Photo by Retiring Guy
Headline: The Hill, 10/25/2023
“The extent of prison book banning is alarming and an attack on the written word itself,” said Moira Marquis, senior manager of PEN America’s Freewrite Project and lead author of the report. “Censorship should not be a knee jerk tactic by authorities to address other prison concerns, such as spurious claims that books are a conduit for drugs. Yet we are witnessing vast amounts of time, effort and money expended in order to stop people from reading. This censorship must end.”
The group based its report on Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for all the prison systems in the country, as well as interviews with prison staff. The organization says its analysis is likely an underestimation due to the poor tracking of the information by states.
Florida was the top in prison book banning among the 28 states that track the information, banning 22,825 titles. Texas came in second at 10,265, and Kansas third at 7,699, based on the latest information available from 2021. [emphasis added]
In Retiring Guy's service area, three copies of the book are available via the South Central Library System's LINKcat online catalog.
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