Prison Banned Books Week Toolkit

Thank you for joining forces with PEN America during our inaugural Prison Banned Books Week (October 25th-31st). Together, we’ll help people understand that prisons are the largest censors in the US and provide ways to participate in our advocacy campaign targeting state leaders and prison officials.

In this toolkit, you’ll find elements to take part in and amplify awareness and actions.

PEN America released Reading Between the Bars: An In-Depth Look at Prison Censorship on Wednesday, October 25, 2023. The report’s main findings are:

• In 2023, PEN America found 84 percent of prisons now require that books are purchased from vendors the state or specific prisons opaquely select without publishing criteria for their choices or providing steps for booksellers to become approved.
• PEN America also found prisons are increasingly limiting the booksellers allowed to send books into prisons to a handful of “approved vendors.” This practice is a kind of content-neutral restriction, and has increased exponentially since 2015, when 30 percent of prisons wouldn’t allow books from nonprofits, independent bookstores, family and friends.
• The scale of this censorship is widely unknown due to a lack of record keeping. Idaho uniquely keeps track of approved vendor censorship and, in the first year the policy was implemented, the state denied one book for every four incarcerated people.

Other major findings in the research revealed:

• Approved vendor banning is on the rise and is outstripping content bans in limiting literature to incarcerated people.
• The most common reason for content-based censorship is “sexually explicit” which in practice censors art, medical and drawing books among others.
• A lack of documentation means that the true extent of carceral censorship is likely exponentially greater than the numbers featured in the report, which were found to be extremely high.

Social Media Campaign

• Tag your posts with #BooksNotBans
• Use the sample social copy below – feel free to make it your own!

Incarcerated people suffer when they’re denied access to literature and learning. Read some of their stories here:

• “In solitary confinement, banned books are a lifeline” by Kwaneta Harris
• “In Prison, Books Are ‘Security Risks’: I Want to Expand My Knowledge. The Arkansas Department of Corrections Keeps Getting in My Way” by Richard Beebe
• “Censorship Starts in the Shakopee Prison Mailroom: There, Reading Material Gets Caught in a Web of Arbitrary Rules and Regulations” by Elizabeth Hawes
• “Why I Almost Went to Court to Learn Italian in Prison: After the Louisiana State Penitentiary Confiscated My Language Book and CDs, I Sued to Get Them Back” by John Corley
• “Ending Prison Censorship” by Moira Marquis
• “The Surreal Prison Censorship Regime” by Dylan Jeffries
• “Misadventures in Mail Censorship” by Robert Schaeffer
• “Censoring Women’s Health” by Kwaneta Harris
• “Ban the Bans: A better way to rid racism in prison” by Tomas Keen
• “I’m a prisoner fighting censorship. Here’s why our access to books matters” by Daniel Pirkel

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PEN America has teamed up with prison book programs, higher education programs in prisons and other nonprofits that send literature to incarcerated people to tell elected officials that we do not support prison censorship. 

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