Georgia Jail Sued by Local Bookstore Banned from Sending Detainees Reading Materials
When the Avid Bookshop mailed several book orders to prisoners at the Gwinnett County Jail outside Atlanta in May 2023, the Athens retailer likely didn’t expect to become embroiled in a lawsuit almost a year later. Then the orders were rejected because the jail has a policy of refusing magazines and books not “mailed directly from the publisher or authorized retailer.”
However, “authorized retailer” was not defined nor was there any indication how businesses could obtain that status. According to a deputy at the jail, books were accepted only from Barnes & Noble and Amazon, but not from Amazon independent sellers. The rationale, apparently, was that someone could enter any other store open to the public, place contraband inside books for sale there and then have it mailed to prisoners by the retailer.
Avid sued Gwinnett County Sheriff Keybo Taylor and jail Cmdr. Benjamin Haynes in federal court for the Northern District of Georgia on March 15, 2024. The complaint alleged violations of the bookstore’s First and Fourteenth Amendment rights and sought declaratory relief, plus nominal and compensatory damages.
Avid said it could mail new books to prisoners “from its warehouse without any member of the public having had access to the books.” Moreover, approved booksellers such as Barnes & Noble have retail stores open to the public, too. So the jail’s ban on Avid’s orders constituted prior restraint on its communication with prisoners—besides being “an exaggerated response to the Jail’s security objectives.”
As a result, the bookstore argued, the jail’s policy is not “reasonably related to a legitimate penological interest,” so it doesn’t fall under that exception to civil rights violations permitted by Turner v. Safley, 482 U.S. 78 (1987). Rather, Avid argued, the ban was applied “on an ad hoc, subjective basis according to the unbridled discretion of Jail officials.” Additionally, the policy functioned as an impermissible “permitting scheme” and was unconstitutionally vague,” the complaint alleged.
Prior to filing suit, Avid submitted an Open Records Request to the Sheriff’s office, but “no further information on the Jail’s Authorized Retailer Policy was produced.” Nor had the jail recorded any incidents where contraband was found in books sent to prisoners. There was also no definition of what constituted an authorized retailer, a “lack of announced criteria or standards allows for arbitrary and potentially discriminatory or even viewpoint-based application” of the jail’s book-ordering policy, the complaint declared. Avid is represented by Atlanta attorney Zack Greenamyre and the First Amendment Clinic at the University of Georgia School of Law. See: Avid Bookshop LLC v. Taylor, USDC (N.D. Ga.), Case No. 1:24-cv-01135.
The suit remains pending, and PLN will update developments as they are available—though readers should not get too hopeful. The district court sits in the Eleventh Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals, which denied a challenge to similar restrictions placed on PLN by Florida prisons. See: Prison Legal News v. Sec’y, Fla. Dep’t of Corr., 890 F.3d 954 (11th Cir. 2018), cert. denied by Prison Legal News v. Jones, 586 U.S. 1069 (2019).
Additional source: Reason