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Prison libraries ban books in name of security

Recently, the New York Times reported that the Federal Bureau of Prisons (a division of the Department of Justice), in June 2007, instituted a policy called the Standardized Chapel Library Project which restricted religious books available in prison libraries to a ridiculously small list of 150 approved titles for each of the Bureau’s 20 recognized religions. What this amounted to was an illegal and immoral purge of sometimes thousands of accumulated religious books in federal prison libraries across the country (including the Federal Penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kan.). Chaplains of all creeds reported that their libraries were being decimated by this draconian policy. The official reason was curbing extremist religion (read: Islam) that could incite violence and threaten prison or national security. But chaplains already had the power to censor radical religious books, and they do. The Bureau’s decision to reduce the number of available books to such a paltry number was irresponsible and indefensible.

Even more infuriating, the Bureau would not release the lists to the public (the Times had an anonymous source) nor identify these so-called "experts" whom they relied on to synthesize 20 religions with a near-infinite number of books to a meager 150 sources.

The lists themselves are laughable. I spoke to Professor Timothy Larsen of Wheaton College, who studied the Protestant book list and was interviewed for the Times article, and he told me that he was equally confused about the selections on the list.

"Despite the purpose ostensibly being to prevent violent tendencies, the list freezes out all the Christian voices who have been most against violence: the pacifists John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas (named by Time magazine as America’s greatest theologian), Ron Sider, and Jim Wallis," he said. Even the popular "The Purpose Driven Life" by Rick Warren and "When Bad Things Happen to Good People" by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner were also banned, according to a lawsuit filed in New York by two inmates challenging the ban. There are also several titles on the list by an author named Henri Nouwen - "a great author," says Prof. Larsen, "but decidedly Roman Catholic - so, do they not know he is Roman Catholic or is he the only Roman Catholic author Protestants should read?"

Major theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr and Karl Barth were shunned. Nearly all pacifist and left-wing Christian authors were left off the list. Left-wingers and pacifists banned in the name of national security? Does this sound familiar? I think Mussolini would approve.

Based on the evidence, Prof. Larsen guessed that an Evangelical Calvinist had probably written the Protestant list. While there is nothing wrong with being an Evangelical Calvinist, there is something very wrong with the fact that it represents only a small portion of the Protestant population, yet it was setting the standards for an entire religion. The 19 other lists had some of the same exclusive tendencies (80 of the 120 Judaism titles are from the same Orthodox publishing house), according to the Times article. You can see the lists for yourself at www.nytimes.com.

But there is good news at the end of this one. Last week the Times reported that, due to an overwhelming public protest from religious groups, civil activists, and members of Congress, the Bureau of Prisons has decided to rescind the policy for the present and put the banned books back on the shelves. Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, Muslims, Jews and Christians all took up the cause and inundated the Prison Bureau and Congress with thousands of letters and phone calls complaining about this gross abuse of power. And it worked. The media did its job of exposing a major government screw-up and the citizenry responded by putting pressure on politicians to change the situation. This may seem like a small victory, and that there are other, bigger issues which merit our concern. That may be true (see Iraq and Darfur), but let us look to this event as a positive example of the way our system should work, and let us find hope in this seemingly insignificant thing that there are sound ways to right wrongs, and to put things in order that are vastly confused.