Dallas County<\/a> in contempt of the 20-year-old consent decree or to allow discovery to determine if the county is unable to comply due to legitimate operational concerns.<\/p>\n![\"A]()
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A Prison Legal News mailing shows the return to sender stamp after the Dallas County jail stopped accepting books and magazines mailed by publishers.<\/p>\n
Human Rights Defense Center<\/p>\n
The motion filed by Prison Legal News\u2019 publisher, the Human Rights Defense Center, is centered on the county\u2019s alleged noncompliance with the 2007 consent decree but states the nonprofit is filing a separate civil rights lawsuit with constitutional claims.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“This should be alarming to everyone that either likes to read or believes in free speech,” said Paul Wright, editor of Prison Legal News.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Sheriff Marian Brown did not respond to requests for comment from The Dallas Morning News. The county has not yet filed an answer to the Aug. 6 motion to reopen the case.<\/p>\n
The Supreme Court has held that jails and prisons may restrict publishers\u2019 communications with incarcerated people when the limits are reasonably tied to legitimate correctional interests, considering factors like security and operations and availability of alternate means of communication. Wright alleges Dallas County fails that constitutional test and violates what it promised a federal court it would do in 2007 by making its materials inaccessible.<\/p>\n
The Center\u2019s two magazines, Prison Legal News and Criminal Legal News, run stories about prison conditions, the death penalty, access to counsel and other topics. It also distributes soft-cover nonfiction and self-help books.<\/p>\n
Prison Legal News sued Dallas County in 2007 alleging free speech and due process violations after the jail under then-Sheriff Lupe Valdez banned magazines and newspapers \u201cto eliminate clutter,\u201d according to the complaint.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The county settled that year by entering the consent decree, which states Prison Legal News\u2019 materials are permitted mail in all Dallas County jail facilities.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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It wasn\u2019t the first challenge. A group of incarcerated people sued Dallas County in 1971 over a litany of jail conditions like overcrowding, medical care and censorship. As part of a seven-year federal oversight order, a judge prohibited jail officials from destroying books and magazines unless they posed a safety hazard.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThey’ve been on this losing battle for over half a century to ban publications \u2013 it\u2019s almost pathological,\u201d Wright said.<\/p>\n
The defense center has challenged roughly 80 similar policies in jails and prisons over the years, winning almost all of them, Wright said. In September 2025, the organization checked on jails where it had consent decrees by mailing outreach materials as tests. The Dallas County jail returned its books and magazines with the stamp saying the materials were no longer accepted.<\/p>\n
The center wrote Brown and County Judge Clay Lewis Jenkins a letter stating the ban was \u201cunconstitutionally censoring publications in violation of the consent decree.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The county did not respond, according to the motion. It’s unclear how the jail gives physical magazines, paperback books and newspapers to people in housing areas with no tablet access, as the handbook states, when it also returns the publications to senders stating they are no longer accepted.<\/p>\n
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The handbook directs ordinary mail to a Florida processing center to be scanned onto incarcerated people\u2019s tablets and destroyed. It separately says, \u201cNo physical books will be accepted.\u201d<\/p>\n
After another letter, representatives of the Defense Center met with jail officials four times this summer.\u00a0<\/p>\n
According to Wright, jail officials declined to accept any soft-cover books and only offered to scan the organization\u2019s magazines into incarcerated people\u2019s tablets.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Wright said this is unworkable due to copyright concerns and no guarantee that incarcerated people have consistent access to the tablets.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The jail handbook states tablets are rewards for good behavior and could be taken away as discipline. Wright said he could not get a straight answer from jail officials on how incarcerated people would receive the tablet scans to comply with the consent decree, leading him to ask the court to reopen the case.<\/p>\n
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“To say that these people are opaque is an understatement,” Wright said. \u00a0<\/p>\n
The consent decree required Dallas County to provide notice of every mail rejection with a statement indicating the reason for non-delivery. Wright said this did not happen for at least 149 mailings rejected between September 2025 and July 2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The exterior of the Lew Sterrett Justice Center on April 13, 2020 in Dallas. Juan Figueroa\/Staff Photographer The…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1003312,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5135],"tags":[5229,1596,358,290227,325183,290169,326777,324427,3187,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":["post-1003311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-america","tag-dallas","tag-texas","tag-tp-dallas-fortworth","tag-tp-courts","tag-tp-dallas","tag-tp-dallas-county","tag-tp-texas","tag-tx","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1003311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1003311"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1003311\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1003312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1003311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1003311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1003311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}