It is banned books week! If you are a prisoner in Texas—and there are about 140,000 people that fall into that category—there are books you can read and books you cannot read. Wolf Boy by Dan Slater is a book you cannot get when you are in a Texas prison. Unfortunately, the non-fiction story of two American teens who ended up convicted and imprisoned (in Texas) for participating in a notorious Mexican drug cartel has been banned by the Texas censors. The reason? No books that may provide ideas for criminal behavior, for example how you go about outfitting your truck to smuggle drugs across the border. But, besides being a stupid idea for censorship, there seems to be very little common sense involved in the process of banning books in Texas.
The Texas list is not just long but diverse. It includes former Senator Bob Dole’s World War II: An Illustrated History of Crisis and Courage; Jenna Bush’s Ana’s Story: A Journey of Hope; Jon Stewart’s America; A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction; and 101 Best Family Card Games. Then there are books banned for what TDCJ calls “racial content,” such as The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, the Texas football classic Friday Night Lights, Flannery O’Conner Everything That Rises Must Converge, and Lisa Belkin’s Show Me a Hero, which depicts the struggle to desegregate housing in Yonkers, New York in the face of institutional racism.
But don’t worry: Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, David Duke’s Jewish Supremacism, and the Nazi Aryan Youth Primer are all kosher. (Clark would not directly respond regarding this issue.)
Some of the criteria that nixed writers like Langston Hughes and others were the use of the “N-word.”
Slater noted that the TDCJ book bans often seem arbitrary. The department has banned many nonfiction books dealing with prison rape, he writes, but does not censor Stephen King's "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption," which contains a scene in which an inmate is sexually assaulted.
Books containing the "N-word" are often targeted by prison censors, Slater writes. This has led to the banning of books by Langston Hughes, Noam Chomsky, Philip Roth, Richard Wright and Salman Rushdie.
It’s not just strange choices like this. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) have banned books by Tom Clancy. However, for all of the money spent on our prison system, you would think they could open up some good reading jobs to actually go through books with a meaningful criteria. The Guardian spoke with the American Library Association’s deputy director Deborah Caldwell Stone and Seattle-based Books to Prisoners program coordinator Michelle Dillon about the Texas prison system.
Dillon and Stone both acknowledge that certain books should be banned — books about lock picking or bomb making, for example. But the paranoid approach taken is a “slippery slope because everything becomes suspicious,” Dillon says, so a prisoner cannot learn about American sign language because it may be used to flash signals or to read biographies of black leaders or about the inequities of our justice system because it may make them less cooperative.
“We understand there are sometimes concerns,” Stone adds, but points out that it would make more sense to take certain books away from specific prisoners (such as books with scenes of rape or pedophilia from people convicted of those crimes) than to create blanket bans. “Unfortunately, the courts have not been friendly to us and support the rights of prison officials instead of the rights of prisoners to educate and rehabilitate themselves.”
I don’t think educated prisoners are the top problem with America’s prison systems.