A Purge Of Prison Books

[Joanne98]

A Purge Of Prison Books
http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/editorials/hc-bookraid.artjun13,0,3987789.story?coll=hc-headlines-editorials

June 13 2007

If the U.S. Department of Justice believes that its Bureau of Prisons should be rehabilitating inmates, then it should not be ordering such a sweeping removal of religious books from prison chapel libraries.

Officials took hundreds of books away from a federal prison in New York state recently as part of a 2004 Justice Department directive that was intended to prevent extremist religious texts, specifically Islamic ones, from reaching violent inmates.

Prison officials have a right to monitor and remove material that could radicalize rather than rehabilitate. The sweeps, however, took away more than radical religious writings. One inmate said that 600 books were removed from the federal prison camp in Otisville, N.Y., including numerous Christian and nondenominational publications and Harold S. Kushner's best-seller "When Bad Things Happen to Good People," an innocuous book that won high praise from Norman Vincent Peale, author of "The Power of Positive Thinking." Such books often help inmates turn their lives around.

So, not only did federal authorities implement their plan about three years late, they went overboard to boot.

Otisville inmates have filed a lawsuit over the policy, saying their constitutional rights were violated and demanding that the court issue an injunction that would restore the books to the shelves until the issue is resolved.

Denuding libraries to purge them of a handful of radical books is an overreaction that deprives inmates of the spiritual nourishment they need for rehabilitation.
http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/editorials/hc-bookraid.artjun13,0,3987789.story?coll=hc-headlines-editorials

[Igel]

1. If they only took radicalizing religious literature, the publicity would be bad.

White Supremacist trash has been banned for a long time; most of the stuff targeted involved some variety of conservative Islam.

"Government purges prison libraries of Islamic materials" would make a bad headline, horrible publicity, and there'd probably be lawsuits. The details are irrelevant to most people. So you simply make sure that every denomination loses some reading material, regardless of content, you've made your life easier--and the lives of the prisoners slightly worse.