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Here's a crazy idea. Books shouldn't be banned in prison. Yes, including books on bomb making and lock picking. If someone is going to be in jail until they die, it doesn't really matter what they read...
...If they're going to be released at some point, like all free citizens, they'll be able to read whatever the hell they want and do whatever mischief they please with the information...
...If you're actually rehabilitating people, then you won't have to worry about them not making a bomb or picking a lock, not because they just haven't learned yet, but because they don't want to, because they're a productive member of society...
...turning reprobates into productive members of society is the greatest and most enduring guarantor of public safety. Moreover, and what is more important, banning certain books because they supposedly promote criminality readily becomes an excuse to ban political education...
...there's a big fight going on in New Jersey to get The New Jim Crow off the banned book list. Why is it on there to begin with? Because if prisoners gain a reasonable understanding of how racist the system that holds them is, they might feel a moral obligation to resist it....
...I've heard correctional officers complain that it's harder to control prisoners now because many are in jail for non-violent drug crimes, they don't have the basic sense that they've done something wrong. I've said before and I'll say again: The incarcerated are not animals...
...the carceral state wants to make them animals, it treats them like animals, but they are full-fledged human beings. And, just like in slavery, those who proclaim the animality of those they control can never afford to believe it themselves...
...to truly confuse humans with animals, whether in slavery or prison, is to wake up with your throat slit, to find that the oppressed have turned the tables and placed the jailer and the slaver's heads upon pikes...
...If the jailed man and woman has access to political education, if they can, with the tools which have been laid out across time as the common heritage of all humanity, lay claim to their right to build a new world, such persons are a supreme danger to the status quo...
...Never forget, Malcolm (X) Shabazz became himself while caged in Massachusetts. George Jackson became a Soledad brother while sentenced to his life behind the walls of San Quentin. Even Martin King found a striking clarity during his tenure in the Birmingham Jail...
...It was from Atlanta's jail that Garvey prophesied his return in the whirlwind. Gramsci behind bars gave us the Prison Notebooks. Yesterday, Christians all over the world prayed to wild visions of the fallen Babylon, which the imprisoned Paul issued forth from Patmos...
...The prison is a horrible place, it is designed to lock down what is most free in man. It is designed to make us a stranger to earth and sky, chained to a man-created environment...
...the jailed are to see only what the jailer wants them to see, hear what the jailer has decided they should hear, think what the jailer wants them to think. But, by a most human miracle, the jailhouse every now and then grows the human personality it was built to crush...
...Martin King said the jailhouse gave him a place to write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers. This is the process which the carceral state seeks to halt when they ban books and censor open discussion, when they deny prisoners political education...
...they cannot stand to see their place of hopelessness turned into an incubator for tomorrow, nor they can to see their charges learn their own history, lest they get the dangerous idea that they may be able to make some history of their own...
...Mein Kampf is allowed in Texas Prisons, but not Juan Williams's book on Thurgood Marshall. David Dukes's book "My Awakening" is allowed, We Shall Overcome: The History of the Civil Rights Movement as it Happened
by Herb Boyd is not. Clearly White supremacy is ok...
by Herb Boyd is not. Clearly White supremacy is ok...
...There's this attitude of: "If you want to be able to read what you want, don't go to prison." This attitude is used to justify most of the inhumane practices that prevail in American prisons, the idea that merely being found guilty renders you unworthy of humanity
...banning books has very little to do with public safety and very much to do with keeping prisoners as ignorant and helpless as humanly possible. It is designed to ensure that the careful work which has been done to miseducate society shall not be undone behind bars.
