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 donā€™t 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 ā€œapproved 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.

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.

Partner Organizations

ACLU
Prison Policy Initiative
American Book Sellers for Free Expression
Every Library
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Incite
Princeton University Press
Haymarket Books, Books not Bars
Cornel Prison Education Program
San Francisco Public Library, Jail and Reentry Services
Abolition Comix
Defending Rights & Dissent
Prison Library Support Network
Midwest Books to Prisoners
Apallacia Prison Book Project
Saxapahaw Prison Books Program
Prison Book Program, Quincy
Books to Prisoners, Seattle
Chicago Books to Women in Prison
Books Beyond Bars
Porter Square Books
Burning Books
Freer Records
Radical Reversal
Book People
BIg House Books
Prison Literature Project, because books open doors.
The University of North Carolina Press
The Maoist Internationalist Ministry of Prisons
Old Firehouse BOoks

To reach Founder and Director of Prison Banned Books Week, Dr. Moira Marquis, please email: prisonbannedbooksweek@gmail.com

To send a loved one inside books please reach out to your local prison book program.

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