According to the New York Times, chaplains in Federal prisons have been quietly carrying out a systematic purge of religious books and materials that were once available to prisoners in chapel libraries. They are doing this under the direction of the Bureau of Prisons, which wants to clear the shelves of any books, tapes, CDs and videos that are not on a list of approved resources. Why are they doing this? According to Traci Billingsley, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons, the agency is acting in response to a 2004 report by the Office of the Inspector General in the Justice Department that 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.”
Specifically, Ms. Billingsley said, “We really wanted consistently available information for all religious groups to assure reliable teachings as determined by reliable subject experts.” 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. What’s on the lists, you ask? 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.
Who selects these titles? The identities have not been made public, but “they include chaplains and scholars in seminaries and at the American Academy of Religion”. This sounds as good as the folks that review movies. Further, 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.
Fascinating. But I guess this just makes it harder for inmates to “find God” and be redeemed. Serves them right.
Update – September 27, 2007: The prisons are restoring the removed books. Seems the fundies did find out about it.
