Myrlanne Smith of Moran came into the newspaper office earlier this week to cancel a subscription she had provided for a grandson.
“They won’t let him have it any more,” she said, referring to the Kansas Department of Corrections, who in late August suddenly instituted a statewide policy that prohibits “outside” parties from providing newspapers to inmates. Her grandson is an inmate at the Winfield Correctional Center.
“He loved getting the paper,” Mrs. Smith said. “It helped him keep in touch with home.”
After his newspaper was canceled, several issues of the Register held up in the mail straggled in.
“They wouldn’t even let him have those,” Mrs. Smith said.
Mrs. Smith helped raise three grandchildren. Besides her incarcerated grandson, another is a Kansas Highway Patrol officer. Their sister is a probation officer.
Every day, Mrs. Smith and her imprisoned grandson visit over the phone.
“We get 15 minutes. Some days we use it all up.”
If they go over the limit, a recorded warning intermittently interrupts their conversation.
Without a doubt, Mrs. Smith is one of her grandson’s most vital connections to the outside world.
When she first learned her grandson wasn’t getting his newspaper, Mrs. Smith called the prison’s mailroom to see what was the problem.
It wasn’t them.
“The mailroom people told me they thought it was a bad idea to keep such things from the inmates,” she said of the new policy.
A WIDOW, Mrs. Smith, 71, drives a school bus for USD 256 in Moran and is an active member of the Salem United Methodist Church.
When she came into the Register to cancel her grandson’s annual subscription, she brought in the form issued by the KDOC which stated the Iola Register had been canceled for “security” reasons.
It read: “Pursuant to K.A.R. 44-12-601 you are hereby notified” the Iola Register “has been censored.”
