The
U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons in 2015 finalized a rule prohibiting inmate
“possession of smoking apparatus and tobacco in any form.” Nine years earlier, the Bureau had
discontinued tobacco sales at prison commissaries.
Announcing
the final rule, Bureau officials discounted the issue of black market activity,
saying that the agency’s staff was already trained to intercept contraband, so
the addition of tobacco involved zero “additional burden.” They promised to increase
searches of Bureau employees to assure that they don’t become contraband
sources, and to impose “more severe inmate sanctions for violations” to deter
“possession of tobacco products.”
Such
measures are destined to fail, as the Mississippi Department of Corrections
discovered. Three years ago, that agency
abandoned its tobacco ban (here), reporting that
prohibition had created an underground market that saw inmates paying “as much
as $500 a pound” for cigarette tobacco.
The new policy, the commissioner said, “will save [them] money and the
state will make money,” and, “By selling [cigarettes], we are breaking the
contraband tobacco trade, designating smoking areas outside, clearing the air
inside for the majority of inmates who don’t smoke, reducing inmate contraband
violations, and recouping for taxpayers some of the dollars it takes to run
prisons.”
The
Federal Bureau of Prisons wrongly claimed that its rule would not affect
prisoners with mental illness, citing a 2002 review that it said
found, “It was no more difficult for the mentally ill to quit smoking than it was
for someone with no mental disorder.” To
the contrary, the authors of that study acknowledged, in a gross
understatement, that “quit rates of psychiatric populations may be lower than
those of nonpsychiatric populations.”
There is overwhelming evidence that people with serious psychological
disorders smoke more and have great difficulty quitting (here, here, here, here, and here).
Clearly,
prison bans of tobacco products ignore both science and economics, but the Bureau’s
prohibition, as well as countless local and state prison tobacco bans, would also
violate international humanitarian standards if the bans were applied to
prisoners of war.
According
to Army Lt. Colonel Frank Rosenblatt (Ret), military law
expert and Assistant Professor at the Mississippi College School of Law, the
Third Geneva Convention of 1949 is an international treaty regarding the
treatment of prisoners of war, and it was ratified by nearly every nation,
including the United States. Here's what it says about
tobacco:
“Canteens
shall be installed in all camps, where prisoners of war may procure foodstuffs,
soap and tobacco and ordinary articles in daily use. The tariff shall never be
in excess of local market prices.”
If
enemy combatants are entitled to tobacco as an element of humane treatment, why
shouldn't the same standard apply to incarcerated Americans?
A
second aspect to the Bureau’s prohibition also violates human rights. The Bureau’s rule banned snuff and chewing
tobacco on the grounds that they “are also harmful to health in the same way
that ‘lighted’ tobacco products are.” (emphasis added) Not only was this proven false 30 years ago (here and here), but eminent
tobacco researcher Lynn Kozlowski demonstrated two decades ago that “no safe tobacco
product”
themes widely promoted by anti-tobacco extremists “are so uninformative that
they constitute a violation of [a fundamental] right to health relevant information
on tobacco.”
The
sweeping and pervasive prohibition of all tobacco products across federal,
state and local penal institutions violates international humanitarian
standards and the rights of 1.8 million
incarcerated Americans.
