AP: Federal Directive Removes "Radical" Books from Prison Chapel Libraries
The Associated Press yesterday ran a piece about a “long-delayed, post-Sept. 11 federal directive intended to prevent radical religious texts, specifically Islamic ones, from falling into the hands of violent inmates” by thinning out prison chapel libraries. The article continues:
- The government maintained that that the new rules don’t entirely clear the shelves of prison chapel libraries.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Brian Feldman told U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain that prison libraries limited the number of books for each religion to between 100 and 150 under the new rules. He said officials would expand the number after choosing a new list of permitted books.
Feldman said the removal order stemmed from an April 2004 Department of Justice review of the way prisons choose Muslim religious services providers. It is not exactly clear why it took so long for the order to be put into effect, but prison officials said they needed time to examine a long list of books.
Feldman said the study was made out of a concern that prisons “had been radicalized by inmates who were practicing or espousing various extreme forms of religion, specifically Islam, which exposed security risks to the prisons and beyond the prisons to the public at large.”
Feldman said the review by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons concluded that prison chapel libraries were not adequately supervised.
“The presence of extremist chaplains, contractors or volunteers in the BOP’s correctional facilities can pose a threat to institutional security and could implicate national security if inmates are encouraged to commit terrorist acts against the United States,” the bureau’s report said.
Three prisoners at a federal prison camp in Otisville, NY, where hundreds of books disappeared from their chapel’s library, are suing the federal government over the policy. As they see it, their Constitutional rights are being violated by the directive.
While the prisoners’ attorney concedes in the article that “there might be limits to relief the prisoners can seek because prisoners’ First Amendment rights are severely limited,” a number of things should give us pause about all of this. For one thing, I’d like to be clearer about what the criteria is for removing a particular title. What constitutes “radical” or “extremist”? This seems an important question to ask considering some of the books that have been removed.
- Inmate Moshe Milstein told the judge by telephone that the chaplain at Otisville removed about 600 books from the chapel library on Memorial Day, including Harold S. Kushner’s best-seller “When Bad Things Happen to Good People,” a book that Norman Vincent Peale said was “a book that all humanity needs.”
Feldman claims that because prisoners have the ability to order books on their own, “this is not a case about what books the inmates have the ability to read.” But what about the prisoners who cannot afford to order their own books and who depend on libraries like those inside prison chapels?
The government’s review also suggests further actions that similarly raise important ethical questions and demand greater explanations. For example:
- The review suggested audio and video monitoring of worship areas and chapel classrooms and screening of religious service providers. It also recommended that prisons reduce inmate-led religious services and consider constant staff monitoring of inmate-led services.
While security in the prisons and at the national level is certainly important, the implications of this new directive (as I understand them from the information in the AP’s article) raise some concerns for me. I will contiue to watch for stories about the directive and report on them here with great interest.
