At Nash Correctional Institution in North Carolina, a series of low-lying brick buildings ringed with barbed wire fencing, parking lots, and stands of pine trees, Duawan Wesley McMillan eagerly awaited two books in the Colored Pencil Painting Bibles series that his sister had sent as gifts. McMillan’s sister, who lives in the sleepy village of St. Pauls, North Carolina, population 2,000, received notification through Amazon in February 2023 that one of the books was delivered. Excited for her brother to receive these gifts, she called the mailroom at Nash four days later and was informed that her brother hadn’t yet received either book. Mailroom staff told her that he would receive the first book later that day. Two days later, her brother still hadn’t received either book, so she called a second time. At this point, McMillan was given one of the art manuals, but when he received it he noticed that pages were torn out. When he questioned the missing pages, the mailroom staff told him that the book had arrived in that condition.

James Hannaham’s most recent novel, Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta (2022), opens with Carlotta Mercedes, a Black, Latina trans woman, answering questions at a parole hearing that pulls no punches. A woman on the board asks condescending, “Are you the sort of person who carries a loaded weapon to a birthday party?” and Carlotta is required to have more self-control than most people can muster on a good day. She replies, “At the time, the record states that I was, ma’am, but since I’ve been inside I have done a great deal of work.”
Any other kind of answer will get her denied even though she is wrongly incarcerated, sentenced to the maximum time, raped and brutalized inside.

I’d just sent a report I wrote on prison censorship out for peer review when, scrolling through Instagram two days later, I saw a post from Inside Books, a longstanding, Austin-based prison book program that provides reading materials to incarcerated people. Though deflating, its contents were not surprising.

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice had quietly implemented an approved vendor policy without advance notice, debate, or a legislative proposal.

On July 22, 2022 Texas prison authorities banned the second edition of Merriam-Webster’s Visual Dictionary, purportedly because there was an image of a weapon. This banned title was added to the 10,265 others that incarcerated people can’t read in Texas prisons.
Unfortunately, dictionaries aren’t the only kind of books banned by Texas corrections officials and their counterparts throughout the United States. As PEN America’s new report Reading Between the Bars shows, books banned in prisons by some states dwarf all other book censorship in school and public libraries.

Dylan Jeffrey is an avid reader incarcerated in New Mexico. Once a week, only 10 incarcerated people are able to visit the prison library, a closet-sized collection of books that tend to be outdated and cliched.

“How insane is that?” he asked when interviewed by my organization, PEN America.

He is not alone in his frustration over access to books and other reading materials.

“As artists, we have to change the narrative.” Spoon Jackson’s voice comes through the phone like an old record, vaguely scratchy and deep. He’s calling from the California prison where he’s been incarcerated for the last 47 years. The narrative he’s talking about is the story the United States tells about the people we punish with this isolation — that they’re irrevocably dangerous and we’re safer because we throw them away. Jackson’s poetry, and now music, push back against this facile understanding asking us to complicate ideas of harm and healing.

Avid Bookshop is an independent bookstore in Athens, Georgia, a college town in Northern Georgia. The bookstore stocks new releases and classics. Curated by their book-loving staff, Avid has been regularly voted by residents and visitors as a community gem in an area with few booksellers outside of big box stores.

Giacomo Puccini is widely regarded as one of opera’s greatest composers. “Turandot,” “La bohème,” “Tosca,” and “Madama Butterfly” are all widely performed and beloved the world over. Since its premiere in 1900, “La bohème” has been performed over 1,200 times and in all but eight seasons at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. The 1981 Zeffirelli production is the most seen opera in New York opera history. And yet, the recording of “La bohème” is banned for listening by those incarcerated in Connecticut’s prisons.
Why?

In 2009 I was working with the prison book program in Asheville, North Carolina when I got a request for shapeshifting. I was shocked and thought it was funny, until I came to realize esoteric interests like this are common with incarcerated people.
Incarceration removes people from friends and family. Most are unsure of when they will be released, and inside prisons people aren’t supposed to touch each other, talk in private or share belongings. Perhaps this is why literature on magic, fantasy and esoteric ideas like alchemy and shapeshifting are so popular with incarcerated people.