Author Joshua Bloch never thought any of his books would be banned anywhere. Not even Florida schools. And yet in Ohio prisons, his book Effective Java is verboten. The inmates are not allowed to read that nor any other book about computer programming by any author.
I think I get it. Just for the sake of argument, let’s accept that everyone incarcerated in Ohio is guilty of what they were accused of and incarceration is the appropriate punishment for their crime. And so now their rights are severely curtailed, including their First Amendment rights. You’re not going to give inmates a printing press.
And you’re going to monitor everything the inmates read, whether it’s a book in the prison library or it's a book sent by a friend of the inmate. You will not allow them to read books that might suggest ways to escape or to commit new crimes.
Books like How to Disappear and Never Be Found by Barry Davies are understandably not allowed in prisons, though I suppose an inmate planning to escape on a day pass would not risk tipping off the warden by reading such a book in his cell. It also makes sense to ban books about abolishing prisons.
Books like Blood in the Water by Heather Ann Thompson might be allowed if the prison staff cut out a couple of pages about prison building layout. Even if your prison building has a different layout, you don't want the inmates getting any ideas.
And you’re also going to forbid books manifesting hateful ideologies, like Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler. At least I would. And yet, somehow, one translation of Mein Kampf has been approved for Ohio prisons, causing some observers to scratch their heads.
As you might know, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf while imprisoned in 1924 for his 1923 treason against Germany. And you definitely know what happened a couple of decades after that. Not exactly an example we’d want today’s inmates to emulate.
The edition in question has no historical photographs, no drawings of Nazi symbols like the swastika or the odal rune, it’s text only. Which makes me wonder: did the prison staff read that text? There are paragraphs in which Hitler seems to be rambling aimlessly, but even a cursory reading shows Hitler doesn’t like Jews, to put it very mildly.
The Marshall Project reached out to Bloch, who was just as surprised as they were.
Joshua Bloch, the author of “Effective Java,” a guide to the popular computer programming language, which showed up on the banned list, said he’d never heard of his book being banned in any context until he was asked by The Marshall Project about the state’s ban. Bloch described his book as a style guide for writing good computer code, which could help someone find employment in a high-earning field after their release from prison. He noted it doesn’t delve into topics like hacking or encryption.
The department said in an email that coding books are banned because “the content was found to pose a threat to the rehabilitation of inmates, the security of the institution, and order or discipline of the institution.”
In the January 2019 memo stating the book was rejected from the prison mail room, the prison staff member who initially intercepted “Effective Java” wrote, “Java platform not allowed no receipt or proof for school.”
Smith, the department spokesperson, pointed out that people in prison have access to computers for educational programs and legal research, and that “allowing these types of printed materials presents a substantial risk of misuse” and poses a security threat.
Bloch disagreed. “Could you use [programming skills] for hacking? Well yes, but if you improve your English skills you could use it for social engineering,” he said. “That didn’t seem like a good reason to ban a book.”
The statement “Java platform not allowed” is a little confusing. If I’m understanding correctly, it means that computers in Ohio prisons are not allowed to have either the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) or Java Development Kit (JDK) installed on them.
To run a compiled Java program, your computer needs to have the JRE, but not necessarily the JDK. To write a new Java program, your computer also needs to have the JDK. Both the JRE and the JDK are available for Linux, Mac, Solaris and Windows.
When Java was introduced in the 1990s, it addressed a major pain point in cross-platform development. If you wrote a C++ program for one operating system and it worked perfectly, you’d almost have to rewrite it from scratch to get it to work on another operating system.
With Java, you can write your program on any computer with both the JRE and the JDK, and, provided you don’t use so-called “native methods” (which are typically written in C++ and involve a lot of the usual C++ tools), your compiled program can run on any computer with the JRE without any adjustments whatsoever.
The way I see it, the biggest security concern with Java is interacting with SQL databases. SQL is notoriously insecure. Just Google “SQL injection” for one example. Otherwise, what’s the harm in letting a prisoner do something innocuous like create a Tic-Tac-Toe game in Java?
This leads me to wonder what kinds of computer programs are allowed on prisons. A Web browser like Microsoft Edge or Mozilla Firefox might be sufficient to access legal databases for legal research, which of course should be allowed for the sake of basic fairness.
There might be contracts to consider. Suppose XYZ Corporation makes a crappy program that no free man would pay for. But XYZ executives have cronies in state legislatures or among executives of private prisons. Then the prisons pay XYZ for that program, it’s installed on every prison computer, and then who cares if neither the staff nor the inmates like the program or even use it.
I myself have not read Effective Java, but in my research for my e-book Java with TDD from the Beginning, I came across plenty of citations and quotations from Effective Java. I guess my e-book would not be allowed in Ohio prisons either.
I wanted to make coupon code “OHIO” for my book, but I had to settle for EY29Z. That’s good for 75% off, but only on Smashwords, not Kobo, nor Barnes & Noble nor anywhere else you might buy my book.
Updates about Amanda Gorman
Last month, I wrote about how Amanda Gorman’s book The Hill We Climb, which contains her inaugural poem for President Biden’s presidency, was “age-restricted” in Florida schools. Gorman took it as a ban. That’s a valid feeling. It wouldn’t give me warm and fuzzy feelings either.
The age restriction was the result of a complaint by one parent of a schoolchild. I immediately assumed it was a bad faith complaint, but tried to assess it as if it had been made in good faith. Based on the previews on Amazon, it seemed much clearer that it was a bad faith complaint, but I still hadn’t read the whole book for myself.
The next time I was at the Main Library of the Detroit Public Library, I asked for the book, but the librarian couldn't find it (despite the end of the coronavirus pandemic emergency, much of the Main Library remains limited to staff).
There are several possible explanations for why the librarian couldn’t find the book, but the likeliest in this case is that the book was innocently misfiled. Last Thursday, I tried again, checked it out and read it. I still can’t find a good faith reason to age-restrict the book.
The foreword by Oprah Winfrey only takes up two pages. Both the foreword and the poem allude to the January 6, 2021 Trump-led terrorist attack against American democracy. The very subtle condemnation of treason must be what’s getting the MAGA馬鹿 crowd all worked up.
Maybe some schoolchildren (and some parents) might be confused by Gorman’s tendency to use more than one meaning of the same word in close proximity. But, I think, that’s not a reason to age-restrict the book, but rather an opportunity to teach the children that one word can have multiple meanings.
If Bloch’s book delves into Java 8, maybe he mentions how “default” has two meanings in Java: as the default case in a Switch-Case statement and as an indicator of a non-abstract function or procedure in an interface. Also, “static” has a subtly different meaning for nested classes.
Adding new reserved words to a computer programming language is something that must be handled with great care. The creators of Java should be proud that Java has a very small set of reserved words.
Natural languages like English, on the other hand, are constantly adding new words. Even if a new word can be added for a new concept, it is still a testament to the richness of the language that an existing word can be pressed into service for a new concept, or that two different words can evolve and coalesce into the same word.
Restricting Gorman’s book doesn’t look good for Florida. Some school officials in Florida are feeling embarrassed about this. Naomi Feinstein for Miami New Times:
Following national backlash over a Miami Lakes school restricting access to Amanda Gorman's 2021 presidential inauguration poem, Miami-Dade County school board member Steve Gallon hopes to strengthen the district's policies to ensure staff is better equipped to handle frivolous book challenges.
Gallon tells New Times the challenge to Gorman's poetry book ... was "woefully deficient" and used vague, culture-war dog whistles to prompt the material's removal from an elementary school library section.
"I thought the national embarrassment that we faced as a district was due to a lack of communication at every level," Gallon adds. …
Gallon says school leadership committees who review challenges need to be better trained on what qualifies as a legitimate objection. ...
Gallon adds that if a challenge is incomplete or severely deficient, the school should send the form back to the challenger for possible resubmission consistent with the law and school board rules.
Or at least a phone call.
"It is one parent's representation that these works represented indoctrination," Gallon tells New Times. "There was no debate. There was no discourse. There was no explicit dialogue to have the individual defend their representation of it being indoctrination."
[...]
"When you use arbitrary words, such as 'indoctrination,' and you are erroneous in your identification of who the author is, that tells me that, number one, the document for the challenge was deficient, and number two, the decision to respond to it... was not in comportment with the policy and statu[t]e," Gallon argues.
As far as I know, Amanda Gorman has not accepted any invitations from Florida Democrats for a public reading of her poems in Florida. Last week she was in France taking an interview with Variety. and talking about her rôle as a spokesperson for Estée Lauder. Given the NAACP advisory against traveling to Florida, I’d much rather see Gorman in France.