‘represents content-based censorship on publications’…well yes. Isn’t that what the GOPpers are trying to do with their ‘fake news’ campaign and meltdowns on the TV machine? Keep 'em stupid…that’s their mantra.
Reminds me that I need to send ACLU a check.
@Matt Shuhan—
“any danger or hinderance”
It’s hindrance.
Turn on your spell-check, since TPM doesn’t hire copy editors.
Otherwise, good work!
“The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” is one of the most important books written in the last 30 years.
If you have not read it, it should move to the top of your reading list.
Already did that.
As for banning books each jail/ prison sets their own standards. This is something I have knowledge of since since I used to ship books to prisoners when I worked at Borders. They control type, content and how many books a prisoner can have. Books can only be shipped from the establishment where they were purchased. Even then books were returned regularly because they move prisoners around.
Banning decent books and offering prisoners Ayn Rand crapola ought to be a violation of the 8th Amendment. Just remembering those endless diatribes and monologues makes me break out in hives.
I wonder if the excellent book on Attica - Blood in the Water - is on the banned list. Book banning is good cause for a riot.
TPM having a picture of a black prisoner would perhaps be more appropriate since the book is about:
The restriction is notable, given the book’s focus on what it characterizes as a racial caste system perpetuated through harsh drug laws and mass incarceration, even as thousands of books are banned from prisons nationwide.
If anyone has watched the documentary “13th” by Ava DuVernay (Selma) it deals with the same subject. It was released October seventh in 2016 by Netflix. The timing of the release could not have been worse. It also won the New York Film Festival award in October giving it more publicity. It hammers Bill and Hillary Clinton very hard for their anti crime bill and Hillary’s “super predators” comment. That clip of Hillary using that phrase was picked up from that movie and posted all over the internet for a full month before the election. I believe it had a lot to do with the lower black turnout for Hillary. I watched the movie and the Clintons do not come off well in it. Louis Farrakhan scorched Hillary and Bill to his followers and recommended seeing the movie. Some blacks in the Milwaukee area say it was a big reason for the low turnout for Hillary in Milwaukee, Detroit and Philadelphia. A couple months ago I linked to Milwaukee or Detroit newspaper article saying the same thing.
If that documentary had been released a month later, we might not have a President Trump.
Stunning. That’s not only an important book, it’s important to the prison population to give them insight as to the forces that are working to imprison them and to keep them from achieving much with their lives. How can they strategize a future without this knowledge?
Is it crazy that prisoners (at least some) are more curious, better read, and more informed than our President? I wonder if the White House even has a library or if that was discarded along with the vegetable garden.
The prison industrial complex needs a way to keep the pipeline open. What better way than to demolish education, rehabilitation, and desire to better and improve one’s life. Sounds like a plan to me.
It seems the ACLU is going to have it’s work cut out for them in these next few years. Yep, I’m going to have to dig a big deeper and try and pull out a donation here and there. I want to make my Party of Lincoln grandfather proud of me for still believing in the Constitution of the U.S.
My kid picked one of those up and I cringe every time I see the cover. I’m not going to prevent it being read, but I always quote John Rogers:
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."