Hartford - A group of prisoners has begun a letter-writing campaign to protest what they see as an unfair ban on pornography inside the state's correctional institutions.

The Department of Correction announced in July that it would be banning all material that contains "pictorial depictions of sexual activity or nudity" from the prisons beginning next summer.

The state says the ban is intended to improve the work environment for prison staffers, especially female staffers, who might be inadvertently exposed to pornography.

"While it is not supposed to be displayed, it is still visible to staff, whether it be on the inside of a foot locker or underneath their bunks, so they are still exposed to it," said Correction Department spokesman Brian Garnett. "And secondarily is the fact that this is contrary to our rehabilitative efforts, particularly when it comes to sex offenders."

The department has received about three dozen letters from inmates, many of them form letters, claiming the recently adopted ban violates the inmates' First Amendment rights. Some of those letters also were sent to The Associated Press.

They suggest either lifting the ban or providing inmates with alternatives such as "cable programming that offers and displays nudity, also sexual activity."

The letters say the suggestions are being made to avoid litigation. The department has not received any lawsuits, Garnett said.

Bill Dunlap, a law professor at Quinnipiac University, said there is a constitutional argument to be made. But, he said the courts have generally sided with prison officials, as long as they can prove the ban has a legitimate goal other than to simply suppress material that some people might find objectionable - such as maintaining safety in the prisons, or keeping the material out of the hands of sex offenders.

"The courts don't require the prison officials to look for other ways of achieving those goals without infringing on First Amendment rights, to the extent that they would for government outside the prison," he said. "Based on the press release and the notice to the prisoners, it looks as though it's in the general area of regulations that have been upheld in the past."

But the state's total ban on sexually explicit material appears to go beyond bans that the Supreme Court has upheld in the past, he said.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut said is not representing any of the inmates and doesn't advocate for pornography in prisons, but is concerned that the ban could be enforced in an arbitrary and overly broad manner.

"Similar regulations have been used to censor an image of the Sistine Chapel, newspapers and magazines with lingerie ads and the novel 'Ulysses,"' Andrew Schneider, executive director of the ACLU of Connecticut, said in a statement.

Garnett said the department is confident the ban will survive any legal challenge. The ban doesn't include material that could be considered literary, educational, artistic or scientific, he said.