Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Best of 2024 ezine!

"Books keep our minds free": US prisons ban reading materials at alarming pace

BookBrowse News - The Full Story

"Books keep our minds free": US prisons ban reading materials at alarming pace

Nov 08 2023

Reading bans are rising at an alarming rate in prisons across the U.S. according to new PEN America data, and are often less documented than bans in other settings, making it hard to determine the extent of the censorship.

“This is an under-reported area because prisons are generally not visible and are isolated environments,” Moira Marquis, the report’s lead author and senior manager in the prison and justice writing department at PEN, said. “The people making decisions are not publicly elected officials, so there is very little accountability.”

Florida now has the highest number of titles banned behind bars, at 22,825, followed by Texas, with 10,265, according to PEN’s new report Reading Between the Bars. Other states like Kansas, Virginia and New York follow behind.

Source: The Guardian

More News Stories

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: James
    James
    by Percival Everett
    The Oscar-nominated film American Fiction (2023) and the Percival Everett novel it was based on, ...
  • Book Jacket
    But the Girl
    by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu
    Jessica Zhan Mei Yu's But the Girl begins with the real-life disappearance of Malaysia Airlines ...
  • Book Jacket: Patriot
    Patriot
    by Alexei Navalny
    On the 17th of January, 2024, colleagues of Alexei Navalny posted a message to his Instagram account...
  • Book Jacket: Rental House
    Rental House
    by Weike Wang
    For many of us, vacations offer an escape from the everyday — a chance to explore new places, ...

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
In Our Midst
by Nancy Jensen
In Our Midst follows a German immigrant family’s fight for freedom after their internment post–Pearl Harbor.
Book Jacket
The Berry Pickers
by Amanda Peters
A four-year-old Mi'kmaq girl disappears, leaving a mystery unsolved for fifty years.
Who Said...

Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever ...

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Big Holiday Wordplay 2024

Enter Now

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.