The New York Tims has a story dated yesterday about a change dictated from the top in the libraries of U.S. Federal Prisons, called the “Standardized Chapel Library Project.” With the rationale of preventing violent religious extremism among prisoners, religious books in Federal prison libraries will now be a standardized collection – 150 books for each library, following a list of approved titles selected by “religious experts.”
According to a range of religious scholars interviewed by the Times, the list of 150 titles is odd. Among its ideosyncracies are that where Christianity is concerned it is heavy on Calvinism and Evangelicalism, leaving out liberal theologians and writings representing major Protestant denominations (no books by Karl Barth or Reinhold Niebuhr); where Judaism is concerned it is mostly books published by a single Orthodox publishing house, and three-quarters of the Jewish books at a prison in Otisville, NY were removed from the shelves based on the new list. Several inmates at Otisville have filed a class action lawsuit alleging that the Standardized Chapel Library Project violates their first amendment rights.
Some people are thinking: “It’s prison, people are supposed to lose their rights.” I have two responses. First, it is easy to think this way until you are put in prison yourself, which I am afraid can happen all too easily in a country that puts a higher percentage of its people in prison than any other, and where social policies become progressively more punitive and more and more based on irrational fear with each decade. Second, prisoners are entitled to basic human rights, even if there are legal rights that they can be expected to lose. The freedom to read is a basic human right. And at the risk of offending some of my atheist colleagues, I think that theological study, while I wouldn’t say it deserves special protection in prison libraries versus other literature, is something that for many prisoners represents an essential tool for coping with imprisonment and for dealing with a violent past. Many prisoners become serious students of theology. Cutting them off from the literature they need for these studies seems more like sadism than a reasonable kind of punishment, especially since it goes against rehabilitation. And given what is on and what is off of the list, the government’s rationale of preventing terrorism can’t be taken very seriously.
It looks like it’s 150 books per category for 20 different religious categories, at least according to the NYT. Not that that makes it much better.
Comment by Logan — September 11, 2007 @ 5:28 pm
Thanks for the correction. I’ll leave the error in the original post and let your comment stand as the correction.
Comment by Rory Litwin — September 12, 2007 @ 6:33 am
This is exactly the post I wanted to write!
I hate it when people pull out the old “you have no rights in prison” argument because it’s lazy, incorrect, and a sign that the person doesn’t want to look at the real issues surrounding crime, poverty, race, violence, and prison.
Comment by Jessica — September 12, 2007 @ 9:51 am
“Second, prisoners are entitled to basic human rights, even if there are legal rights that they can be expected to lose.”
Fantastic! The article you are referring to has been on my mind for the past few days – that whole idea of rehabilitation seems to have vanished when it comes to the prison system.
These types of intellectual control policies do nothing to encourage education/rehab/humanity improvement in prisons.
Comment by french panic — September 13, 2007 @ 9:26 am
This article is a narrow minded. It does not show the problem of faith diversity in the US prisons. Many states refused to keep ‘religious books’ in chapels long time ago to prevent the stream of law suites about ‘faith discrimination’. All religious books are kept in common library so inmates who belong to different confessions could use them equally without fear to be forced to participate in religious services.
Comment by Alex — September 15, 2007 @ 2:11 pm
[...] week I read Rory Litwin’s Library Juice post No intellectual freedom in U.S. prison chapel libraries and it got me wondering about how much professional discussion there was out there on outreach to, [...]
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