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Prisons Purging Books on Faith From
Libraries
September 10, 2007
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/10/us/10prison.html?_r=2&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print
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.
“It’s swatting a fly with a sledgehammer,” said Mark
Earley, president of Prison Fellowship, a Christian
group. “There’s no need to get rid of literally
hundreds of thousands of books that are fine simply
because you have a problem with an isolated book or
piece of literature that presents extremism.”
The Bureau of Prisons said it relied on experts to
produce lists of up to 150 book titles and 150
multimedia resources for each of 20 religions or
religious categories — everything from Bahaism to
Yoruba. The lists will be expanded in October, and
there will be occasional updates, Ms. Billingsley
said. Prayer books and other worship materials are
not affected by this process.
The lists are broad, but reveal eccentricities and
omissions. There are nine titles by C. S. Lewis, for
example, and none from the theologians Reinhold
Niebuhr, Karl Barth and Cardinal Avery Dulles, and
the influential pastor Robert H. Schuller.
The identities of the bureau’s experts have not been
made public, Ms. Billingsley said, but they include
chaplains and scholars in seminaries and at the
American Academy of Religion. Academy staff members
said their organization had met with prison
chaplains in the past but was not consulted on this
effort, though it is possible that scholars who are
academy members were involved.
The bureau has not provided additional money to
prisons to buy the books on the lists, so in some
prisons, after the shelves were cleared of books not
on the lists, few remained.
A chaplain who has worked more than 15 years in the
prison system, who spoke on condition of anonymity
because he is a bureau employee, said: “At some of
the penitentiaries, guys have been studying and
reading for 20 years, and now they are told that
this material doesn’t meet some kind of criteria. It
doesn’t make sense to them. They’re asking, ‘Why are
our tapes being taken, why our books being taken?’ ”
Of the lists, he said, “Many of the chaplains I’ve
spoken to say these are not the things they would
have picked.”
The effort is unnecessary, the chaplain said,
because chaplains routinely reject any materials
that incite violence or disparage, and donated
materials already had to be approved by prison
officials. Prisoners can buy religious books, he
added, but few have much money to spend.
Religious groups that work with prisoners have
privately been writing letters about their concerns
to bureau officials. Would it not be simpler, they
asked the bureau, to produce a list of forbidden
titles? But the bureau did that last year, when it
instructed the prisons to remove all materials by
nine publishers — some Muslim, some Christian.
The plan to standardize the libraries first became
public in May when several inmates, including a
Muslim convert, at the Federal Prison Camp in
Otisville, N.Y., about 75 miles northwest of
Manhattan, filed a lawsuit acting as their own
lawyers. Later, lawyers at the New York firm of
Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison took on the
case pro bono. They refiled it on Aug. 21 in the
Federal District Court for the Southern District of
New York.
“Otisville had a very extensive library of Jewish
religious books, many of them donated,” said David
Zwiebel, executive vice president for government and
public affairs for Agudath Israel of America, an
Orthodox Jewish group. “It was decimated.
Three-quarters of the Jewish books were taken off
the shelves.”
Mr. Zwiebel asked, “Since when does the government,
even with the assistance of chaplains, decide which
are the most basic books in terms of religious study
and practice?”
The lawsuit raises serious First Amendment concerns,
said Douglas Laycock, a professor of law at the
University of Michigan Law School, but he added that
it was not a slam-dunk case.
“Government does have a legitimate interest to
screen out things that tend to incite violence in
prisons,” Mr. Laycock said. “But once they say,
‘We’re going to pick 150 good books for your
religion, and that’s all you get,’ the criteria has
become more than just inciting violence. They’re
picking out what is accessible religious teaching
for prisoners, and the government can’t do that
without a compelling justification. Here the
justification is, the government is too busy to look
at all the books, so they’re going to make their own
preferred list to save a little time, a little
money.”
The lists have not been made public by the bureau,
but were made available to The Times by a critic of
the bureau’s project. In some cases, the lists belie
their authors’ preferences. For example, more than
80 of the 120 titles on the list for Judaism are
from the same Orthodox publishing house. A Catholic
scholar and an evangelical Christian scholar who
looked over some of the lists were baffled at the
selections.
Timothy Larsen, who holds the Carolyn and Fred
McManis Chair of Christian Thought at Wheaton
College, an evangelical school, looked over lists
for “Other Christian” and “General Spirituality.”
“There are some well-chosen things in here,”
Professor Larsen said. “I’m particularly glad that
Dietrich Bonhoeffer is there. If I was in prison I
would want to read Dietrich Bonhoeffer.” But he
continued, “There’s a lot about it that’s weird.”
The lists “show a bias toward evangelical popularism
and Calvinism,” he said, and lacked materials from
early church fathers, liberal theologians and major
Protestant denominations.
The Rev. Richard P. McBrien, professor of theology
at the University of Notre Dame (who edited “The
HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism,” which
did make the list), said the Catholic list had some
glaring omissions, few spiritual classics and many
authors he had never heard of.
“I would be completely sympathetic with Catholic
chaplains in federal prisons if they’re complaining
that this list is inhibiting,” he said, “because I
know they have useful books that are not on this
list.” |
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