First Amendment: Which Amendment Effects Corrections Most?

First Amendment
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Of all the amendments in the American constitution, the First Amendment is the one that has the most significant impact on corrections. When prisoners are arrested, quite a number of them cite that their rights relative to the First Amendment are being violated. In states such as Pennsylvania, there have been issues that have been reported where prisoners demand that they are given the right to receive and read newspapers and magazines. However, there is a standing policy that largely prohibits prisoners from receiving or reading such material unless they contain legal or religious content. In most of the cases related to the same, the argument borders the idea that barring the inmates from accessing information is a violation of the basic rights. The element of curtailing the prisoners from receiving any form of information is directly related to the fact that some of the information contained in the magazines and the newspapers can easily fuel resistance and riots in the prisons relative to aspects such as political affiliations and connections to the outside world and criminal links. As such, the element of the prison’s policies curtailing the information access to the prisoners with the aim of controlling the correction process such that it is not influenced by outside forces. On the other hand, the prisoners are not comfortable with the fact that they are being controlled and correction process rendered limiting.
There have been cases where prisoners sue correction facilities relative to the issues of religion, diet, grooming and even jewelry. There have been cases where prisoners have sued over the food that they have been forced to eat, which they consider to be prohibited in their faith. In some of the most recent cases, some two Muslims had sued the state of California for having been given food that was prohibited by the faith. In another case in Mississippi, there were Christian inmates that sued the state for preventing them from preaching in prison. There have been cases where prisoners of the Jewish faith have been forced to shave their beards.
The idea behind the impact that the First Amendment has on the correction process is that, prisoners are able to exploit the fact that the amendment protects citizens from the government exploiting or violating the basic rights. One of the elements that is quite crucial to note relative to the element of being a prisoner, is that,...