Behind the walls of federal prisons nationwide, chaplains have been quietly carrying out a systematic purge of religious books and materials that were once available to prisoners in chapel libraries.
The chaplains were directed by the Bureau of Prisons to clear the shelves of any books, tapes, CDs and videos that are not on a list of approved resources. In some prisons, the chaplains have recently dismantled libraries that had thousands of texts collected over decades, bought by the prisons, or donated by churches and religious groups.
Some inmates are outraged. Two of them, a Christian and an Orthodox Jew, in a federal prison camp in upstate New York, filed a class-action lawsuit last month claiming the bureau’s actions violate their rights to the free exercise of religion as guaranteed by the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
Traci Billingsley, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons, said the agency was acting in response to a 2004 report by the Office of the Inspector General in the Justice Department. The report recommended steps that prisons should take, in light of the Sept. 11 attacks, to avoid becoming recruiting grounds for militant Islamic and other religious groups. The bureau, an agency of the Justice Department, defended its effort, which it calls the Standardized Chapel Library Project, as a way of barring access to materials that could, in its words, “discriminate, disparage, advocate violence or radicalize.”
This is as weird as searching octogenarian women at airports. Everyone knows it’s about jihadi literature but they’re terrified by the islamist lobby. Get some intestinal fortitude!
Banning books is never an effective way to ban ideas anyway. I don’t think they should be removing literature pertaining to any faith.
I am outraged on two fronts. First, as a Christian, I can see that we should ban books from prisoners that advocate violence in any form. But just because a book is not on an “approved” liste, we should not banish it. If we are going to ban books from prison, we should be very selective in what we ban. I’ve been involved in prison ministry for over 10 years and I know that the men inside relish any books that they can get.
Second, as an American I get nervous when we start to ban books in any situation. Like I said before, I understand the need to ban certain books from a prison population, but it should be done with extreme caution and very limited in scope.
YBIC,
Phil Snyder
Prison officials worry about a potentially violent minority of Islamists (themselves a minority of Muslims), so they conduct a partial purge of religious books.
Does this stop jihadists wannabes from getting religious literature? Can friends mail it to them? If so, prison officials have to make distinctions between incitement-to-hatred literature and everything else. The purge will not have made that problem go away.
As a former prison chaplain, I have seen some of these libraries…my comment…can I get on the dispersion list? I would really like to acquire a few of the very old and out of print titles I have seen across the country in the prison system.
As a Chrisitan, I am disgusted by this act of censorship of religious material for people who need them most.
As an American Citizen, I find it an outrage.
As a Librarian, ditto to both messages.
I thought we’d have learned by now that prohibition doesn’t really work. Want to make something more seductive? Just ban it.
Sheesh.
Phil
“Book burning” is alive and well!! Nuff said!!
You are all weak on terrorism.
(joke)