A convicted murderer at a prison in Connecticut thinks he should be able to view porn.
Inmate Dwight Pink Jr. is claiming in the lawsuit that guards have used the ban to deny him an art book, The Atlas of Foreshortening, which uses naked models to help illustrate how to use art to draw the human body.
He said the ban on pornography in prison violates his constitutional rights and serves no meaningful objective in prison. The state filed its response yesterday, saying none of his rights was violated and he has not been harmed by the ban.
“Any injury or harm, if any, was caused solely by plaintiff's own acts, omissions, or conduct and was not due to any wrongful conduct by the defendants,” Assistant Attorney General Steven Strom wrote.
The state Department of Correction put out the administrative directive in 2011. It bans all material that contains “pictorial depictions of sexual activity or nudity” from the prisons.
But it also says the ban should not apply to “materials which, taken as a whole, are literary, artistic, educational or scientific in nature.”
A prison spokesman at the time said the ban was intended to improve the work environment for prison staffers, especially female staffers, who might be inadvertently exposed to pornography.
Pink is serving a 56-year sentence at the Cheshire Correctional Institution for his part in the 1998 murder of a 35-year-old father of two.