San Luis Obispo – From February through April 2020, prisoners with valid subscriptions to the San Francisco Bay View newspaper were denied their monthly publications by the mailroom supervisor and her sergeant. However, a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation memorandum, dated May 8, 2020, sent to “Wardens/Mailrooms,” subject: “Response to Institutional Request for Approval of Temporarily Withheld Publications,” was denied by Acting Deputy Director Charles W. Callahan.

The Bay View is serializing the introduction to “Annotated Tears, Vol. 2,” by Talib Williams, who is currently incarcerated in Soledad, California, and has written the history of that storied place. In the spirit of Sankofa, we learn the past to build the future. Part 2 begins with the continuation of a letter written by George Jackson to his lawyer, Kay Stender, from his book, “Soledad Brother.”

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer: While you’ve been busy reopening the state for business, via your Michigan Safe Start plan, the COVID-19 pandemic is exploding like a biological time-bomb in Michigan’s aging and overcrowded prisons, with a 50 percent infection rate among state prisoners confirmed by recent news broadcasts. Your current plan to expedite the parole of state prisoners who are past their earliest release dates will, at best, only release a thousand prisoners, more or less.