In April 2021, the Iowa prison system passed a rule banning charities, families, and others from providing books to inmates. “Jailed people can only get books through one of the approved vendors,” the document reads. Strictly new volumes, used ones are not allowed.
The measure follows a countrywide strategy, wrote Alex Skopic in Protean, a left-wing nonprofit newspaper. Michigan introduced a similar regulation in 2018; other states – such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington – have not succeeded just because of citizen protests. Officially, the ban serves to prevent smuggling and thus to protect security and order in prisons. But the unauthorized circulation of goods, which is a problem in prisons, rarely affects books: the most popular items are cell phones, cigarettes, marijuana. “The old image of the book dug inside to hide a hacksaw or a gun is good for a comic, not for reality,” the reporter points out. “If it is used to justify a measure, it means that there is something else underneath”.
Non-literary interests
As often happens, the real goal is profit. Among the few book retailers Iowa inmates need to turn to are Barnes & Noble and Books-a-Million (two of the largest US bookstore chains), which offer them their products at full price. For ebooks, the situation is even more absurd. The organization Appalachian prison book project denounced it in 2019: people in prison can download many texts in a free and legal way from various platforms, for example the Gutenberg Project, but to read them they are obliged to use tablets provided by companies such as Global Tel Link, which charges users for connection minutes. On each expense, the prison collects a commission of 5 percent. In parallel, essential services such as libraries were cut. Skopic takes the example of Illinois: in 2017 the state prison system, which houses around 39,000 inmates, spent $ 276 on books.
Lastly, to the limits on donations and cuts, there are the lists of texts not allowed due to their content: practically every American prison has its own list. Andy Chan and Michelle Dillon, of the non-profit organization Books to Prisoners, talk about it in an article published in January in the Washington Post. The pretext is a fact that dates back to late December 2021, when a Tennessee prison returned a package with three copies of an unauthorized book to the association. The volume in question was a biography of Malcolm X, published by the same publishing house that publishes the Harry Potter series in the United States and recommended to secondary school students.
Chan and Dillon explain that the censorship targets texts by African American authors or that contain criticisms of the treatment of blacks. It recently hit The new Jim Crow: mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness at Michelle Alexander, The bluest eye by Toni Morrison and I am not your negro by James Baldwin. In 2020, Wisconsin allowed inmates to read my fight but not the publications on the Black Panthers. A year earlier, the Pen America organization concluded in a study that “prison systems frequently ban literature that discusses civil rights and abuses in prison” as a threat.
Restricting prisoners’ right to read is a practice intimately linked to white supremacism, and therefore to American history. But recent mobilizations across the country give hope for change, not to mention that there are simple enough ways to foster it. Books to prisoners activists and journalist Skopic suggest them: make donations to a prison library, support a local literacy project, or start one.