The policy has prompted condemnation and threats of legal action, and critics say it amounts to unlawful and mean-spirited censorship.
Inmates stand in the yard at Arizona State Prison-Kingman in Golden Valley, Ariz in 2015. In March, the state's corrections department banned a book that criticizes the negative impacts of prison on black men. Prison officials are now facing widespread calls to overturn that ban.
“This move seems like something out of the 1950s McCarthy era,” Butler told The Washington Post. “Of all things to take away from a prisoner, why would you take away a book?” In one of Christy Lopez’s classes at Georgetown Law, where Butler also teaches, “Chokehold” actually is required reading. Lopez, a former federal civil rights attorney, said she investigated and sued the Arizona Department of Corrections when she was at the Justice Department.
— Christy Lopez May 22, 2019 In prison systems from the East Coast to the Southwest, officials have banned books and limited prisoners’ access to them, justifying the restrictions as a way to cut down on drug smuggling or prevent the flow off material that might incite violence. In 1989, the Supreme Court ruled that prisons may prevent prisoners from receiving certain publications — only as long as it’s in the interest of safety. But the results of these policies are often puzzling.
“Prison officials may not agree with that message but it’s unconstitutional to ban a book because the government doesn’t like its policy proposals,” ACLU staff attorney Emerson Sykes said in an interview. “The book bans are a symptom of the punitive mind-set that fails to account for the intellectual well-being and growth of those who are incarcerated.”
“The ideas in ‘Chokehold’ are dangerous to the status quo; the ideas are dangerous to mass incarceration,” he said. “They are very threatening to white supremacy, and I am proud of the power of those ideas.”
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