A new play lets formerly incarcerated people tell their stories. Meanwhile, prisons are still banning books.

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/02/27/a-new-play-lets-formerly-incar.html

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Good story, Thom. Break a leg! This arbitrary censorship is a huge problem for books-through-bars programs (most of which are donation-funded & volunteer-run). These groups have to maintain fat rulebooks listing every individual prison in the country with their censorship quirks. If books are rejected by the prison mailroom staff, they are mailed back to the group, which thus has to pay postage both ways, doubling the costs. Private prisons are especially draconian as there’s no oversight at all.

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I thought the more immediate concern was that the books would be used to smuggle things in, hence rules against used books. Long enough ago that it’s hazy, I do remember reading about rules requiring that books come new, from the publisher.

The weekend I spent in jail in 1979, there were copies of Johnny Cash’s “Man in Black” and of course Gideon bibles. When one of our group decided to keep his book because he’d not finished it, I said something about how he should leave it there for the prisoners remaining.

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I do remember reading about rules requiring that books come new, from the publisher.

Yes, many (but not all) prisons require that books look brand-new & most require that they come from an “approved vendor.” Most books-through-bars programs work with a cooperating bookstore. But more & more prisons are requiring that books come new from Amazon. And some would like to ban books altogether.

I too have been incarcerated & the boredom was crushing. But beyond that, I think it’s important to remember that American prisons are just the latest version of the slavery system & American slaves have always been violently discouraged from reading.

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Because for too many of us in the USA the cruelty is the point.

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The book bans are not “arbitrary”. They’re carefully targeted.

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:musical_note: And I ain’t saying that will change rap back
But I do know this for a fact
Right now there’s a youth on your block
With his hands on his balls, face screwed up
Swear he don’t care, don’t give a fuck
That he won’t let nobody call his bluff
But the words go in
Open your shackles
Because once that’s happened there’s no going back
Once you start to see what is really happening
Who the enemy you should be attackin’ is
So READ, READ, READ!
Stuck on the block, READ, READ!
Sittin’ in the box, READ, READ!
Don’t let them say what you can achieve
Because when people are enslaved
One of the first things they do is stop them reading
Cos’ it is well understood
that intelligent people will take their freedom :musical_note:

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The prison industrial-complex and legal / criminal justice system we have in the US (and how that intersects with how employment under capitalism works) is a total disaster and should be completely redesigned based on modern science, and continually updated as our empirical knowledge of reality is refined, to ensure the best social outcomes.

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Hopefully this isn’t too off-topic, but I ran across this at some point and I thought it was an excellent piece of journalism:

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Incidentally, there’s an obvious historical line between that and this:

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