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After working with seven newspapers in four states for nearly 39 years, it’s getting more challenging to come across anything that I haven’t seen before. Yet, just that happened last week at the Cherokee Scout.
Some of your local newspaper’s strongest readers are located inside various penal institutions across the country, perhaps because inmates don’t have a whole lot else to do. Almost all of them apparently used to live in Cherokee County, so it does give them a glimpse at what life’s like back at home while they’re paying their dues behind bars.
Of course, these folks are inmates because they were convicted of breaking the law, so we use justifiable caution when responding to any requests from them. For example, an inmate who wanted several years of high school graduation sections was rejected, along with another who thought he should receive a free subscription since we wrote about him so much.
One former local inmate even claimed he knew where bodies were literally buried in Cherokee County. It took sending his chief deputy to a Florida prison for firsthand interviews, but then-sheriff Derrick Palmer was able to conclusively prove that inmate was a lying liar who lies in one of the more bizarre incidents I’ll never get to write about because we’re a family newspaper.
One of the Scout’s readers today is living inside the Jefferson Correctional Institution, a male-only facility in Monticello, Fla. However, he was not able to read the March 15 edition, as it was “impounded pending review … because the warden or designee believes the publication contains subject matter that is inadmissible” under Florida law.
That’s a first. What possibly could have been in the Scout that would cause such a response?
Line (15)(e) was checked for that. It says that edition of the local newspaper was impounded because it “encourages, provides instruction on or facilitates gambling.” The form goes on to say, “Front page and page 9A article ‘Mobile sports betting is legal now’ contains various sports betting apps.”
As someone who has yet to spend their first dollar at Harrah’s Cherokee Valley River Casino & Resort in Murphy, I was admittedly aghast at hearing this conclusion. However, after thinking about it for a bit, I can understand the method behind the institution’s madness.
As much as corrections officials try to keep inadmissible things out of the inmate population, items like drugs, weapons and cell phones are still smuggled into prisons – and a smart phone is all it takes for someone to be able to place a bet online. While the newspaper doesn’t encourage gambling, the apps mentioned in that article would like nothing more than to instruct you on how to do it. So keeping inmates from both having too much fun while they’re being punished, and wasting what little money they (or their families) have, actually sounds like a pretty good idea to me.
As a fun aside, this article was Scout Sports Editor Cannon Crompton’s first one ever published on the front page. To have it banned by The Man somewhere only adds to getting his journalism career off to a good start.
David Brown is publisher of the Cherokee Scout. You can reach him by phone, 828-837-5122; email, dbrown@cherokeescout.com; or on X @daviddBstroh.