Posted by Helen on: 09.12.2007 /
I ran across this article in the New York Times (you need a free subscription required to read original article - here’s a copy of it on a blog). Here’s an excerpt
Behind the walls of federal prisons nationwide, chaplains have been quietly carrying out a systematic purge of religious books and materials that were once available to prisoners in chapel libraries.
The chaplains were directed by the Bureau of Prisons to clear the shelves of any books, tapes, CDs and videos that are not on a list of approved resources. In some prisons, the chaplains have recently dismantled libraries that had thousands of texts collected over decades, bought by the prisons, or donated by churches and religious groups.
Some inmates are outraged. Two of them, a Christian and an Orthodox Jew, in a federal prison camp in upstate New York, filed a class-action lawsuit last month claiming the bureau’s actions violate their rights to the free exercise of religion as guaranteed by the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
Traci Billingsley, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons, said the agency was acting in response to a 2004 report by the Office of the Inspector General in the Justice Department. The report recommended steps that prisons should take, in light of the Sept. 11 attacks, to avoid becoming recruiting grounds for militant Islamic and other religious groups. The bureau, an agency of the Justice Department, defended its effort, which it calls the Standardized Chapel Library Project, as a way of barring access to materials that could, in its words, “discriminate, disparage, advocate violence or radicalize.”
Ms. Billingsley said, “We really wanted consistently available information for all religious groups to assure reliable teachings as determined by reliable subject experts.”
But prison chaplains, and groups that minister to prisoners, say that an administration that put stock in religion-based approaches to social problems has effectively blocked prisoners’ access to religious and spiritual materials - all in the name of preventing terrorism.
Comment by: benjamin ady
1 09/12/07 9:22 AM | Comment Link |that is so outrageous I just want to chew on a bullet.
On the other hand, it is in sense taking a lot of the ideas behind having such an extensive prison system to their logical extremes. So maybe the problem isn’t so much with so outragously treating prisoners as subhuman in this particular incident. perhaps the problem is so outrageously treating prisoners as subhuman by making prisoners of them in the first place.
Comment by: Stephan
2 09/12/07 2:20 PM | Comment Link |I suppose this was a logical conclusion for someone. They wanted to stop radical Islamist recruiting in prisons, but if they only removed Islamic books someone would complain. If you remove all religious books, then everyone complains. It’s stupid, but at least you can say it’s fair.
Comment by: Brendon
3 09/12/07 2:24 PM | Comment Link |Outrageous only begins to describe it
Hands up all you Christian wannabe suicide bombers!
Comment by: Helen
4 09/13/07 3:18 AM | Comment Link |It seems unlikely to me that removing religious books from prisons is going to foil any radical Islam extremist plots.
Unless the prison libraries had books in with titles like “How to fly a plane into the World Trade Center without anyone realizing what you’re going to do beforehand”. I can see removing those. But those would be filed under ‘terrorism self-help’ not ‘religion’.
Comment by: Laura M.
5 09/13/07 11:34 AM | Comment Link |Well I guess that explains it completely.
Seriously, what the heck does that mean?
Comment by: benjamin ady
6 09/13/07 5:22 PM | Comment Link |Laura
Great call! It sounds reasonable, but when you look again, it’s like “huh??”.
Comment by: Doreen A Mannion
7 09/16/07 11:59 AM | Comment Link |Therefore, only Chuck Colson’s books are allowed.