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Federal Prisons to Return Religious Books

Submitted by Gauranga Prasad Das on October 28, 2007 - 7:38am.
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According to an article published by american libraries on 8 September, 2007, all "appropriate" religious materials that had been removed earlier this year (No Intellectual Freedom in U.S. Prison Chapel Libraries) are being returned to the prisons' libraries.

Following an outcry from civil libertarians and religious groups, the Federal Bureau of Prisons has authorized the return to chapel libraries of all appropriate religious materials that it had ordered removed as part of its new Standardized Chapel Library Project, an effort to restrict prison reading lists to 150 titles per denomination. In an e-mail quoted by the September 26 New York Times, the bureau reported that the only exceptions would be “any publications that have been found to be inappropriate, such as material that could be radicalizing or incite violence.”

Prison chaplains began removing books from chapel libraries in May as a belated response to an April 2004 Department of Justice report that recommended steps prisons should take to limit the spread of radical or militant Islamic materials. This prompted two inmates of the Federal Prison Camp in Otisville, New York—Orthodox Jew Moshe Milstein and Protestant John J. Okon—to file a class-action lawsuit against the bureau August 21 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, claiming that their rights to free exercise of religion and due process of law were infringed.

I haven't heard if ISKCON-literature had been affected by the removal, but most books are being returned to prison libraries, it seems. Still, the Federal Bureay of Prisons maintains the concept of lists of approved books, instead of blacklisting those that do contain objectionable material:

Bureau spokeswoman Traci Billingsley declined to give the Times the names of the religious experts who were compiling the lists, but said they included chaplains and scholars in seminaries and at the American Academy of Religion. Although the books are being returned to the prison chapels, the bureau has not abandoned the concept of maintaining lists. Bureau spokeswoman Judi Simon Garrett said the “review of all materials in chapel libraries will be completed by the end of January 2008.”

 

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