Quote:New Jersey permitted a 34-year-old man convicted for torturing and filming pornographic, transgender videos with his 7-year-old daughter to serve his 25-year sentence in a women's prison. The child rapist now claims that the women's facility has wrongfully interfered with his diabolic rituals.

Matthew Volz filed a lawsuit on April 28 in the Hunterdon County Superior Court against the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women.

Volz alleges in the suit that he and the "entire Wiccan population" at the prison — an inmate subset for which he provided no accounting — have suffered religious discrimination and now seek religious accommodations.


Volz's lawsuit alleges that Joy Lynch, head of religious services at Edna Mahan, has denied him various essential religious items, including a witch's cloak.


The brown, hoodless cloak is one of the personal and congregate religious items attributed to wiccans by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Other items include: the "Book of Shadows"; a "diviniation tool"; pentacles; pentagrams; rune cards; salt; and chalices.

The suit also complains that other "religious items have been implicitly denied, because [Lynch] refuses to approve a vendor by which the Wiccan population as a whole may fairly obtain their religious items from source of sale."
While a selection of witchcraft paraphernalia is permitted by the New Jersey Department of Corrections' Internal Management Procedures, state regulations state that only the prison chaplain or a volunteer religious group leader can bring ritualistic items into the facility and store them, reported MyCentralJersey.com.

Even if the transvestic pedophile received his desired accoutrement, the prison might be able to restrict his diabolic practice somewhat to ensure the "maintenance of a safe, secure, and orderly operation of a correctional facility," according to the 2019 NJDOC resource guide.

Volz's lawsuit suggests the prison has already applied some limits in a discriminatory fashion.
The child rapist suggested that prior to Dec. 21, 2022, he was "denied the ability to hold corporate worship during appropriate times of day, despite other religious groups being able to worship at those same appropriate times of day that have been requested."

The suit insinuates that the alleged discrepancy "could be viewed by the community as a form of proselytizing because it encourages participation in some religious groups by incentivizing conversion to those religions," singling out the prison's Jewish population as recipients of alleged unfair favor.

The child rapist seeks $9,950 in compensatory damages, stressing the alleged discrimination has left him with "anxiety due to a lack of information, emotional stress, time loss, uncertainty and resultant planning difficulty for religious holy days and sacraments."