Mr. Feigley enough, we at the website, would want to protect him by stopping our criticism of the prisons and their staffs. It didn't work. The scheme started off by throwing Mr. Feigley into the hole at the Smithfield prison on a trumped-up charge that his son's company sent him some reference books. That didn't silence him. It just made him mad and he wrote about the incident, criticizing the self-important prison security maven, Miss Marple, for his abuses. In this whole scheme, the prison system seems to have relied upon their security department to carry out their scheme. Those cop-want-a-bes can get away with almost anything by justifying it as "security." Working dishonestly and in secret (as they always do), the Smithfield security jackboots concocted a plan to have Mr. Feigley transferred out to another, worse prison. They realized that the transfer would be very stressful on their ailing victim. They intended that it would "teach him a lesson." Maybe it would give him a heart attack. They were sure it would disrupt and intimidate him. Mr. Feigley was given neither warning nor a voice in where he would be transferred. Most men are usually consulted about transfers, and older prisoners are often given a chance to transfer to a prison where they can make progress. The diabolically simple scheme sent George Feigley, draped in chains, across the state to an oppressively gloomy backwater, Frackville prison, in Schuylkill County, in the east central part of the Commonwealth, renown for its inability to cope. In the process, his back was injured, he lost much of his personal property and he was temporarily disrupted and unable to do much writing. At the Frackville prison, the security Gestapo had Mr. Feigley tossed into the hole. They pretended that someone in the prison was a threat to him. That's a lie! The only threat to Mr. Feigley was, and is, the prison system it's self. For a while Mr. Feigley was hidden from his wife and held incommunicado. To make sure that he was completely censored, another member of the security staff, Dennis Durant, (our list says he's a captain) decided to open and read all his mail. When Mr. Feigley authored and submitted to the website a story characterizing some junior executives at the Frackville prison as "pussies" for their cowardly timidity, the Durant guy pounced! He gave Mr. Feigley a misconduct report for using "abusive language to the staff." Obviously, the truth hurt. It made no difference to Durant, apparently a captain of the guard and presumably aware of the law, who knew or should have known that Mr. Feigley had a constitutional right to express himself about the prison staff (see the federal case, Brooks v Andolina, 826 F2d 1266). It didn't even matter that years earlier, another security type had lost a suit (see Feigley v Kyle, 4:97CV-519) when he'd written Feigley up for a story observing that a guard acted like a homosexual. Almost immediately, Feigley was transferred again. Again without warning or consultation, he was trucked down the road to the nearby Mahanoy prison. There the 62 year-old invalid was again summarily tossed into the hole. The relationship between Mahanoy and Frackville is not dissimilar to the relationship between Huntingdon and Smithfield. In both cases, the poorly managed smaller prisons (Smithfield and Frackville) are satellites to much larger and more professional prisons. Mahanoy is a sprawling metropolis of a prison with an excellent hospital, rehabilitative programs and a generally relaxed, self-assured staff. There was no explanation at all for George Feigley to be put into the hole at Mahanoy. One deputy superintendent called him a "terror" and "notorious" apparently because of his writing. Later Edward Klem, the superintendent, said that Feigley might be "disruptive" again apparently because of his writing. It wasn't too long before Mr. Feigley was transferred a third time. This time he was shipped back to Frackville! The security department's lie about him being in danger had apparently been discovered when legislators started to ask questions. Sandra Feigley and her husband were left with very little choice except to file suit to protect their rights of free speech and free press and to protect Mr. Feigley from the reprisals and intimidation of prison officials who want to silence us. It's pending in Middle District Court, Feigley, et al. v Shannon, et al. There can be no justification, not even "security" for keeping the public ignorant of what happens behind prison walls. The solution is not censorship. It's changing the system.