Prisons are the largest censors in the United States.
Single state prison systems censor more books than all state schools and libraries combined. Literature gets banned by prison mailroom staff quickly flipping through books as they inspect the mail. These cursory judgments sweep up medical books, drawing and art books, popular magazines, history books and literature of all kinds. Prison censorship prevents people in jails and prisons from reading.

The third, annual Prison Banned Books Week will focus on the exponential rise of “approved vendor” policies. Denying independent booksellers and limiting places to purchase books, sometimes to a single, bookseller, “approved vendor” policies are being passed around the country under the specious claim that mail is the primary conduit of contraband.
This Prison Banned Books Week we’ll look at the data to determine if this vast denial of reading materials is warranted.

Increasingly censorship is being enacted through policies that donāt target specific content or titles but instead broadly prohibit paper literature of any kind. Individual prisons and jails as well as statewide prison policies are limiting who is allowed to send books and literature to incarcerated people through āapproved vendorā policies which are made without any opportunity for public comment and devised through a closed-door process. The rationale for the exponential rise of this policy in the last five years is the purported use of paper mail as a conduit for contraband.

Get the Book
Have prisons and jails always banned books? Why do prisons and jails censor what people can read? What kinds of books are censored? What have people been doing to try and resist these limits on reading? Find out more in this history of prison book programs.

Support Prison
Banned Books
Week
Partner Organizations
- Black and Pink
- Library Services to the Justice Involved
- Prison Library Project
- Wisconsin Books to Prisoners
- UC Davis Books to Prisoners
- DC Books to Prisons
- Rikers Public Memory Project
- The Petey Greene Program
- Asheville Prison Books
- Malaprop’s Bookstore/Cafe
- Avid Bookshop
- Tubby & Coo’s Traveling Book Shop
- Louisiana Books 2 Prisoners
- Charis Books and More
- Estelita’s Library
- Flyleaf Books
- Da Book Joint
- Rogue Liberation Library
- Prison Creative Arts Project
- Elliott Bay Book Company
- Museum for Black Innovation and Entrepreneurship
- Head House Books
- Boneshaker Books
- Wooden Shoe Books and Records, Inc.
- Blacksburg Books
- Queen Anne Book Company
- Pilsen Community Books
- Outsider Comics
- Books to Prisons-Birmingham