The Judges & the Saints on the Textbook Committee

by Molly Ivors

There is much that is wrong, very wrong, with the American prison system. Aside from it being an indifferently just warehouse for all kinds of sociopathology and weight-lifting, it's also something of a Darwinian/Machiavellian Workshop, in which bad behavior is often rewarded and genuine progress and healing are rare. It's a hermetically sealed social system which really only teaches inmates to thrive within its confines, not in the larger world to which they presumably intend to return. In that sense, it's basically high school.

Nevertheless, it does offer a chance for some people to restructure the principles upon which they've been operating, and in that sense, this is very very bad news indeed.

Prisons Purging Books on Faith From Libraries

Behind the walls of federal prisons nationwide, chaplains have been quietly carrying out a systematic purge of religious books and materials that were once available to prisoners in chapel libraries.

The chaplains were directed by the Bureau of Prisons to clear the shelves of any books, tapes, CDs and videos that are not on a list of approved resources. In some prisons, the chaplains have recently dismantled libraries that had thousands of texts collected over decades, bought by the prisons, or donated by churches and religious groups.

.........

Traci Billingsley, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons, said the agency was acting in response to a 2004 report by the Office of the Inspector General in the Justice Department. The report recommended steps that prisons should take, in light of the Sept. 11 attacks, to avoid becoming recruiting grounds for militant Islamic and other religious groups. The bureau, an agency of the Justice Department, defended its effort, which it calls the Standardized Chapel Library Project, as a way of barring access to materials that could, in its words, “discriminate, disparage, advocate violence or radicalize.”

Ms. Billingsley said, “We really wanted consistently available information for all religious groups to assure reliable teachings as determined by reliable subject experts.”

But prison chaplains, and groups that minister to prisoners, say that an administration that put stock in religion-based approaches to social problems has effectively blocked prisoners’ access to religious and spiritual materials — all in the name of preventing terrorism.

“It’s swatting a fly with a sledgehammer,” said Mark Earley, president of Prison Fellowship, a Christian group. “There’s no need to get rid of literally hundreds of thousands of books that are fine simply because you have a problem with an isolated book or piece of literature that presents extremism.”

While "getting religion" in prison is something of a joke (as in Paris Hilton finding God* in jail), I have no doubt that many prisoners find comfort in religion. My own personal mantra is that religion is often a fine guide to personal behavior, it just sucks when used as a stick to beat others or a guide to formulating public policy, as in the contemporary Christianist movement.

More to the point, I wouldn't trust this administration to judge a Beautiful Baby Pageant, let alone assess the potential "danger" of works of philosophy. Belly up to the bar, Socrates; hemlocktails are on the house!

The selection committee is secret, the terms of assessment are secret, and the list of books is secret (though the last of these was, of course, leaked to The Times). As Roxanne notes, bring on the Stalinism!

One can more or less predict how this is playing out in Earth-W, with the Jawa Report declaring: "why not just throw out all Korans. That pretty much covers all the hate bases." Yeah, because no one's ever done anything foolish or violent in the name of Christianity, you ignoramus.

I fully expect Thers to weigh in on this with an update, as secret lists of banned books drawn up by secret committees is more or less his thing.

* Umm, in googling to find info on Paris's religious conversion, I learn that, apparently, Paris is set to star in a London stage production of the old Australian soap Prisoner: Cell Block H. I'm..... speechless.

Comments

[Roxanne]

Thanks for blogging about this. I'm a little bit shocked (I'll never learn) that it hasn't gotten more press today.

[rea]

I'm a little bit shocked (I'll never learn) that it hasn't gotten more press today

In another era, it might have, but GWB & Co. have exhausted the country's supply of outrage long ago . . .