More Books Censored By Prisons

 From The Guardian byway of LitHub: They wrote a book while locked in solitary confinement. Texas won’t let them read it.

Since 2021, Texas Letters has been published with the hope that this collective work shows that people in prisons are not pure monsters deserving of the most inhumane punishment, but rather imperfect beings who are far more than a prison sentence. Their words are powerful and deserve to find a wide, wandering readership – including in prisons, where the anthology stands to benefit the incarcerated by showing them they are not so entirely alone in their enforced aloneness. For the writers featured in it, the anticipation of receiving a copy was high. For some of them, it was their proudest accomplishment. Unfortunately, the anthology now lands on a long list of banished titles throughout the statewide system.

Truth, it appears, is trouble in the Lone Star state.

The Fort Dix Leisure Library (East Side) removed all the manga/anime books, and, if I recall correctly, all comic books. The woman running the library, not a trained librarian, also refused any interlibrary loans which she deemed unsuitable. I experienced this with my loan request for Alasdair Gray's The Ends of Our Tethers. The library's guardian decided from the cover it was obscene. Oddly enough, when my sister sent me a copy, it got through the mailroom, which had the same rules regarding obscenity. If you follow the link above, you can judge about the cover and the quality of the work for yourself.

Back to the original article, my experience gibes with this:

n Texas prisons, Texas Letters rests among banned titles including The Color Purple; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave; Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire; and A Charlie Brown Christmas, in addition to New York Times bestsellers and books by Nobel peace prize nominees, civil rights leaders and even the Bard himself.

The Texas department of criminal justice (TDCJ) denies books for myriad reasons, as the Dallas Morning News reported in 2017. Where’s Waldo? Santa Spectacular was banned because it had stickers. Freakonomics was banned because it “communicat[es] information designed to achieve the breakdown of prisons through … strikes, riots, or security threat group activity” – books that talk about social justice movements or race often fall into this category. Shakespeare’s Love Sonnets was banned because it used “sexually explicit” imagery, as were reading materials about filing taxes, which could be used to commit fraud.

In reality, this censorship is a ploy to limit knowledge – about connections between slavery and mass incarceration, about literacy’s role in inspiring the desire for freedom, and, in the case of Texas Letters, about what takes place in solitary confinement under the guise of “justice”. It pits the ensemble behind these letters against the large-scale ignorance prisons try to cultivate and the enforced silence they apply. 

Prisons do not teach responsibility. They serve to infantilize inmates. This leaves inmates even less able to cope with life outside. When inmates fail to cope with the outside world, they return to prison. I guess it is a sort of job security.

Meanwhile, those are your tax dollars at work.

sch 10/15