Date: 04-19-2022
Restrictions vary from state to state, facility to facility with Florida banning 20,000 books, and Texas banning 9,000 |
From Vera:
In Florida, the list of 20,000-plus banned books includes Nutrition For Dummies and PCs For Dummies. In New Hampshire, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy makes the list. Texas, which bans nearly 9,000 books, once counted a collection of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets among them. In New York, one prison attempted to ban a book of maps of the moon because it could “present risks of escape.”
The examples here serve to demonstrate the expansive, arbitrary, and absurd ways in which prisons make materials inaccessible to people behind bars. Across the United States, agencies have issued an ever-evolving list of restrictions on what people in prison can read. Works by Black authors, civil rights literature, critiques of mass incarceration, books in languages other than English—all are frequently censored. (Meanwhile, Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf and books by David Duke have been allowed in some of those same prisons.)
Restrictions aren’t limited to book titles. Maps, survival guides, and even specific magazine issues (of Reader’s Digest and Rolling Stone, among others) are prohibited. Restrictions vary from state to state, facility to facility. Ultimately, such policies underscore how corrections agencies and staff limit incarcerated people’s access to the written word—and, by extension, their access to information. And they succeed in doing so without much public awareness or oversight. Continue reading >>>
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