The conservative Republican government of Pennsylvania is obsessed with all things sexual. Indeed, sexual mania is the predominate mental kink of the entire religious and political right-wing. Their minds are constantly on your peter and what it's up to. It's bizarre!
Of course, the Pennsylvania prisons are the laboratories where the unnatural obsessions of the political extremists are worked out. The Department of Corrections ("DOC") is run by the sickest of the extremist sickies. They have an oppressive scheme for every occasion. After they refine their tyranny on prisoners, the same strategy will be used on you "free" citizens. What's happening to us in prison will, in due course, be done to you suckers "on the streets."
DOC has always censored prisoner communications and prisoner mail. The DOC is VERY frightened of information (and computers and the Web makes them white with trembling terror). Prisons couldn't exist if you, the public, really knew what was going on, and if lawmakers realized what prisons really do to the society. For the DOC, however, the terror is that prisoners will get information.
One of the principle tasks of the prisons is to keep prisoners ignorant. Alternatively, prisoners are fed the conservative Republicans' view of "truth." Obviously, prisoners have no difficulty learning about crime. Prison is the crime-university. Every convict is a teacher of his brand of criminality to every other prisoner. There is no kind of criminal conduct that I haven't learned in prison.
The DOC doesn't care if prisoners get criminal information. What DOC wants to stop is pleasure, especially sexual pleasure! It's their mania!
Recently, fixated on its obsession, the DOC promulgated yet another new censorship regulation. While the regulation is absurd and sweeping, it concentrates on sex. Well, you'll know soon enough because, in a little while, it'll be the law which censors you!
The regulation outlaws all sorts of things from catalogs and "free" offers to magazines and commercial offers. Every prisoner's outgoing envelope is boldly stamped that it's coming from an inmate." That way the person who gets the mail will be humiliated, degraded and branded. But don't prisoners' loved-ones deserve to be injured? That will teach them a lesson for daring to stick by a prisoner!
The biggest part of the regulation deals with smut, especially those sinful dirty pictures! DOC doesn't want imprisoned men to look with desire upon women. DOC wants prisoners to lust after other prisoners, after other men!
Many of the fanatics who run DOC (like many of the religious and political right) have some strong unnatural desires. DOC openly promotes homosexuality, especially the most degrading and humiliating sorts of homosexuality. The DOC doesn't want prisoners to look at pictures of women. That's much too normal and healthy. It's much too pleasurable! The DOC wants the prisoners to screw their cell partners! It's bizarre!
Not only are magazines such as Playboy and Hustler illegal, but DOC has a very special regulation barring a mere prisoner from getting a dirty picture form his wife or loved-one!
It is not uncommon for a wife or girlfriend to try to remind an imprisoned man what he has waiting for him. She sends her man a nude, or partly nude, photo of herself. OH MY GOD!! Does that infuriate the conservative crazies! Nobody cares enough about the conservatives to send them a dirty picture! How do those scum bag prisoners get a female to expose herself to them?
DOC has a special rule against any prisoner receiving a nude photo from his wife. My good wife tested out the absurd regulation. She sent me a colored photocopy of the antique advertising card which has been used to illustrate this article. DOC instantly seized it! Much too pleasurable for a prisoner to get!
DOC doesn't like it that a woman should have the right to send a nude photo to a prisoner. DOC doesn't like all this rampant heterosexuality. In each prison you taxpayers pay big money to employ teams of overpaid censors with silly, inflated titles.
And that brings us to Steve, the censor. Steve is a balding, aging bureaucrat, not someone worth a second notice. He's employed as an "educator," or really the "principal," of the prison "school." He doesn't do much that I can see, but one of his principle duties is censor. You wonder how a person can be both an educator and a censor. For Steve, it's easy. He may not be able to define pornography, but he knows it when he sees it and sees it and sees it. . .
I've had my share of brushes with Steve The Censor. Once he shrilly ranted at me for a full ten minutes because he thought I'd exposed one of his "friends" as a marauding muncher of man-meat. Steve didn't think that I (as it happens, I didn't really author the article) should presume to publicize the snacking habits of a prison guard with a taste for prisoners.
Then, I got a notice from Steve. He and some of his cronies on the censorship team had snatched some of my incoming mail. Apparently they were terrified of it. Sadly, it wasn't dirty pictures. I'm told that his spacious office is already bulging with seized smut, magazines and centerfolds. Sex is by far the favorite thing to censor; that and politics which dares to disagree with the conservative Republican party line.
Since the DOC is keeping you citizens safe by preventing us prisoners from getting 3rd class mail like catalogs, I've got no sources from which to buy little gifts for my loved-ones. My good wife tried to help me. She put some catalogs into an envelope, paid $3 in postage and sent them to me by first class.
Every alarm in the star chamber went off! Steve and the fellows of the censorship team (often called the Viagra Vigilantes) pounced on the frightening catalogs. Proudly, Steve informed me that he'd confiscated catalogs from Lillian Vernon, (you know how scary Lillian Vernon clothes and gadgets can be) from Williams-Sonoma, from Herrington (meats, but not the kind I'm authorized to look at and desire) from Global Computer Sales, from Coldwater Creek, (scary clothes) and from Wireless. In addition, Steve had decided that I shouldn't receive a soft back book entitled WEB, The 2500 Best Sites. In every possible way the prison staff punishes me for my involvement with this website. The Web is knowledge. The Web is scary. The Web is bad!
So, I dropped Steve a note. Since my catalogs were way too dangerous to let me have, could I please have the envelope in which they were sent. I figured I could have it scanned as the illustration for an article.
In his best public-servant persona, Steve answered: "I'm not going to give you the envelope, just because you want the stamps. We will hold on to these materials while you litigate." Silly me! I thought that either my wife or I owned the dangerous envelope for which she paid $3 to send me catalogs. As it turns out, the envelope belongs to the censor. I didn't realize that anybody would steal it just to keep me from using it as a Web illustration.
I'm sure that you citizens feel much safer in your beds at night knowing that I can't buy any clothes for my kids from Coldwater Creek and that my dangerous envelope has been confiscated. And just think, you paid Steve and his fellows about $60,000.00 of your money to do his vital task.
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