According to a recent New York Times article, by this fall New York prisons will have banned the majority of books for their prisoners. This is something Texas prisons have already done, banning over 10,000 books such as Freakanomics, Memoirs of a Geisha, and The Color Purple.
This is in a way, unsurprising. Officials are worried about prisoners becoming radicalized, and are worried that books will inspire escape attempts or lead to ideas of prison violence and riots. To be fair, these are legitimate concerns for prison officials – their argument is ultimately that, by banning books, prisons will become safer. However, book banning leads to largely negative consequences for prisoners, such as a greater difficulty in assimilating back into society and increased rates of illiteracy after release.
It could be easy to brush this off and wonder why we should care about the education and comfort of prisoners, but it should be known that education is by far our best tool in lowering recidivism rates. The higher the level of education of the collective is, the lower the poverty rates and crime rates will be. Education is one of the most effective ways to rehabilitate prisoners, which means that former prisoners will be more likely to become productive members of society and less likely to commit crimes that would once again lead them to imprisonment. People who are well read are also generally more compassionate, intelligent, and understanding of themselves and others than are those who are not as well read. Given that, how can we expect former prisoners to be compassionate, intelligent, and productive members of society if we don’t allow them access to the resources that would create these qualities?
Books in general provide so much good to the world, and by banning books from prisons, we are arguably taking away good from some of the people who need it the most. As a country, our goal for prisoners should always be rehabilitation. And in order to do that, we must treat prisoners with respect and humanity – no matter what they did, and whether we like it or not. If we continue to treat criminals like they are lesser humans because of what they have done, we will be no better than them. How can we find the humanity in ourselves, if we cannot treat everyone with humanity?