(Above: How can Frederick Douglass continue his best work if he is banned?)

In this the third year of the drumpf maladministration my personal levels of anger and disgust are so red-lined that it takes a story of particularly spectacular levels of stupidity and iniquity to pierce the drumpf-glut and make me incensed about something else.

Enter the Danville Correctional Center in Illinois and its administration.

will.illinois.edu

When she found out that staff at the Danville Correctional Center had removed more than 200 books from a library inside the prison’s education wing, Rebecca Ginsburg said she felt a pit in her stomach.

“I felt sick,” she said. Ginsburg directs the Education Justice Project, a college in prison program that offers University of Illinois classes to men incarcerated at the Danville prison in east-central Illinois. In late January, prison staff removed dozens of titles from two rooms that serve as the program’s library.

Those titles include books like “Visiting Day,” a children’s book about visiting a parent in prison by author, Jacqueline Woodson. Also included among the removed books are two titles written by African-American scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., a book by philosopher Cornel West, “Up From Slavery” by Booker T. Washington, and “Mapping Your Future: A Guide to Successful Reentry 2017-2018” written by the college in prison program’s reentry team.

A majority of the books removed from the program’s library are about race.”

A full listing of the banned books can be found here.

Below are the first ten titles on the banned list:

Crossroads, Directions, and a New Critical Race Theory — Francisco Valdez Jerome McCristal Culp,
Angela P. Harris

Varieties of African American Religious Experience — Anthony B. Pinn

The New Rulers of the World — John Pilger

Violence: Six Sideways Reflections —  Slavoj Zizek

Violence and its Alternatives: An Interdisciplinary Reader — Manfred Steger Hannah Ardent, Robert
Wolff, Jacques Derrida, et al.

Teaching Black Girls: Resiliency in Urban Classrooms — Venus E. Evans-Winters

Don’t Shoot: One Man, A Street Fellowship, and The End of Violence in Inner-City America — David M. Kennedy

Letters & Papers From Prison — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Drug War Heresies: Learning from Other Vices, Times & Places — Robert J. MacCoun, Peter Reuter

The Stickup Kids; Race, Drugs, Violence and the American Dream — Randol Contreras

What could possibly be the reason to remove these books, none of which cost the state a dime and many that were already approved for inclusion in the Education Justice Project’s privately supported library, from the access of the prison population?

Michael Tafolla, from Chicago, a former inmate who used books to learn his way out of the belly of the beast, thinks he has an explanation.

““Prisons are filled by mostly black and brown (people),” said Tafolla. These books seem to be empowerment for not only black and brown, but directed towards black and brown, learning their history, learning who they are, giving them self identity, self worth and awareness of what their people, their generations have been through.

If people like me that come from poverty stricken neighborhoods learn how to be much more and value ourselves, we’re going to be less likely to be breaking the law or doing other at-risk things,” Tafolla said. “If that happens, then less people are going to go to prison. Less people go to prison, that means there’s going to be less prisons… That means that a lot of people are going to be out of jobs in the future.””

What a travesty.

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1 COMMENT

  1. This is so disgusting. Rehab will help those coming out of prison not to reoffend and reading is a tool for learning and improvement.

  2. Banning books. Wouldn’t you just expect such a thing during an administration such as this one? Legal action needs to be taken against this prison for discrimination, those behind this policy need to be exposed and punished before this crap spreads to any other institutions. What next? Removing books from schools and libraries? We have leaders with really heinous ideas on how citizens should be treated, and those ideas have nothing to do with the Constitution or civil liberties. This is more like what Russians and North Koreans have come to expect.

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