WBEZ: “Who should decide which books are allowed in prison?”

Sally Deng for NPR

Former Education Justice Project student Michael Tafolla is quoted in this WBEZ article by Lee Gaines. In Danville Correctional Center last year, and in prisons around the country, books about race are often banned because of a fear of them being disruptive. However Tafolla says having access to these kinds of books in prison, “[empowers] our people to be so much more than what we've been reduced to.”

The regulation of books coming into prisons is generally up to an individual corrections officer’s discretion about what is appropriate. Generally, nudity, sexually explicit material, and material that could be construed as encouraging dangerous situations are explicitly banned, but other decisions about the books allowed into prison can seem arbitrary. According to the article, in Kansas, they have banned “Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye — but they do allow Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf.”

The Freedom to Learn Campaign was built in response to books, mainly about race, being taken out of the Education Justice Project’s library. Although they have been returned, we still live in a world where unclear, vague, and arbitrary decisions are made in Illinois and across the country about what books people who are incarcerated are allowed to have access to. For a more detailed look at some of these decisions, please read the whole article.