Wisconsin prisoner Kevin T. Singer sued the state’s Waupun Correctional Institution after the guards confiscated his materials for role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons.
Waupun’s Disruptive Group Coordinator, Captain Bruce Muraski, received an anonymous letter from an inmate expressing concern that Singer and three other inmates were forming a D&D gang and trying to recruit other to join by passing around their D&D publications and touting the “rush” they got from playing the game. Muraski, who is an expert on gang activity, decided to look into the gang “before it got out of hand”.
Singer sued the prison for violating his First Amendment rights. The district court ruled with the correctional facility on summary judgment, and the Seventh Circuit affirmed.
Singer had collected the affidavits of eleven inmate affiants—who collectively served over 100 years in prison—to testify that they had never heard of any gang-related or other violent activity associate with D&D gameplay or paraphernalia.
The Seventh Circuit had this to say: “The question is not whether D&D has led to gang behavior in the past; the prison officials concede that it has not. The question is whether the prison officials are rational in their belief that, if left unchecked, D&D could lead to gang behavior among inmates and undermine prison security in the future. Singer’s affiants demonstrate significant personal knowledge about D&D’s rules and gameplay, and offer their own assessments that D&D does not lead to gang behavior, but they lack the qualifications necessary to determine whether the relationship between the D&D ban and the maintenance of prison security is “so remote as to render the policy arbitrary or irrational.” …
(Of course, many of Singer’s affiants are present or former inmates, but their experiential “expertise” in prison security is from the wrong side of the bars and fails to match Muraski’s perspective.) The expertise critical here is that relating to prisons, their security, and the prevention of prison gang activity. Singer’s affiants conspicuously lack such expertise.”
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