A Banned Books Week PSA

 This week (Sept 22-28) is Banned Books Week. And while we hear a lot about school and library challenges, do you know who has the strictest book bans?

Prisons.

Tens of thousands of books are banned in prisons throughout the country, far more than all schools and libraries combined. And it's far from just true crime or how to build a bomb. It's also instructional books about software development, cooking, and electrical wiring. Atlases have been banned. In fiction, books by George R.R. Martin, Octavia Butler, and Neil Gaiman have been banned. 

Many states have a specific vendor list which only allows books to be purchased from that vendor, another way to profit off incarceration. 

For further reading: 

Prison Banned Books Week 2024 (actually last week-oops!)
Prison Banned Books Week: Books give incarcerated people access to the world, but tablets are often used to wall them off | Prison Policy Initiative
Prison Banned Books: What We Learned From a Year of Listening and Investigating | The Marshall Project
America’s unseen book bans: the long history of censorship in prisons | US book bans | The Guardian
How Prison Book Bans Dwarf All Other Censorship | TIME