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Excerpt from www.nytimes.com
Damon Landor is a Rastafarian. His faith requires him to let his hair grow long. When he started a five-month prison term for drug possession in Louisiana, his dreadlocks fell nearly to his knees.
Mr. Landor was wary of the state’s prison system, and he kept a copy of a 2017 judicial decision with him. That ruling, from a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, said that Rastafarian inmates in Louisiana must be allowed to keep their dreadlocks under a 2000 federal law protecting prisoners’ religious freedom.
The first four months of Mr. Landor’s incarceration were uneventful. Then he was transferred to the Raymond Laborde Correctional Center in Cottonport, La. He presented a copy of the 2017 decision to a guard, who threw it in the trash.
After consulting the warden, two guards handcuffed Mr. Landor to a chair, held him down and shaved his head to the scalp.
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