Prisons

I have been meaning to start a mail correspondence with a queer inmate for awhile now.  Yesterday, I looked at blackandpink.com and found a persyn.  When I sat down to write the letter today, I wanted to check the mail regulations for prisons in Texas so I wouldn’t send anything that would get rejected and mailed back.  I did not know that you cannot send any publications to prisoners in Texas that “would be detrimental to the offender’s rehabilitation because it would encourage  homosexual or deviant criminal sexual behavior.”

While much of the LGBT community seems so wrapped up  in the racist, classist, sexist, elitist, transphobic “fight” for marriage equality (a term that does not make any sense to me), queer prisoners cannot even read any books, magazines, comics, or zines that are queer.  The movement for marriage by rich, white gays and lesbians seems to have forgotten all about police brutality, street violence, and gender policing that forces extremely high numbers of poor queers, especially transpeople of color, into prisons and jails, violently abusing them along the way.

I also wanted to state that the rule did not really surprise me at all.  If the State cannot stop queerz on the outside of prison walls, they will do anything and everything they can to ensure that prisoners who leave uphold Eurocentric, middle class, capitalist heteronormativity.  

We do not need prison reform.  We need prison abolition!

You can look over the document here .

*Also, I wanted to note that in the rules about sexual assault process, there is a warning that says (their emphasis):

Engaging in HOMOSEXUAL conduct in prison significantly increases your risk of HIV infection, along with exposing you to other sexually transmitted diseases.