Here's what Pennsylvania prohibits any prisoner to obtain:
(1) materials in which the purpose is sexual arousal or gratification; or (2) the material contains nudity which means showing the human male or female genitals, pubic area or buttocks with less than a fully opaque covering, or showing the female breast with less than a fully opaque covering of any portion thereof below the top of the nipple (exposure through “see through” materials is considered nudity for purposes of this definition).Infelicitously for his case, the particular plaintiff here was serving a sentence for rape. Even more infelicitously, he represented himself. And to make matters worse, the evidence he was prepared to present consisted of affidavits from fellow prisoners asserting that viewing nudity did not have ill effects on their rehabilitation or day-to-day conduct.
Interpreting a handful of Supreme Court precedents, the court held that a prisoner faces a heavy burden to take a case of individual constitutional rights to trial. The state's burden, it said, is simply to articulate a "rational connection" between its censorship standards and any "legitimate penological interest." If the state can meet that low bar, the prisoner must then present specific facts that call that basic rationale seriously into question. The court was silent as to how a pro se prisoner is to meet this burden in a First Amendment case, where calling into question the state's rationale would seem to require access to expert witnesses, social science research, or the like. In other words, if the state can come up with any rationale that the court will "buy" in the abstract, a prisoner would seem to need substantial outside assistance to take the case to trial.
Be that as it may, the court found that the state's asserted goals were rational, and that the prisoners' affidavits did not raise any genuine question about their validity. What were those goals? The primary rationale accepted by the court was that:
the pornography ban serves to foster the rehabilitation of inmates, including sex offenders like [the plaintiff], and is consistent with inmate treatment objectives, particularly discouraging inmates from “objectifying” others, rather than treating them as individuals.The court also accepted the state's reasoning that pornography in the prison would lead to a "hostile work environment" for prison staff. While the workplace-harassment rationale, and the idea that pornography will have a particularly dangerous effect on persons convicted of any sex offense, are not new, I believe the "objectification" rationale is not as frequently seen.
While it may seem remarkable - at least to those familiar with philosophical and feminist debates over the concept of "objectification" - that courts would accept this vague rationale at the level of abstract, unsupported logic, one must keep in mind the litigation context. As the litigation around same-sex marriage demonstrates, the ability to overcome vague government interests under a "rationality" test often depends on the ability to go toe-to-toe with the state in contesting its logic. That is to say, a pro se prisoner lacks not only the ability to gather sophisticated evidence in a case like this, but also the resources to engage in the kind of sophisticaed legal argument that may be necessary merely to ge to trial.
