Ezekiel Caligiuri is an author, editor, and co-founder of the Stillwater Writer’s Collective. And, having served 22 and a half years in a Minnesota Correctional facility, he’s also a seasoned expert on contemporary prison censorship, which has intensified to a level many fear is oppressive.
“[Prisons censor] the things that you would probably think about as most threatening — materials that might enhance violence or maybe encourage some other sorts of subversive behavior,” Caligiuri says. And sure, most of us could probably guess that prisons would censor, say, a book about an escaped inmate. But increasingly, says Caligiuri, prisons are banning a much wider variety of books for increasingly unclear reasons — these materials are censored for being donated, being provided by “unapproved” vendors, and a whole host of other reasons that don’t make practical sense or promote rehabilitation.
To get to the bottom of how censorship in prison works and highlight how it can hinder a prisoner’s attempts to grow, learn, and improve, we spoke to Moira Marquis, author of “Reading Between the Bars,” a PEN America report on how these bans work and why they’re the most pervasive form of censorship in the U.S. Plus, Caligiuri fills us in on the strange ways that censorship manifests behind bars, and how it may stifle rehabilitation.
How are books being banned in prisons?
Prisons censor reading materials using two, overarching types of bans. Content-based bans are the more “intuitive” of the two: According to Marquis, content-based bans occur when prisons “identify particular texts as threatening because of the ideas or information they contain.” These materials are then withheld — Marquis likens these bans to the sort of censorship that you may have come to expect (like it or not) from a contemporary library or school.
Marquis clarifies in the report, however, that content-based bans are liberally used to restrict materials that don’t seem very “threatening” at all. Marquis notes in the report that some states ban reading materials that aren’t written in English, citing security concerns. This means the contents of the book could be harmless, but because those making the rules don’t understand the language, they’re automatically tossed into the “no” pile. The state of Florida has banned PEN America’s creative writing anthology The Sentences That Create Us because Florida’s Literature Review Committee perceives it as a threat to security. Why, exactly? The committee used the rationale that the anthology “otherwise presents a threat to the security, order, or rehabilitative objectives of the correctional system or the safety of any person.” The committee provided no additional reasoning for banning a book aiming to help incarcerated writers hone their craft (which, you’d think, would be a helpful tool for rehabilitation rather than a hindrance).
Caligiuri recalls a specific instance in which reading material that seems very relevant to incarcerated people was withheld: “There was an article about mass incarceration and youth incarceration in the New Yorker. But, [the prison] didn’t let anybody in the system get this issue of the magazine. It’s ridiculous because you’re thinking, ‘This is the New Yorker, it’s reputable. You won’t run into some material that would somehow threaten the facility.’ It didn’t make sense why they would withhold it. Sometimes, they just would.”
If content-based bans weren’t infuriating enough, another form of censorship may give you even more of a headache: According to Marquis, content-neutral bans have been on the rise since 2015. “Content-neutral,” she says, “means that the literature’s being withheld from people not because of the ideas or information contained in it, but because of other criteria that they’re saying need to be met for those physical copies to be allowed inside prisons.” You’re probably wondering, like what? “These run the gamut. Everything from no hardcover books to no free [donated] books, no used books.” Reading materials are also increasingly being censored because they’re not being mailed by approved vendors.
But what exactly is an approved vendor? PEN America wishes they could tell you, but Marquis says that “the Department of Corrections and the states that are employing this censorship don’t publish criteria about why certain vendors are approved and why others aren’t.” Independent bookstores, for whatever reason, are rarely approved. Caligiuri says that behind bars, “the processes through which you order books can be the most complicated. At one point you had to order them straight from a publisher. Incarcerated people are like, ‘What? I have to write and figure out who the publishers are?’ Most human beings are not ordering their books directly from Random House.”
How are such complicated content-neutral bans justified? According to Marquis, “the rationale is that contraband [comes] in through the mail. When they say contraband in terms of the mail, they’re mostly saying that liquid drugs are sprayed onto books, magazines, and letters and mailed into the facility from an independent bookstore, a smaller bookseller, or even PEN America.” So, earnestly trying to change someone’s life with a free creative writing guide is treated as a method of smuggling illegal substances. To illustrate how irrational these restrictions are, Marquis points out, “if you look at the statistics about prison contraband, the mail is a very small source. In Florida, just 1.7 percent of all contraband came through the mail in a three-year period.”
“An actual human being decides that other human beings aren’t worthy of knowing certain information”
Both Marquis and Caligiuri point out that while we talk about prisons as monolithic systems, a lot of these decisions boil down to the actions of individual human beings.
“When you look at policies, an actual human being decides those,” says Caligiuri. “You have facilities that are just full of policies that have been made over 25 or 30 years. Sometimes [these policies] aren’t relevant anymore, but they’re embedded and caked into the system.”
Ultimately, Caligiuri says that individual employees within the prison also make the call over whether something can be allowed: “When you’re an inmate, what mail you end up receiving is decided by an actual human being. It’s not decided by a computer or a system. There may be rules or processes in place that impact that, but there still ends up being this discernment where somebody steps forward and decides that other human beings aren’t worthy of knowing certain information.”
Marquis agrees that the responsibility of individual employees can have huge ramifications: “The weight of this censorship falls on mail room staff. They have to individually inspect every piece of literature that comes through their hands. Prisons in general are very understaffed, and prison mail rooms are very understaffed. If you’re tasked with censoring literature, you essentially have to skim every single 300-page book that comes across your desk.”
Marquis theorizes, “I think that the approved vendor policies are trying to limit the work that mailroom staff has to do by limiting the overall quantity of literature that’s coming in.”
“This is a solvable problem”
While the issue of prison censorship may seem insurmountable, Marquis says this very much isn’t the case: “This is a solvable problem. DOCs don’t want the public to think negatively of them, so they’ll be responsive if public opinion is not supportive of extreme censorship.”
Marquis also points out that, given that prisons’ supposed aim of restitution for incarcerated people, doing away with such stringent book banning is a no-brainer: “It’s confusing to me that censorship is being turned to as the primary mechanism for maintaining security and for rehabilitation. It seems very antithetical to those purported goals to deny people their ability to read, which is a very quiet activity, and also leads to self-improvement.”
Speaking for himself and his accomplishments, Caligiuri says that reading never inspired him to engage with some shadowy security threat; instead, it opened the doors for him to discover purpose and passion. “A relationship with language made my world much larger,” he says. “Literature and books were my starting point with just about everything. They allowed me the ability to think creatively and very critically while in prison. Sometimes, it was really hard to trust each other. Sometimes, it’s hard to trust your own judgment. Literature was sort of that open book that showed me [what was] possible.”
Caligiuri also points out that outside resources help incarcerated people adjust to and understand the rapidly shifting society they’re ideally supposed to rejoin: “When you do long-term stretches in prison, the political reality when you enter prison will be way different than it is when you’re released. There’s such a need for human beings to stay updated and understand the present political reality.” And acclimating to life outside of prison is difficult enough without the extra burden of catching up on years’ worth of political and social events; according to a report by the Department of Justice, “at least half of citizens released from incarceration will recidivate in some way following release.” Recidivism is often fueled by lack of personalized education and reintegration preparation in prison. If reading can help lower that recidivism rate and boost chances of rehabilitation, why limit opportunities to read?
And sure, you may not be incarcerated. You may have plenty to worry about in your daily life and don’t want to extend extra energy to someone serving a sentence. But Marquis reminds us that incarcerated people are part of our society, and that if we want to prevent censorship in other public institutions, we must include the prison system as well.
“We’re witnessing a rise in culture of people characterizing literature and information as potentially threatening. [We can see] the origins of this in our prison system, because it has existed there for so long,” she says. “If we don’t want to have someone in government telling us what we’re allowed to read, then we should try and extend that to everybody in our culture, just to really emphasize for all public institutions that people have autonomy. You can’t foreclose our intellectual freedom.”
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